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When the members of New Liberty Baptist learned who had set fire to their church, no one could have predicted the amazing response.

They line the front row of the small courtroom, twelve members of the all-black New Liberty Baptist Church with every reason to be angry at the young man before them.

Christopher Deer is the man—the white man—who had admitted to burning down their church, which sat at the end of a sandy cow-path in the Black Belt region of Alabama.

The building in the nowhere town of Tyler was built in the early 1900s, but the church predates the Civil War. And, the congregants freely admit, by 1996, there wasn't much church left. Church members met once a month to worship with Rev. L. C. Pettway, a 75-year-old circuit-riding preacher with three other churches under his charge.

The New Liberty Baptist building had electricity, but no air conditioning or ceiling fans; the restroom was a shingle-sided little outhouse out back. The church building was dilapidated, its windows broken, its sanctuary used for unauthorized teenage parties more often than it was used for worship.

But it was their church. And on February 28, 1996, amid the rash of national news about black and white churches burning in the Southeast, their church building burned to the ground.

The New Liberty story was lumped right there with the rest of the reports, which said the burnings were part of a conspiracy of hate against blacks, despite no evidence of a conspiracy or even racial motivation in most of them.

And now, on a September day in Selma, Alabama, Christopher Deer stands before Judge Tommy Jones. The members of New Liberty Baptist Church are present to have their say.


The setting of the fire
Tyler, Alabama, sits at the end of Dallas County Road 7, a few miles east of Selma. U.S. 80 splits the area. The Tyler post office, across the street from the town's cotton gin, is north of the highway. New Liberty Baptist Church stands to the south.

A graveyard behind the church dates back more than a hundred years. The more recent graves are marked with stone markers. The graves of slaves are marked by the coffin-shaped depressions in the earth where pine boxes have rotted and collapsed.

Until the church burned, few people ever had heard of the town, much less the church. One late afternoon in February, however, both were thrust into the nation's headlines. Christopher Deer, for reasons he has yet to discuss publicly, lit a propane torch and set fire to the old building.

Minutes later, Chris was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his father and other members of the Tyler Volunteer Fire Department fighting the blaze.

While the charred rubble still smoldered, investigators from federal and local law enforcement agencies swooped into the little community, ruled that the fire had been set deliberately, and for a week, searched for their arsonist.

Their investigation ended exactly one week later as they were asking routine questions of Chris Deer, who admitted he had set the fire.

Chris went to jail in Selma, the feds left, and the Deer family's time of trauma and triumph began.


Attitudes and the arsonist
Ida Hester didn't see her church the day it burned. She didn't come out until two days later. When she did come, she came alone, and she sat on the steps that once led into the front door of New Liberty but which now dropped off into a pile of ash.

Before the fire, she had heard the news reports about other churches burning. When her own church burned, she didn't know what to make of it, but she never thought it burned because the congregation was black.

"I sat on the step, wasn't nobody but me. I never did think it had anything to do with race. I never would let them (reporters) make it into a racial thing. They tried to get me to say that. One lady reporter told me she thought it was a white supremacist.

"I got the mind that Jesus has. My heart speaks to me. My heart told me it wasn't a racist. And when my heart speaks to me, it's usually right."

In this case, the fire's destruction stopped with the building. The flames were only the start of a remarkable story of rebuilding a church, of reconciling people, of a young man's journey to forgiveness.

It is no small irony that this story unfolded just a few miles from Selma, site of some of the bloodiest moments in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The marchers in the famous walk from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 marched right down U.S. 80, within rock-throwing distance of New Liberty. But the woods are dense, and they couldn't have seen the church.

In Selma, the Edmund Pettus Bridge is a symbol of the civil rights movement. In Tyler, New Liberty Baptist Church has become a symbol that some folks are learning to behave right civil.

cont'd next post

No publicity stunt
The first talk of rebuilding comes in mid-March at First Presbyterian in Selma. Ed Livingston, a banker, mentioned it to Jerre Yeager, a contractor, and Vick Callaway.

They contact members of New Liberty and meet with them. "When my mama told me," Lucy Hester says, "it was like a dream come true."

The church members provide a sketch of the building that burned and tell the men what kind of church they would like.

"It's been 90-miles-an-hour since then," says Yeager, a burly builder whose company pours foundations for water towers.

As plans proceed, Alabama's state Baptist association connects the Presbyterians in Selma with the Mobile [Alabama] Baptist Builders, a group started in 1982 by Burben Sullins.

The group of volunteers, who travel at their own expense to church raisings all over the United States, decide to build the church during the last week of August.

This is not a bunch of white people gathering to help black people, Sullins says of the group. "This," he says, "is Christians helping Christians." This is not for praise or acclaim. They are doing what God has called them to do.

Even as Vick Callaway and Jerre Yeager prepare the site for the rebuilding, a woman from the U.S. Department of Justice shows up with questions.

She is there, she says, to interview people about the hate crime, although in plain view black men and white men are working side by side.

"Ma'am," says Rev. Robert Elwood Sims, another local circuit preacher, "do you know what we're doing? We're building this for God. This wasn't a hate crime. This was a young man who made a terrible mistake."

Her eyes go wide.

"I don't think," Vick Callaway says later, "this is at all what she was expecting to find."


Making things right
It's Saturday, a week before the Mobile builders are to arrive. Local volunteers are working. Members of New Liberty watch, and as rain begins to fall, they gather under an oak.

Then Chris Deer and his parents arrive. The suspect. He's 6-foot-5, three inches shorter than his father, Wayne.

The Deers walk to the oak tree. Chris looks at Rev. Pettway, at the church members. He tells them he is sorry. Then he bursts into tears.

"Don't say another thing," Pettway says, embracing the 19-year-old. "Your tears tell it all. God has forgiven you, and I forgive you."

Rev. Pettway turns to Chris's parents. "I know you have had many sleepless nights over this. Now," he says, "you can sleep."

When the builders from Mobile arrive at 8 a.m. on August 24, the foundation has been poured and the donated lumber is there. But before work begins, they circle up for song, prayer, worship, and testimony. They do this at least three times a day, every day.

As church members watch, the first wall of their new church goes up by 10:20 a.m., and by half-past noon, all four walls are standing and braced.

The builders take Sunday off, and return at 6 a.m. Monday. Under the direction of Tony Poiroux and Ray Van Slyke, they work for nearly two hours before breakfast, preparing for the arrival of a crane, which will set the roof trusses, and the cement truck, which will pour the front porch.

By noon, all the trusses are up. Three of the builders nail together two-by-fours to make a cross and nail it to the top of the skeletal church.

The group had planned to be in Tyler all week, but by Wednesday afternoon, most of their job is done. The roof is shingled, the doors hung, the windows installed. Much of the insulation is up. Much of the wiring has been completed, and the plumbing has been roughed in.

Another crew will come in to hang sheet rock and to lay the brick.


There's healin' goin' on
The speed of the work, and the devotion to it, are beyond human understanding. "When it rained," Jerre Yeager says of the preparation days, "not one person got in their car. We stood under the tree in the rain. If we'd been working for each other, we'd been gone. Working for God is a whole different attitude."

This wasn't about wood and nails. What they are building is not a church but God's kingdom.

And that is the story of the miracles.

The wiring. That is one of the miracles. Chris Deer, in training as an electrician, is helping to wire the new church. And so is his father, also an electrician. They are helping to rebuild the church the son is accused of burning. He's working side-by-side with the folks from Mobile. The members of the church smile and hug him every time they see him.

The kingdom of God …

It's their first day on the job. The Mobile builders have paused for lunch at Sister Springs Baptist Church, a white congregation and home church of the Deers. It is two miles away.

A woman stands before the group and says these simple words: "My name is Patsy Deer."

The room is quiet.

"My son," she says, "is the one accused of starting the fire … "

Her emotional dam gives way, crumbled at the force of tears that flow without end from a mother's broken heart.

But the tears mingle with tears of joy and the balm of forgiveness at what she sees before her: A roomful of people who have come 160 miles, paying their own way, giving their own time, to rebuild the church her son is accused of burning.

"Jesus help her," someone in the room says, as Patsy covers her face and attempts to gain control.

The woman standing next to Patsy while she struggles to speak is Lucy Hester. Her grandmother, 82-year-old Ida Robinson, has attended New Liberty since 1928 and admitted she "could have melted" when she heard her church had come down.

In the midst of Patsy's tears, Lucy, member of the burned church, pulls the mother of the accused arsonist, into a tight hug, a healing in progress.

cont'd next post

We know what to do
L.C. Pettway won't listen to talk about putting that young white man in jail. "As far as I'm concerned," he says, "they can let that fellow go."

He's sitting on his front porch in Orville, 11 miles west of Selma on Alabama Highway 22. He's in a red-striped shirt and a tie, dressed for the Wednesday evening service.

Rev. Pettway has been preaching for 28 years. He meets with the New Liberty congregation on the second Sunday of the month.

"We really enjoyed that place," he says of the burned church. "It was a good-sounding place, and the spirit of God was on it.

"We had heaters, propane heaters. We had to take them home with us. They stole a few of them. We had plastic over some of the windows for the winter. And we had to take the fuses out of the electric box so people couldn't come in and use the lights. There were only two fuses. I still got 'em in the trunk of my car."

From the day the church burned, people have tried to convince Rev. Pettway to denounce the fire as a hate crime. But from that day to this, he has told investigators that if they want to prosecute Chris Deer, they'll have to do it on their own.

"Y'all do what you want," he told the FBI agents and the district attorney, "but we ain't got nothing agin' him."

"My Bible tells me that except you forgive your brother, God won't forgive you," he says, quoting Matthew 6:14, 15. "I'm the one that would be in trouble if I didn't forgive him. I can't hate nobody. How can I hate and preach the gospel? Everybody's children goin' to do something. I got two grandchildren in prison right now.

"They ask me, I say, 'Let him go.' Just as sure as I'm sitting here. Let him go."

Full-moon night. The sky is a rich blue, the heavens pin-pricked by starlight.

This new church building in Tyler seems taller in the dark, silhouetted against the full-moon sky.

The woods have been cut back a ways, and the church stands in the middle of the clearing. This will be a much nicer building than the structure that burned. This one will have a public address system. Air conditioning. A pastor's study. Two indoor rest-rooms. Doors that lock and a burglar alarm.

In the moonlight, if you stand just right, you can center the cross-beam of the two-by-four cross on the bright surface of the moon.


Nothing's normal here
They're all there, the twelve members of New Liberty Baptist Church, sitting on the front row of Judge Tommy Jones's courtroom for the hearing. One by one, eight of them go into the conference room with the judge, the lawyers, and Chris and his parents.

What they tell Judge Jones is that they want Chris to have another chance. Which is what they said from the beginning.

The judge, after hearing from the church members, grants Chris status as a youthful offender, the first miracle. This could have been a federal case. Instead, it's a state case, and the judge will judge him as a juvenile.

Then the judge surprises the participants and tells them to return at 1:30 p.m. for sentencing.

When they return, Judge Jones announces he is putting Chris on two years of supervised probation; he'll report once a month to his probation officer. When he successfully completes his probation, his record will be sealed, meaning in essence that he won't have a record.

Things could have turned out much worse for young Chris, given the national climate surrounding the church burnings.

But this was not your normal crime. This was not your normal criminal. These most certainly were not your normal victims.

When church members received the news that Chris had been given youthful offender status, they understood the significance of that, and they cheered and hugged the family. They were happy that something good happened to the man who burned their church.

His victims cheered. That says it all about Chris Deer's journey to forgiveness, and the Christians—black and white—who led him there.

A very good story.  I'd prefer stories like this are the ones that get the national attention from the press instead of some of the ones that do...