Preaching Sundays Come Monthly At Bethlehem

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In 1901, Joe Brooks Cole and a group of men from the former Pisgah church combined their efforts to build the Bethlehem United Methodist Church nearby. Bethlehem is a little, old, country church in the Velma community, and although members no longer worship there each week, they do assemble there on the first Sunday of every month, for what Mrs. Opal Wright calls a “Preaching Sunday.”

This past week, I joined descendants of some of Bethlehem’s founding fathers, and as I sat on one of the handmade pews there, I cherished the fact that I had been invited to participate in a tradition that is threatened by time.

It is an understatement to say that the Bethlehem United Methodist Church is, and always has been, a body of people – of neighbors who crafted their church’s structure and almost everything in it. The precious folks who still assemble at Bethlehem each month are the descendants of the people who originally established that church.

Over 100 years ago, the Cole family, the Williams family, the Barber family, and the Person family worked together to build Bethlehem, and now, after more than a century, these same four groups of people are still one united church family. First Sundays are not only preaching days, they are also days to share jars of jelly and to swap old familiar tales. First Sundays are “Old Home Days.”

When I attended services at Bethlehem Methodist, I was the guest of Mrs. Opal Williams Wright, and her son Ben joined us. Jim Barber, who travels from Franklin, Tenn., also joins his mother every month for “Preaching Sundays” at Bethlehem. This past week, a member of the Person family sat behind the Barbers, and the Coles were also represented. The four founding families of the Bethlehem United Methodist are still the delightful pillars of that church, and my guess is that as long as there are descendants from these families, services will continue there.

As people began to gather before the services began Sunday before last, a young lady played old hymns on the piano. “Blessed Assurance. Jesus Is Mine.” During the service, we used an old Methodist Hymnal, and as we sang “On a Hill Far Away,” I looked out from a window, and saw that a Black Gum tree had started to adorn itself with red leaves. In every way imaginable, autumn had come to Bethlehem Church, and the day was perfect.

As I mentioned before, the founders of the Bethlehem Church spilled out of Pisgah, which truly was a church in the wildwood. Mrs. Opal Williams Wright told me that her grandfather was the preacher at the Pisgah Church and that he drove his family in a wagon there for services. After the highway was built and people began traveling along that road, some of Pisgah’s members chose to build the Bethlehem Church near that Highway – near what is now called Velma Crossing. In doing so, the founding families of Bethlehem Church had moved their building to a spot that was more convenient for the entire community.

Mrs. Opal Wright told me that long ago, her Williams ancestors had moved in a wagon train to Yalobusha County. Before their move, their farm was positioned along the Black Warrior River in Alabama. Mrs. Opal said that the Black Warrior River was unruly and that it often flooded her family’s crops. She said that in moving to Yalobusha County, her people had moved to “Higher Ground.” Metaphorically speaking, when the Bethlehem Methodist Church was shifted out of the woods to a more convenient spot, it had also moved to “Higher Ground.”

“Lord lift me up and let me stand,
By faith on Heaven’s table land.
A higher plane than I have found,
Lord plant my feet on higher ground.”

After church services at Bethlehem Methodist, I joined Mrs. Opal and her family for lunch on the original Wright farm, which is the oldest family-owned farm in Yalobusha County. The Wright farm was established in 1840, after an ancestor, George Washington Wright, moved from Tennessee. The Williams family lived in a house very near the Wright farm. That Williams house still stands next to the road that leads there. When Opal and Jim Wright married, it was a merger of neighboring families.

The original Wright house is across the highway from the current Wright home. It still overlooks Mrs. Opal’s cotton field and the pasture where her cattle still roam. After Mrs. Opal’s husband retired, her family moved back to their farm from Huntsville, AL, where he had been designing and helping build rockets. Like their families before them, they chose to migrate to Yalobusha County, but in doing so, Open and Jim Wright had moved back home – back to “higher ground.”