This weekend marks a defining event of my childhood. At some point during the night of February 9, 1983, a mentally ill African-American man with a history of arson smashed the window of the southeast classroom of Greenville Christian School. The school had been renting the education wing of the old Washington Street Baptist Church, located, of course, at the intersection of Washington and Wellington Streets in North Greenville. The young man had been arrested on suspected arson of the structure before, but his prior target had been the old sanctuary proper.
The window through which he chose to set the fire was hidden behind a large, untrimmed cedar tree. The campus had been plagued with burglaries and other damage during the school's entire occupancy, dating back to 1977. Many times, human feces could be found in piles of paper - or not - in front of doorways or other nooks along the building's exterior. This included underneath the cedar tree which provided cover for the troubled man's crime. North Greenville was then -- and still is -- an economically depressed section of a smallish southern city. Surrounding the campus were rotting frame houses with notorious occupants. Beer bottles in what was then a dry city were as common on the school grounds as the slap of a plastic jump rope.
To young Christian children, the regular mistreatment of our campus signaled nothing short of the assaults of Satan and his minions. The young man who lit the fire served as the epitome of the evil out to destroy us. He wasn't just a firebug; he was a diabolical mind under demonic torment. The fire itself was the catharsis of our war against the Prince of Darkness.
Using little more than matches, the arsonist lit his fire in some papers against the inside wall beneath the broken window. The flame then spread directly upward and ignited the composite drop ceiling of the classroom. An angel altered the Greenville Fire Department quickly as the flame burned slowly across the dense ceiling. This slow-burn gave the fire "plenty to feed on" which fortuitously prevented a conflagration. However, the burning composite produced thick, choking smoke which filled every single square inch of the education wing. It seemed also to have an adhesive property to it, as the ruthless cloud absolutely covered every surface it enveloped with a foul-smelling brown film.
The next morning, Thursday, February 10, my mother woke up my sister and I late with the news. Even though we knew Satan was out to get us, nothing gets a 5th grader out of bed faster than news that his school burned. I will admit I wanted to rush to campus and take in the awful shock of what I had just heard. Soon we were joined by other board members, including my dad, in inspecting the damage.
I was struck by the gallons upon gallons of water everywhere. At first, I thought the fire had burned the pipes and caused a massive leak, but it was quickly explained that the fire hoses caused this water damage. Again, the perverse side of me was a little disappointed that my classroom, which adjoined the one where the fire started, wasn't a charred cinder. But after seeing all the water damage, it was revealing to me how the cure seemed worse than the disaster.
But the damage to our school wasn't the defining moment I referred to earlier. Over the next seven days, including the weekend, the entire school family, as well as others in the community, got together to reopen. Southern Baptists, Independent Baptists, Catholics, Pentecostals, Charismatics, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists and just good'ol run-of-the-mill evangelicals worked hard to relocate classes to a church, scrub that stinky film off desks, and re-inventory which learning materials were still usable. And all of this without a headmaster (what we called a principal), who had resigned only weeks earlier.
I spent the remainder of 5th Grade crammed next to my classmates in half of a mobile home. The following autumn, however, we moved into a new campus which is the school's current location. Years later I told this story to a pastor friend up in the Chicago suburbs, and he couldn't believe the body of Christ worked together in this way. Today, I'm still struck by the same effort of faith. It is my gold standard for how I measure a Christian community.
Psalm 126:5
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