Woody Dougherty recalled the day in 1954 when more than 70 people crowded together to have their picture taken in front of the newly completed Pine Grove Baptist Church building.
The new house of worship -- constructed along a rural stretch of Little Rock's East Dixon Road, less than half a mile from its former location -- had been more than 10 years in the making. The congregation had added to its previous building until it had 13 classrooms, at one time giving Sunday School instruction to 150 students. Pine Grove had begun taking up collections for the new building within a few years of his beginnings at the church as a youngster in 1939.
Dougherty, 83, did not end up in the photo.
"That was taken right after lunch," he said. "I wasn't in the picture because they sent me back into the church to round up anyone who had stayed behind."
On Sunday, Dougherty will have another chance to appear in a commemorative photo of Pine Grove, when it celebrates 150 years of worship, history and community on the road still marked on some maps as Sweet Home Cutoff.
The church's earliest minutes, dated Aug. 14, 1869, call for the official organization of Malineal Baptist Church. Malineal -- spelled more than one way in its records -- was one of several area churches formed in the first years after the Civil War, and a house of worship was critical to establishing communities at that time, said the Rev. T.J. Strickland, Pine Grove's pastor.
"When a town form[ed], such as Little Rock, the first thing they needed was a church because it had to be three things: they needed a meeting place, a school and a church," Strickland said. "Back in those days, you weren't a town unless you had a church."
The Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas notes that at the time the church was formed, the denomination was a year past the Arkansas Baptist State Convention's split from the Arkansas Baptist Publication Society, and that Baptists in the state during that time "moved increasingly" into the autonomous, affiliated group of churches that form the Southern Baptist Convention.
By 1885, the congregation had continued on with a new name, Pine Grove Baptist Church, and spent $83 to erect a new building on what was most likely the grounds of where Pine Grove Cemetery is today. One of the trees in the cemetery marks the corner where that late-19th-century building once stood, said Dougherty, who is listed as a contact for the grounds at the cemetery's entrance.
James Philip Eagle, the 16th governor of Arkansas, is noted in church records as being a "frequent guest" at Pine Grove's pulpit. An ordained Baptist minister, Eagle would serve as president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention for more than 20 years and serve as president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1902-04.
Eagle died in 1904, and the church is honored to own what members call "the Eagle Bible" -- the one given to him on Christmas day 1895 by his wife, Mary Kavanaugh Eagle, and which was later passed on to the church by a relative of Eagle's who knew of the association between the governor and Pine Grove.
"You can tell it's a very old Bible because of the Roman numerals [in it]," Strickland said.
Tucked inside is a printed list of the Southern Baptist Convention's accomplishments from May 1902-03 and goals for the forthcoming year, and the governor's handwritten notes for an undated sermon that opened with Psalm 62:7, which begins, "In God is my salvation." A red ribbon also in the Bible indicates that Eagle was a delegate to the 10th annual state Baptist convention in 1901.
Connie Files, the church's clerk and organist, said visitors preached out of the Eagle bible until it was put away for safekeeping in a bank vault.
Files, 64, said her earliest memories of the church are of Vacation Bible School when she was 10 or 11, after it was already at its current location, and recalled how her mother attended church during a bygone era when women at Pine Grove wore hats to church.
"What's stayed the same is Scripture -- God's word the way that it was taught to us," Files said.
"We reflect that [Scripture] in our dedication and love for the church and Jesus Christ," Dougherty said.
When Strickland, 36, came to the church more than five years ago as its pastor, it was his first assignment and he didn't know what to expect.
"I came here to be the youth pastor, but when I got here I was the youth," Strickland said. "I think [Files] was the youngest person active in the church -- and then God saw fit to change that."
The church has grown in membership -- to about 45 active members on Sundays -- and Strickland, who recently led a camp of teenagers, said there is a core group of 11 youths. Volunteers now fill spots on church committees that formerly would remain vacant for stretches of time.
"They stayed dedicated, during the hardest times," Strickland said of the congregation. "It's easy to say, 'Look what we've done.' But instead, it's what we feel God is leading us to do and following him in that direction. Just get out of God's way."
Through its affiliation with the Pulaski Baptist Association, the umbrella for between 90 and 100 churches, Pine Grove also has grown its outreach ministry. The church is in the process of helping to build and establish 20 churches, known as church planting, in the Dominican Republic. Strickland, also a master electrician, has made two trips to the country to complete wiring for the worship houses.
Pine Grove plans to celebrate its anniversary during the church's 10:30 a.m. worship service with songs, anniversary-specific music and what Strickland said Wednesday would be a "Word of Truth from God's Word," with a luncheon afterward. Dougherty and the congregation hope to welcome back the church's two living former pastors, the Rev. Elbert Warren and the Rev. Verne Wickliffe.
"[It's] just how we continue from week to week, year after year," Dougherty said of the church's 150 years. "It's such a place of love and harmony, and it's just unreal what you can experience here."
Religion on 08/17/2019