Sunday, March 25, 2012

"At Dye Rock crowds were exceedingly large and many at the altar"

Dye Rock Church is one of the early sites of the Pentecostal movement in south Alabama whose location and history I would like to find. I wrote about it in a post a few years ago here, which quoted a note in a 1915 issue of Word and Witness (a COGIC newspaper at that point). Recently, I realized that several Pentecostal archives have banded together to form the Consortium of Pentecostal Archives, so I redid a search for "Dye Rock" and found another previously unknown newspaper article in a 1919 issue of the Christian Evangel (subsequently known as the Pentecostal Evangel, and that's how it is often referred to). (The link above to their site is to the 'About' page with a list of the participating archives.)

In a short article, "An Evangelistic Tour," S. C. Johnson tells about his travels via a very winding path from Missouri, through Arkansas, down to the Gulf and then over into the Wiregrass region of Alabama: "At Hartford [Ala.] I fell in with Bro. Dan Dubose [sic]. Was with him three weeks witnessing souls saved and baptized (Acts 2:4). At Dye Rock crowds were exceedingly large and many at the altar."

It might be significant from an administrative standpoint that Johnson traveled to Dye Rock in 1919.  In the 1919 article, Johnson mentions going on to Dothan, where he was appointed "State evangelist and assigned to visit all the assemblies." In the minutes for the A/G southeastern district meeting in Dec. 1919, S. C. Johnson was appointed to a committee to settle problems with the way churches were grouped together into districts (The First Fifty Years - A Brief Review of the Assemblies of God in Alabama (1915-1965) by Robert H. Spence, p. 29).  As I noted in the earlier post, "Die Rock" was one of “the original line-up of churches that were part of the old Southeast District,” and put in the "Dothan Group" in 1915 with assemblies in Dothan, Madrid, Haleburg, and Wicksburg (Spence, 21). I'm just speculating, but, Johnson may have been visiting Dye Rock four years later in part to find out what, if any, problems this church might be having by being in the Dothan Group.

In the 1915 Word and Witness note, Dye Rock is "near Midland City, Ala."  Midland City falls in a bee line between Wicksburg to the southwest and Haleburg to the northeast. (However, Grimes, apparently within the geographical grouping of the Dothan Group, and just south of MC, is in the Clio Group, with churches much further north. That's a political mystery I'll save for another day.)  Six years ago, I visited Midland City and asked the librarians there if they had ever heard of any place or church called Dye Rock, but they had not. For now, its location is still a mystery, but I know there is a source waiting to be discovered that tells us its location and possibly some of its place in the history of the early Pentecostal movement in Wiregrass Alabama. 

Click here for a few photos of Assemblies of God churches in south Alabama and early sites.

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