GREENVILLE, Tex.—“Blackest Land, Whitest People.” Until the mid-1960’s, those words were painted on the water tower and on a sign near the square in this North Texas town, a once-segregated cotton-ginning center. Joe A. Bobbitt, the county judge in Greenville, still has photographs of the water tower and the sign on the wall of his office here.
“It’s part of our infamy,” said Judge Bobbitt, 59, seated in a large red leather chair stitched together by inmates of the Texas penal system. “If you try to hide history, then you cannot change.”
The people of Hunt County, a largely rural area of which Greenville is the county seat, are about to get a rare opportunity to break with the past. The Redeemed Christian Church of God is a fast-growing evangelical church with mostly black adherents but that espouses a multicultural mission. Founded in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1952, it is building its North American headquarters on the outskirts of Greenville.
The church’s goal, according to its mission statement, is to establish parishes within five minutes’ driving distance of every family in every city and town in the United States. It is now about 250 parishes closer to its goal.
The church has paid more than $1 million for about 500 acres of land in Floyd, an unincorporated community of about 100 people, almost all of them white, a few miles from Greenville.
A conference center has already been erected in the middle of farmland planted with sorghum and wheat. There is also a trailer for visits by Enoch Adejare Adeboye, who is the general overseer of the church and is called Daddy by its more than 2 million members.
Next to be built, church officials say, are cottages, a large dormitory, a 10,000-seat sanctuary, an amphitheater, an artificial lake and perhaps even a modest water park. The complex, which is intended to evoke Redemption City, the church’s 18,000-acre global headquarters near Lagos, is to be completed in the next decade.
{snip}
Some residents of Floyd, a smattering of trailer homes and decaying bungalows that a century ago was a thriving cotton-growing town on a railroad, speak uneasily about their new neighbor. They have already seen bumper-to-bumper traffic, and the Caddo Basin Special Utility District has extended an eight-inch water line to the church property.
“The Nigerians I’ve seen on TV are dark, really dark, not like the black people around here,” said Tina Causey, 69, a house cleaner who lives in Floyd with her husband, a post office employee. “I’m not a racist, I’ve got Mexican grandchildren.”
Ms. Causey said she did not want to see any group dominate. “I just don’t like a majority of anybody,” she said.
{snip}
For the pastors of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, the residents of rural Texas present an opportunity to evangelize. The ambition of the church, as stated on its Web site and repeated by its pastors, is “to make heaven; to take as many people as possible with us; and to have a member of R.C.C.G. in every family of all nations.” That mission, of course, includes white Americans.
{snip}
John Omewah, a pastor at one of the Dallas parishes, brushed past the concern expressed by some people who live near the church’s land in Floyd.
“They’re just trying to resist something that is new,” Mr. Omewah, 52, said in an interview in an office bedecked with the flags of the United States and Nigeria and posters explaining the church’s mission. “There is a tendency among us human beings to resist change,” said Mr. Omewah, a Nigerian who recently moved to Texas from Delaware, where he had overseen another parish.
{snip}
(Posted on August 22, 2005)