I truly can't think of why anyone would want to burn a church. It doesn't seem there are too many things worse you could do to get on the bad side of the Almighty. When a tragedy like this happens, though, sometimes it can end up being a positive.
Emit Grove is a small rural church near Statesboro in the southeastern part of the state. It sits adjacent to some cotton fields off a county road. When it burned, a lot of history and sentiment went up with the flames. When I wrote the article for the paper I didn't want to sugar-coat too badly the fact that people were angry. Although there is grace and forgiveness extended to the guy who did it, people were ticked. I know I would've been.
It's cool too see that the church is rebounding though. The new family life center has become more than what it was originally supposed to be. This is opening doors for the congregation in the community.
The only thing I regret about running this story is that we couldn't use the picture bigger. We didn't want to wait another issue, and ads had eaten up our other color space. Too bad. The lady who took this, not a professional photographer, did a really good job with it.
