In downtown Grand Rapids, fire tore through a 133-year-old building owned by LaGrave Avenue Christian Reformed Church late Wednesday night. While in Pennington, Alabama, the Ebenezer Baptist Church - a congregation founded in 1850 - was reduced to a total loss in a late-night blaze days earlier.
The official language surrounding the causes is already familiar: under investigation, unknown. The buildings are not coming back.
MULTIPLE historic churches have now burned in recent days and weeks, and several instances were deemed arson. They want more churches to burn. America is a Christian nation and must stay that way
The congregation was established in 1850 and had served the community in Choctaw County for more than 175 years.
The Grand Rapids fire started around 10:55 p.m. Wednesday night, in the former Seventh-day Adventist building near Oakes Street and Sheldon Avenue - a masonry structure the city archives date to about 1894, originally All Souls Universalist Church.
Grand Rapids Professional Firefighters Local 366 said Rescue Company 2 arrived to "a large church with heavy smoke and fire showing from the basement windows." Crews pushed an interior attack with hoselines in the basement and on the main floor. The fire was already in the walls and void spaces.
Nineteen crews worked the scene. Off-duty firefighters were called in. The floor collapsed. Part of the roof came down. Two firefighters were struck by falling brick and are expected to recover; local reports later put the injury tally at three. Battalion Chief Kathleen Thompson said crews had to pull out and fight the fire from the outside. The secondary building is expected to be a total loss. The main LaGrave sanctuary next door was spared.
Investigators are still looking at the cause. No ruling of arson has been announced. The phrase on the record is the same one now attached to so many of these scenes: unknown.
Ebenezer Baptist Church in Pennington, Choctaw County, caught fire around 10 p.m. on Tuesday of last week. Jerry Snowden, chairman of the deacons, said: "It's a total loss." The congregation had served the community for more than 175 years. Firefighters were still killing hot spots the next morning so the fire marshal could walk the ruins. Church members posted memories of baptisms, funerals and the brick walls their families had helped raise.
Two more churches in America are now rubble. And it keeps happening.
Last week in Cleveland, the former Friendship Baptist Church - a mid-1890s structure that began as a synagogue before becoming a Baptist sanctuary - was destroyed in an early-morning fire. Nearly sixty firefighters responded. The roof collapsed. The remnants were demolished.
Officials first called the cause unknown. Cleveland Fire Lt. Mike Norman later confirmed it was incendiary. "The motives are not believed to be financial. This was not a fire set for insurance money or to acquire the land." He called the loss "irreplaceable" and put the damage at about $500,000.
Buffalo's former St. Ann's Church and Shrine, built in 1886, was hit twice in four days in July after earlier damage this year. Investigators ruled the July fires arson. The Diocese of Buffalo sold the church, school and convent in November 2022 for $250,000 to Buffalo Crescent Holdings, Inc., a company affiliated with the Downtown Islamic Center, which planned an Islamic community centre for Buffalo's Bengali community. The site had been vacant since parish life ended in 2013.
Buffalo Common Council Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope said she had just told city officials the building would probably be set on fire again. "I know it's been said that it was arson, which is to be expected."
New York City has taken its own losses. On June 19 the 173-year-old South Bushwick Reformed Church in Brooklyn, a Greek Revival landmark, was gutted in a three-alarm fire that brought the steeple down. The FDNY later confirmed it was intentionally set.
Pastor James E. Steward II said: "It was more than just a building. It's lives and generations of lives that have been touched." After the ruling he added: "Now we understand it is intentional, which brings another layer of grief to myself, as well as the congregation and the community."
He also said, "Whoever is responsible for this ultimately has to answer to God," and "We have no known enemies." The city rejected a restoration plan based on an independent engineer's assessment and ordered demolition.
Weeks earlier, the vacant First Reformed Church of Astoria in Queens - organized in 1839, rebuilt after an 1888 fire - suffered a major fire that began in a vacant rectory and raced into the church.
This is happening everywhere. The United Kingdom has been subject to this same script for months.
