ATLANTA (AP)—Several pastors of burned Southern churches have come together to call on President George W. Bush to make the issue of church burning a national priority.

The recent fires that have damaged or destroyed 10 rural Alabama churches with both black and white congregations highlight a serious problem that is hardly new, said Rose Johnson-Mackey, program director for the National Coalition of Burned Churches and Community Empowerment. She noted there have been 59 church fires in Alabama in the last five years—an average of about one a month.

“Until President Bush denounces the church burnings in Alabama, it is not a national priority. Then the resources will flow. The nation needs those resources to be brought to bear,” she said Friday.

The Charleston, South Carolinabased coalition, which claims 200 member churches, was established in 1997 following a series of church arsons.

“We knew churches would continue to burn across this country and somebody needed to be there to help them recover,” said the Rev. Terrance G. Mackey, Sr., president and executive director of the coalition.

It was at the ruins of Mackey’s charred church, Mount Zion A.M.E. in Greeleyville, South Carolina, in 1996 that former President Bill Clinton condemned church burnings and made their investigation and prosecution a priority. Clinton established a church burning task force and pushed for federal legislation against church arsons.

Race was found to be the motivation in a relatively small number of arson cases during a period in the mid-1990s in which arson increased at both black and white churches.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference spokesman Dexter Wimbish said every American citizen should be allowed to worship without fear or intimidation. He added that church burnings should
qualify as hate crimes.

Five Alabama churches were burned on Feb. 3, and four more were burned on Feb. 7. Another was burned Feb. 11. Investigators have said they do not know a motive, but there is no racial pattern. Five of the churches had white congregations and five black. All were Baptist, the dominant faith in the region.

The Rev. Glenn Harris of Spring Valley Baptist Church in Gainesville, Alabama— one of the four churches set on fire on Feb. 7—said those who burned his church’s sanctuary have not discouraged the congregation that has worshiped there since 1876.

“You have failed in that effort,” he said at a news conference Friday. “We are determined to rebuild. We are praying for the perpetrators. The God they hate is the only God that can save them.”

Source: AP - AP Wire Service