Local Church, Business, Ministry and Neighbors Rally to Help Give Local AME Church a Facelift

 

On Saturday, October 9th, Seacoast Church Serve Saturday volunteers, part of a mission construction team that served in Haiti in April 2010, are scheduled to do a major face lift on the Greater Bethel AME Church, 1516 Foster Creek Rd, Hanahan, SC. Major financial contributors for this activity are Imagine One Technology and Management, Ltd, which has an office in Hanahan, and COME, SEE Ministries Intl, Hanahan. Volunteers doing the face lift will come from all four organizations, including residents of Tanner Plantation. The Church is located in the Bowen's Corner area of Hanahan.

According to a marker on the site, "Bowen’s Corner, an African-American farming community from the mid-19th century through the late-20th century, was originally part of a rice plantation established along Goose Creek in 1680. That tract was granted by the Lords Proprietors to Barnard Schenckingh (d. 1692). It was later owned by Benjamin Coachman (d. 1779), member of the Royal Assembly. By 1785 it passed to John Bowen (d. 1811), a state representative, for whom Bowen’s Corner is named. Bowen and later absentee owners through the antebellum and post-Civil War era often employed slaves and freedmen as overseers or managers, giving them an opportunity to work toward self-sufficiency. “Bowen’s Old Place” was subdivided into small farms after the war. By 1936 the Bowen’s Corner community, between the railroad and the Goose Creek Reservoir, was centered on Bethel A.M.E. Church and Bowen’s Corner School, for grades 1-8, which closed in 1954."

“The African Methodist Episcopal Church has a unique and glorious history. It was unique in that it is the first major religious denomination in the Western World that had its origin over sociological and theological beliefs and differences. It rejected the negative theological interpretations which rendered persons of African descent second class citizens. Theirs was a theological declaration that God is God all the time and for everybody. The church was born in protest against slavery - against dehumanization of African people, brought to the American continent as labor.” Source: AME Church website

Contact: judelesemann@seacoast.org

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