The Magnolia Missionary Baptist Church of Statesboro, Georgia was organized on March 18, 1914. But to understand Magnolia, you must start further back—before paved roads, before stained glass, before even the 14th Amendment dared to call us citizens.

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Our story begins in Louisville, Georgia, where Magnolia Missionary Baptist Church was born on May 17, 1868. Just three years after Emancipation. Just one year after Reconstruction began to breathe possibility into broken promises. It was a church planted by people who had survived the unthinkable, and who believed—fiercely—that their children deserved more than survival. They deserved sanctuary. They deserved song.

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Years later, some of those believers journeyed southeast. Not just to escape, but to build. Not just to find work, but to find worth. They came to Statesboro carrying more than bags—they carried faith, fire, and memory.

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They met in the home of Brother West Givens. Among them: Rev. E.O. Burke, Deacon John Hill, Deacon Henry Rivers, Brothers R.S. Givens, N.S. Gamble, and Bill Gamble. Rev. Burke served as chairman. They prayed. They planned. And under the open sky, they gathered for their first worship service beneath a humble bush harbor—a sacred clearing in the woods, where nothing separated them from the heavens.

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But even then, they dreamed of more.

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They built a church—a physical house for a spiritual movement—on the old spot just right of where the present edifice stands today. They built it brick by brick, song by song, testimony by testimony. And in 1973, after sixty years of faithful ministry, the congregation walked with joy into the sanctuary we now call home.

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Magnolia has never just been a building. She is a beacon.

A light to the lost.
A lifter of the oppressed.
A balm in Southeast Georgia where wounds could become wisdom, and sorrow could turn to sacred strength.

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For 111 years, she has stood—not untouched by the winds of change, but unmoved in her foundation. Through Jim Crow and civil rights, through assassinations and awakenings, through trials and triumphs—Magnolia has endured. Because she is not the product of perfection, but the fruit of perseverance.  As the late theologian James Hal Cone reminds us, “Black churches are very powerful forces in the African American community and always have been. Because religion has been that one place where you have an imagination that no one can control.” 

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Indeed, Magnolia is holy ground for the radical Black imagination—
Where we dared to believe we were somebody.
Where we dared to organize. To uplift. To dream out loud.
Where God was not far off in the clouds, but right here—among the pews, in the protests, in the praise. 

 

Magnolia, let this be known: We are still here. Still Black. Still Baptist. Still bold enough to believe in freedom and fierce enough to fight for it. Still the church our ancestors dreamed, and the church our descendants deserve. This is our 111th year. But we are not finished. We are just getting started. And no—we are not tired yet.