A series by Leo Adam Biga

Photo provided by Mount Nebo Missionary Baptist Church

Click here for information about grant funding available from the National Trust for Historic Preservation for the preservation of Black Churches

THE BLACK CHURCH: STILL AN ANCHOR, JUST NOT IN THE SAME WAY AS BEFORe.

Black Americans began liberating themselves prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. From then through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement, the Black church became a conduit for independence and cohesion.

Octogenarian Ella Jean Seay Rogers has been churched her entire life. She knows generations ago her family found refuge in the church. That familial-faith line has carried through to her and her adult children today.

“After slavery it was the thing that kept them together. It helped people survive. It was their hope. It was how and where they shared information. It was where they prayed. That’s our survival mode. It still is,” she said.

Her daughter Jade Rogers, a historian, said, “The Black church in America in general was the center of the Black community wherever those Black communities were. Church social clubs served as connection points. People used churches to find places to live, to find employment, to figure out how best to navigate new spaces of covert racism. There was the promise of the North but still the reality of being Black in America.”

Ella Rogers said that just as many Black institutions were birthed out of the church, it cradled the Civil Rights Movement. “Church is where we learned almost everything we needed to know to grow as a people,” Ella said.

“The Black church in America in general was the center of the Black community wherever those Black communities were. Church social clubs served as connection points. People used churches to find places to live, to find employment, to figure out how best to navigate new spaces of covert racism. There was the promise of the North but still the reality of being Black in America.”

— -Jade Rogers

“It’s been the proving ground for so many people in so many different professions,” Jade added.

Ella feels the reason why the Black church has retained more membership-attendance than many non-Black churches is because of the fundamental role it’s played in uplifting African Americans. Mount Nebo Baptist Church member RaDaniel Arvie agrees. “It was the only institution we had that was really for us and that had our interests at heart,” said Arvie, whose father Rev. Terry Arvie pastors Mount Nebo. “It was the only place where we could self-determine our own destinies.”

Mount Nebo Pastor Terry Arvie feels the Black church is still a vital gathering place.” He rues, however, “The church is no longer respected as it once was.” Before,” he said, “people wouldn’t throw trash or use profanity on church grounds – but that no longer exists. In today’s world, it’s just another place to some people. I think we have to get back to that old-school thought that the church is hallowed ground.”

INSTALLMENT III

Mount Nebo Missionary Baptist Church marks a century of service in 2021, joining a select group of Omaha Black worship places with such longevity

As Mount Nebo social media posts proclaim, “we are gearing up to celebrate our 100th Anniversary in a GRAND way.” An Oct. 15 Celebration Banquet will feature guest speaker Rev. France A. Davis, pastor emeritus of Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City, Utah. An Oct. 23 Night of Worship will feature guest vocalists Kierra Sheard-Kelly, Tammy Jordan and the MNMBC Reunion Ensemble.

Ella Jean Seay Rogers has belonged there for 87 of her 90 years, witnessing most all its anniversary milestones. As special as those celebrations were, being around for the 100th is extra special.

“I cherish that. It’s quite a blessing,” the church matriarch said. “It brings back a lot of memories. Those who’ve gone before us. Sunday school teachers. Choir rehearsal directors. All the preachers. These people are monumental in my mind. We stand on their shoulders to have come this far. Times have changed so much. I pray that in this time we remember those things we made a covenant with God to do – to learn how to be ambassadors for Christ.”

Tucked away in a residential neighborhood at 5501 North 50th Street, this traditional Black church is holding its own amidst decreased organized religion membership and participation. While navigating the pandemic, Mount Nebo’s stayed connected with members through robust live streaming while managing to conduct in-person services through the majority of the crisis. Adapting to challenges is nothing new for this church.

No religious organization reaches 100 years without pillar members pouring sweat and money into the endeavor. Mount Nebo relies on the goodwill of legacy families like the Rogers and the Seays. The former Ella Jean Seay grew up in Mount Nebo where her parents and grandparents made their faith home upon migrating from Arkansas. Her elders filled various offices and her family became fixtures there. Her sister Veola Dryver led the music ministry.

“We all were very active,” Rogers said. “When we were children my mom would start getting us ready on Saturday to make sure we were on time for Sunday service. In our family it wasn’t just Sunday service, there was something (prayer meetings, choir rehearsals) going on all week. My life has been fashioned around it. It becomes a lifestyle.”

Current pastor Rev. Terry Arvie arrived in 2005. He grew up the son of a minister, Hearnest Arvie, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He got the call to preach at 12, publicly accepting it at 18, He began his ministerial career in Hurricane Bluff, Arkansas. His Southern roots appealed to Mount Nebo elders from the Deep South. He and his wife Pamela Arvie, a Prairie Wind Elementary School teacher who leads some ministries at church, are parents of six children.

This preacher’s son said, “Everything I know came out of a connection to church. Everything I know as a preacher I was taught by my dad. My seminary training didn’t stop after four years – it lasted the whole time he was alive. It’s still going on now because of what he instilled in me and it’s coming out. He would often say, ‘Son, that stuff that you can’t use now, don’t throw it away, because at some point you’re going to need it.’ And I’ve been the beneficiary of it.”

You don’t have to be a preacher or the child of one to be immersed in church. When in 1952 Ella married John B. Rogers, who came from Ark. to work the Omaha packing houses, he joined her at her church. “He loved Mount Nebo, as I,” she said of her late husband. “He came because of me.” His family followed, thus further bolstering the congregation. When the couple became deacons the church gained devoted, faithful servants.

“My husband and I were set aside by the church as deacons under Rev. Claude Williams. We took vows to make a covenant with the church. I always considered that a special anointing from God by the church to administer to the needs of the membership. There’s many things I have been able to do with great zeal for so many years. We even had a church pantry at one time where people could come and get food. We were that dedicated to being of service, and we were always busy serving anybody in need.”

The couple’s four children grew up in that church, although only one, Jade Rogers, is still a member. As a historian, Jade appreciates her family’s three-generation church ties are significant but nothing unique. Many Black churches count multigenerational families as members, though young adults are few and far between in this increasingly less churched age. “At one point most all of my family was at one church,” she said with a hint of nostalgia.

Doris Moore represents another family with deep church roots. Her parents Sherwood and Gracie Ellis came from Mississippi. Doris and her three siblings were brought up in church. When she married Henry Moore, she continued making Mount Nebo her gospel home. Henry joined her. Their two daughters were brought up there and one still belongs. Moore lost her mother last fall, but her father still attends.

“That became part of the foundation for helping me become the person that I am today,” said Moore, founder-CEO of the Center for Holistic Development, a non-profit that provides behavioral health to individuals and families. “There are a lot of skills you gain when you’re part of a church environment. It’s a great training ground.”

— Doris Moore

Church gave Moore her spiritual bearings and practical life lessons.

“That became part of the foundation for helping me become the person that I am today,” said Moore, founder-CEO of the Center for Holistic Development, a non-profit that provides behavioral health to individuals and families. “There are a lot of skills you gain when you’re part of a church environment. It’s a great training ground.”

Similarly, the church experience has been so embedded in the life of Jade Rogers, a professional educator by trade, that it’s intrinsic to who she is and what she does.

“My grandmother was a Sunday school teacher. My mother was a Sunday school teacher. My father was a Sunday school teacher. My sister was my Sunday school teacher,” said Rogers. “So I come from this long line. I understood the importance of it and that it was something you took seriously. And I had this group of women in church that nurtured and helped me. They were teachers who knew before I did that I needed to be an education major. They prepared me for that career. They shaped me as a Sunday school teacher. I went from being in the nursery to working in the nursery to teaching in Sunday school. My classroom management skills came from that. That’s what I took into the world. That’s not a small thing to be dropped into your existence that I can attribute and trace back to Mount Nebo and my experience with those women.”

In a community where mental health resources are scarce and often dismissed, Jade Rogers said people often use churches to connect with people who share similar life-cultural experiences.

“Even people without a spiritual relationship with a church go to churches when they need help. The church is about the spiritual life of people, but it’s also about people living and surviving day to day. Those things speak to community that is extended and welcoming, which is what I think the church was historically during the time of migration.

“My story growing up in Omaha is the same story as many of my friends who grew up in Chicago or Iowa, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., New York City – the church was the center of community. Before social service programs, the church was that resource.”

Jade grew up seeing her mother Ella engage with the community through Mount Nebo. “The deaconesses took food and clothes and whatever they could to women and talked to people about whatever they needed. They treated people with humanity and dignity. Those are things I learned from church service.”

One of the pastor’s sons, RaDaniel Arvie, is the church’s assistant music director and its graphic designer. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln senior comes from a musical family. “We all sing. But the realization that I can really sing came when I started singing at church.”

The Arvie family’s musical gifts will be on display at the church’s Oct. 23 Night of Worship 100th Anniversary Celebration when they lift their voices with other performers.

RaDaniel Arvie credits church with honing his music, design and management skills and providing networking opportunities via state and national Baptist conventions he attends.

His father knows well what it means to acquire lifelong skills through church.

“There came a time when my dad started his own church,” Rev. Terry Arvie recalled. “He invested in a building that needed a lot of work. So every summer, every weekend I was learning how to be a carpenter through church work, getting the church up to speed for Sunday school. Because of that I have carpenter skills. When a church van went down he taught us how to work on engines. I can do all the basics. I didn’t learn that at Firestone, I learned that at church.”

Through the years Mount Nebo’s relied on the helping hands of skilled laborers within its own ranks to help repair and maintain its facilities.

Commissioning a Church

Its origin story begins with Rev. J. C. McFarland, who formed the congregation in 1921 a mere two years after the 1919 Red Summer lynching of Will Brown outside Omaha’s downtown courthouse. The church’s earliest services were held in a leased space near 31st and Pacific, only a mile and a half from where that violence occurred. Distant from any sizable African American enclave, Mount Nebo soon relocated to the heart of the Black community in segregated but safer northeast Omaha. It was there new arrivals from the Great Migration joined. Over the next several years the church struggled finding a permanent site, at one point consolidating with another fledgling Baptist flock. Services for the merged congregations were held at 33rd and Emmet before a fire destroyed the sanctuary. Not unlike the way early Christians gathered in dwelling places to pray, Mount Nebo’s faithful convened for worship and praise in the large Victorian-style home of Mrs. Cornelious Wood at 32nd and Pinkney before their numbers outgrew the space. In 1933 the church purchased property at 3211 Pinkney. Ella’s parents mortgaged their house as collateral for what became Mount Nebo’s home the next five decades. The early years were rough with no indoor plumbing. “I remember the outdoor toilet,” Ella said.

In 1957, Rev. John H. Whittington received the call to pastor there. He remained its leader the next 47 years, making him the church’s longest-serving pastor. “That’s amazing within itself,” Doris Moore said of his service, “because a lot of churches would go through several pastors in that span. I guess that speaks to the consistency and continuity of the congregation.” “We just kind of grew up with him,” Ella said of Whittington. “He dedicated my third child, Joel, when he got the call to preach.” Joel later left the ministry to enter the military, which he made his career.” Her oldest child, Jeffrey, began a career in architecture before transitioning to the ministry. He pastors a church in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. She calls it a “privilege” to have two sons who entered the preaching field, especially since they followed in the footsteps of their maternal grandmother’s preacher-father.

Ministering means, among other things, navigating politics and personalities. When Rev. Whittington scuttled the congregation’s plans to erect a new Mount Nebo facing John Creighton Blvd. in favor of moving to an abandoned church a few miles away, it caused a rift. “My heart was always with that little building and that land (on Pinkney),” Ella said. “because that’s where the congregation grew and the fellowship was so strong. We invested so much of our life to grow up in that church, to dedicate that land to the Lord.”

Despite opposing the move, the Rogers obediently accepted it. Others were not so forgiving. “We lost people that did not come with us to the new location. It was almost like a church split. There’s always going to be some reason why some people leave, because of disputes or hurts. That’s what a family does, and it’s been a church family.” To show there were no hard feelings, Ella said, “Most of the people that left we stayed in contact with and still do.”

Moving day to consecrate the new sanctuary proceeded in grand style. “I remember we went in a motorcade,” she said. “My husband and I were second in line behind the pastor and his wife.”

While not as prominent in civil rights actions as some local congregations and church leaders, Whittington shepherded Mount Nebo through trials that beset the Black community. By the time he led the move to its current home in 1986, socio-economic blows and civil disturbances had wrecked the North 24th Street business district. Disinvestment followed, especially after the North Freeway cut through the heart of the district, displacing residents, isolating neighborhoods and stunting development. The Rogers lost their home to the project. In a Women in History interview, Ella Rogers said, “So many people I knew lost their homes. They took away our community.” She told NOISE the upheaval was “very devastating. It separated us from the closeness we had with families and being able to share like a community. There was so much disruption. It was traumatic.”

Her daughter Jade notes the freeway’s imposition altered the church-neighborhood experience. “I knew the Black community in Omaha before the freeway and then after the freeway. Before, everyone I knew was in somebody’s church. Most of the people I knew were at my church. Most of the people I was friends with I thought I was related to because I spent so much time with them. I spent time in their homes. You just couldn’t tell me they weren’t my cousins because we were together all the time.'

The close affinity found in church encouraged self-imposed limits. “I never thought it appropriate to date anyone that was part of the church because it did feel like family,” Doris Moore said. “It was almost like you know them too well, so you’ve got to reach outside of that to find a husband.”

The church subculture defined one’s world. “There was never any question about where we were going to be on a Sunday and what I was going to do and how I lived my life because most of the people around me were in the same situation,” said Jade. “Everyone’s parents had some kind of role. Their father was a deacon, their mother a deaconess, or something. The church leaders were all of my friends’ parents. You were just part of the community. That’s who we were. Whether Mount Nebo or Salem or Pilgrim or somewhere else, that was how it was. After the freeway, it was a little different.”

Her mother Ella recalls how the once tight knit Black community became less so. “There was a time when all you had to do with a child who came to your home was ask who their parents were and we would know who they were. We knew almost everybody who went to every church,” she said. The freeway interrupted those connections. “Among other things,” she added, “it changed the way people related to each other.”

As if being forced to move was not hard enough, making it tougher, Ella said, was Armour packinghouse closing, costing her husband his job. He ended up commuting to Kansas City to work in an Armour plant there before it too closed and he got hired by the Omaha Public Schools.

In the 1990s, gang warfare became a new hazard in the inner city. Struggles with entrenched poverty and disparities in education, employment and healthcare still affect many families.

Music and Black Culture

The rich history of church that families like the Arvies, Rogers and Moores experience serves them as a guide and buffer from societal ills. “We did most all of our sinning and growing up in church. It was a magnificent resource to get good training into us. And so for us church is all we know,” Rev. Arvie said.

From call and response to gospel music, he said, “What we experience inside the church is really just an extension of Black culture. I’m one of those preachers that loves to have the response, and I know how to generate it. I know how to elicit what I need to from those listening to me. Everyone doesn’t have that ability. Some people are born with it. You can get it over the course of time.” The response doesn’t need to be loud, he said, just sincere.

From a pastor’s perspective, he said, the most vital part of church is worship, via the minister preaching the gospel and congregants’ response to that scriptural-based word. All of it in service to “getting people saved.” “Music,” he added, “paves out the path of the gospel ministry. Music is a mood-maker. You can take someone sitting in worship who’s maybe experiencing some terrible things in life and a particular song will become a mood-maker for them to be able to hear the message easier and clearer.”

His son RaDaniel said music ministry cannot be taken for granted or assumed by just anyone. “In the Black church we have standards of what we call ‘a good Sunday’ – where ‘the word’ is good, the music is good, everything is just right. And then we have ‘a bad Sunday’ when some integral piece is off. It’s deeper than what songs you sing and how well you sing it. It’s so deep where if you come to the microphone with the wrong spirit, it will throw off the whole trajectory of worship. But in the church the role of music is too important, too integral, too pivotal... You have to have the right heart and posture – and the gift to do it.”

Jade Rogers still draws succor from the hymns she grew up with. “My grandmother used to say you sing those songs, you learn those songs, you know those songs and when you get older and you need them, they come back to you. And the older I have gotten, that is a true statement because in the midst of any crisis, any down moment, anything that happens that you’re just like, spent, a song will come and comfort or instruct..”

Formational

“Growing up a preacher’s kid,” RaDaniel said, “l always knew I was different and I had to live different. I do have to deal with a whole lot of unrealistic expectations from people they wouldn’t put on their own children, but they want me to have because of who my father is. The same for my siblings, though it affected us all different. It did bother us, but now we’re all at a place where we understand who we are and we know how to navigate this space we occupy in life.”

He wouldn’t change anything. “It’s been rewarding for me. The benefits of being a preacher’s kid outweigh the bad. I’ve been given a lot of opportunities simply because of the great name my parents have and the name that our family has made for ourselves in people’s minds.”

As the daughter of deacons, Jade Rogers identifies with the expectations that come with being a church kid. “There was this blending of my family, my church and the community so that I didn’t have a choice but to make right and good decisions,” she said. “Because wherever I went in this city I was going to see somebody that I was either related to or knew who I was related to. That also impacted a lot of things I chose not to do.”

Churches not only set standards for individuals but for communities and societies. Historically, the Black church catalyzed the civil rights struggle when that movement needed its organization, leadership and seal of approval.

In her Women in History interview, Ella Rogers recalled Mount Nebo doing its part. “We took up collections for civil rights workers who went to jail. We contributed to the NAACP. We boycotted public transportation (to pressure local transit companies to hire Black drivers).” She described as “sad days” when civil disturbances “burned North 24th Street … When injustice boils and you feel it's fruitless …When you see people killed … I don’t like violence and looting. But peaceful demonstrations do not always get the job done. I attended some of the public outcries and demonstrations. I remember when we marched for civil rights. Everything we did counted.”

“Back during the civil rights movement the church had to play a vital role,” Rev. Arvie said, “because that was the institution that the Black community could say had a voice and any kind of power.”

The church is not out front pressing for social justice the way it was then, he said, because “from that time to this time things have changed.” The church is no longer a central cog in as many people’s lives. Black Lives Matter is a more diffused movement. Ella Rogers points to another factor, noting, “The churches were more united at that time than they are now. We got to know people in other churches because we used to have union services on Sunday nights with other churches. We used to picnic together at Elmwood Park.”

Jade Rogers notes that most young people these days are “not connected with a church or a congregation and never have been,” which is the polar opposite of when she grew up. “I would dare say their grandparents or aunt or somebody in their family probably was, but we moved away from the church being the center of the community.”

RaDaniel Arvie recognizes that church has become less “relevant or prevalent in the Black community,” adding, “I can remember as a kid more people going to church and respecting the church, whereas now I have peers and their parents who I used to see at church every Sunday that I don’t now. It went from a great host of youth to a handful.”

Conflicts over issues like abortion and same sex marriage, Arvie said, turn folks off. “When people see those things they don’t want to be involved.”

Oasis

In keeping with its traditional mission, Rev. Arvie said Mount Nebo’s “primary reach out to the community is via evangelism – sending out letters, knocking on doors, person-to-person conversations.

Through its Members Care Ministry, he said, “We give care to members of our church who may have a tough time with basic necessities of food, clothing. During the Thanksgiving season we provide food to families. At Christmas we provide gifts to children whose parents are incarcerated.”

Mount Nebo’s generosity happens in planned and unexpected ways. Jade Rogers recalls instances as a child when stranded motorists sought help from the church and members responded. That Christian charity still happens. “Since I’ve been here,” Rev. Arvie said, “we’ve had persons who were traveling and just ran out of money or whatever come by the church and we’ve assisted them in getting along their way. We’ve paid bus fares for people to get them from one point to another. We’ve had Omaha residents come knocking on our door needing help and we’ve done our best. We’ve helped with housing, paying utilities for people in arrears. That’s Mount Nebo.”

Doris Moore advocates for even more outreach. “I think it’s crucial for the church to reach beyond its four walls and stay engaged with the community because parishioners of the church are made up of the community. That’s what helped build the resiliency we have and help get people through a variety of challenges.” She feels churches can be too set in their ways. “One of the challenges I experienced was a hesitancy by some of the more senior leadership to relinquish some of their power and control. It was really hard to find where I fit in and how I could use the gifts I felt I brought to the church. To this day for me that’s a struggle, maybe because I’m in a nontraditional role. Mental-behavioral health is not something churches typically want to talk about and get in deep with.”

Rev. Arvie is sure Mount Nebo’s slogan – The church where fellowship is real – is lived. “What’s real about Mount Nebo, people come to one another’s comfort, encouragement … uplift one another.”

An occupational hazard for any pastor is getting so close to congregants that when they pass, it truly is like losing a loved one. Recalled Rev. Arvie, “The two hardest funerals I ever preached in my life, and I’ve preached a ton of funerals, were those for my dad and for John Rogers (Jade’s father), because of the closeness we shared.” In Rogers, he found a trusted ally. “I have not had the church fights and struggles for governing authority that exist in a lot of our Black Baptist churches,” he said, “and I really believe it’s because of John Rogers. He picked up that mantle. He saw the direction I was going in and became a conduit to making it happen.

“He treated me as a son, he treated me as a pastor, he was just good to me. And I really believe every pastor, no matter the denomination, needs a lay person like John Rogers. The Brother Rogers I knew, you don’t find those fellas too often.”

When John and Ella Rogers were a young couple, they were mentored by church elders. They eventually aged into being mentors themselves. In her Women in Omaha interview, Ella, who earned her GED taking night classes and worked at Western Electric and Northwestern Bell, expressed appreciation for the “excellent examples” and “role models” who helped her mature. “I’ve just tried to emulate the people who set the pattern for me. I’ve been blessed with people who’ve made an impact on my life. My mother was such a beautiful example as to being a good Samaritan, a missionary and a woman that exhibited love. The greatest reward is that someone sees love in your spirit. My father used to tell us, ‘There is no one better than you, but you are not better than anyone.’ That was the kind of philosophy we lived by. Even today I feel like anyone who has a problem with the color of a person’s skin, they’re the one that has the problem. That’s what I’m trying to do for my children and grandchildren.”

Many hands make quick work of things. But the same hands tend to toil the most. The same is true at Mount Nebo, but it’s always found enough help to get the job done. In the church’s earlier years, Doris Moore said, “Many members were laborers, so if there were things that needed to be done, they did it themselves. I think that speaks to the bond they had as a congregation. I think the new age of church is a little bit different. Those connections are not as close as they used to be.”

Moore still feels enough of a pull to remain. “When I think of Mount Nebo I think of family, faith and foundation. I like the consistency. That’s one of the things that has kept me there over these number of years. It’s the strong foundation we received from the time we started there and the fact we as a family are still there. I have a daughter who did decide she wanted to go someplace else. For the most part though we’re all committed to being at Mount Nebo. But there is changing and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t know as many people there as I did before. I am trying to figure out if this is the place for me. I am very much focused on community and while historically Mount Nebo was involved in community I don’t feel that at this moment. That’s creating a struggle for me because I am a community person. I’m at a crossroads.”

Moore feels it’s incumbent upon the Black church “to figure how to be engaging and relatable to the current community,” adding, “I think some (churches) are doing it well and some are not.” In her capacity as Center for Holistic Development executive director, Moore wants the church to advocate more for mental health. “Just like if you were having diabetes or heart problems, a church that has a connection to healthcare resources should share that with the congregation.”

Weathering the Storm

No church holds onto all its members, but this one’s held fast, even during the COVID scare. “The pandemic has not deflated Mount Nebo, it’s inflated Mount Nebo,” Rev. Arvie proclaimed. “We were doing well prior to the pandemic. But I think we’re even doing better during the pandemic. The health of a church is not about how much money you’ve got in the bank or how many pews you’re filling up with people. The health of a church is how well the people are living out lives that honor and glorify God, and Mount Nebo before my arrival had a rich tradition of people in the pews who believe in living lives that honor and glorify God. And since my arrival that has continued.”

“Not that Arvie suggests its members are holier than thou or without struggles. Wherever the Lord resides, he said, the devil hangs out, too.”

— Rev. Arvie

Not that Arvie suggests its members are holier than thou or without struggles. Wherever the Lord resides, he said, the devil hangs out, too.

A strong faith community invests not just their time and talent but their treasure in church. The same is true at Mount Nebo, where Arive’s seen donations rise in the pandemic. More worshipers are attending services as vaccinations among African Americans rise. Attendance surpassed 100 at several recent services.“A lot of churches I know of in the Black community didn’t have one third of that,” he said. “Our people have remained connected to the church via in-person or live streaming. It’s refreshing to me as pastor that our people would have the desire to stay connected.”

Jade Rogers made the adjustment to online service as needed but she and her pastor are of like minds that there’s a tremendous difference between in-person and virtual worship.

“You can find your own way to worship at home and that should be a part of your natural process as a Christian,” she said. “But there is something special and amazing that happens when you are in the company of others. That is the worship experience you have in a church.”

Her mother Ella’s chronic health problems pre-date the pandemic and so watching worship services from home was nothing new to her. “I have spent most Sundays hearing messages on television and radio,” Ella said, “but I’ve always done that. Even when I was working, I was listening to sermons on the way to work, on the way home.” Since Nebo began live streaming, she’s tuned in via YouTube. Not everyone in her age group has access. “I have friends who have really suffered from not being able to get out.”

Pastor Arvie intends to continue live streaming services long after the pandemic’s over and to address access issues some members face.

Wherever and however one prays, Ella Rogers said, “It’s very important to know where you come from and where you’re going, and how to live in this world.” In its centennial, Mount Nebo remains her “old ship of Zion” carrying her to calm waters and restful shores amidst the storm. Looking back over a lifetime there, she said it’s a time to “mingle tears for those who have gone by way of death or who moved away or left for any other reason.”

“It’s like family. Our hearts bound together as one.”