SILVER POINT, TENN. — There’s no burning bush, just a red-brick church building and tall trees casting shadows over a cemetery. Still, it’s sacred ground.
The simple brick structure was home to the Silver Point West End Church of Christ, which met for decades in a rural community 60 miles east of Nashville. Its membership in decline, the church discontinued weekly services in the mid-1990s but lives on in yearly homecoming reunions.
A sign in front of the Silver Point West End of Church of Christ notes its establish date in 1909 and closing date in 1996.
A recent homecoming celebrated not only the preachers and other male leaders but the women who have garnered for Silver Point a prized place in the history of Black Churches of Christ.
“Do you realize how important Middle Tennessee is?” historian and speaker Edward J. Robinson asked the more than 100 people attending the 26th Silver Point reunion. “Everybody ought to take off your shoes, because we’re on holy ground.”
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The homecoming activities began at noon on a recent Saturday with a ceremony honoring Silver Point members who had fought in both World Wars, Korea and Vietnam.
“Whatever the period and whatever the cause, the ones now entombed in this sacred earth are real heroes,” said Donnell Carr, whose parents along with other relatives rest in the church cemetery.
“Whatever the period and whatever the cause, the ones now entombed in this sacred earth are real heroes.”
After the memorial, guests entered the church building for a program about Silver Point’s history, followed by songs from musical groups from visiting congregations. A late lunch at a nearby community center ended the day.
The next morning featured an assembly, an afternoon potluck and a concluding worship service.
Silver Point reunion committee chair Harold Carr speaks to reunion attendees.
Robinson spoke on that Saturday about a key figure from Silver Point’s past, Annie C. Tuggle, born in 1890 near Memphis to former slaves.
Professor of history at Texas College in Tyler, Texas, where he also serves as minister for the North Tenneha Church of Christ, Robinson has written extensively on Black Churches of Christ.
“What would the church be without good and godly women?” he asked the crowd. “We’d be in bad shape.”
Robinson set Tuggle’s life squarely in America’s past, emphasizing — as Tuggle’s parents illustrated — the inescapable link between slavery and Black Churches of Christ.
Harold Carr and historian Edward J. Robinson display the certificate of appreciation Carr awarded Robinson for participating in the 26th Silver Point homecoming.
The plight of Black Americans, he said, has been a “drama within a drama.”
Tuggle’s story intersected Silver Point’s after she left the Methodist Church to become a member of Churches of Christ, converted by a preacher associated with George Phillip “G.P.” Bowser, the founder of the Silver Point Christian Institute. Bowser himself was responsible for the conversion of Tuggle’s mother.
G.P. Bowser, a renowned Black minister who preached for the Jackson Street Church of Christ in Nashville
Bowser launched the institute in the first decade of the 20th century to provide African American children in first through eighth grades a Christian education. What’s now the historic Silver Point church building was added a few years after the school’s beginning.
Learning of the Silver Point Christian Institute from Bowser’s periodical, the Christian Echo, Tuggle moved to Middle Tennessee and “joined the crusade, the movement of educating … African American youth,” Robinson explained.
Though Tuggle had a university degree, she moved to Silver Point “to absorb more Scripture,” Robinson said, adding that Bowser, aware of Tuggle’s talents, commissioned her to serve as ambassador for the school. She not only provided a role model for students but supported the institution as a fundraiser.
Robinson underscored Tuggle’s knowledge and insight as a Christian leader.
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In the 1930s, Tuggle attended a meeting during which a Black congregation in Memphis was considering firing its preacher to pay the mortgage. Another woman at the meeting, who, like Tuggle, opposed the idea, nudged her Christian sister to say something.
“When you take the Gospel out of the church, you have a dead church,” Tuggle stood up to declare. Instead of letting the minister go, she suggested inviting famed evangelist Marshall Keeble to Memphis to grow the church.
“When you take the Gospel out of the church, you have a dead church.”
Keeble’s month-long meeting yielded 75 baptisms.
Tuggle’s support of the Silver Point Christian Institute became part of a chain of events that would make Bowser’s lifelong dream of an institution to educate Black Christians come true.
A historical marker outside the West End Silver Point Church of Christ.
Silver Point closed as a Christian school about a decade after its start. Later, Bowser founded the Bowser Christian Institute in Fort Smith, Ark., then the Southern Bible Institute in Fort Worth, Texas. The Fort Worth institute moved to Terrell, Texas, and became Southwestern Christian College.
“There is no Southwestern Christian College … without the Silver Point Christian Institute,” Robinson said.
Frances Baugh, a member of The United School Workers, a fundraising organization for Southwestern, appreciated Robinson’s message about Tuggle. Baugh had driven a church bus with 14 guests from her organization as well as Nashville’s Schrader Lane Church of Christ to the reunion.
“Hearing her story is always inspiring, to know that she had such an impact,” Baugh said about Tuggle. “She was a very strong, resilient woman. … The background of her … coming out of the Methodist Church, coming into the Church of Christ and really just being a major force in the church was very powerful.”
Harold Carr awards a commemorative plaque to Geraldine Tibbs, honoring her decades of work in organizing the Silver Point homecoming.
Geraldine Tibbs, who grew up at Silver Point and now lives in Memphis, invited Robinson to speak at the recent reunion at the request of Harold Carr, Donnell’s brother and chair of the homecoming committee.
Tibbs, 85, co-founded the Silver Point reunions with Silver Point’s Evelyn Buck, Harold Carr said.
Sitting on her front porch in the Middle Tennessee community of Silver Point, Evelyn Buck talks about her years growing up in the West End Church of Christ. Read more about the last of the ‘living water.’
“We were really a committee of two,” Tibbs said.
The organizer said that many Southwestern Christian College speakers had assisted with the reunions. Tibbs cherished the connection between Silver Point and Southwestern and longed for the homecomings to further the work of Southwestern, born of Bowser’s lifelong passion for educating Black Christians.
Following the group singing on Saturday afternoon, Harold Carr joined fellow committee member David Meek to present plaques to Buck and Tibbs in recognition of their years of work in organizing the reunions.
“I felt good,” Tibbs said. “I felt real proud that I did something … to help Silver Point.”
Silver Point guest Pam Scruggs, a member of Nashville’s Jackson Street Church of Christ, discusses the Silver Point hymnal with her 8-year-old granddaughter, Kennede Scruggs.
The Carrs’ older brother, Virgil, who traveled to the reunion from his home in Florida, referred to Tuggle’s unique testimony to the importance of women at Silver Point, the church cemetery and its rows of markers behind him as he spoke.
“She was ahead of her time,” Virgil Carr said about Tuggle.
Reunion guests enjoy a Sunday-afternoon potluck at the Silver Point Community Center near the historic Silver Point church.
“We sometimes forget, particularly in the Black … communities, the contributions of Black women,” he added. “You had some strong, strong Black women in this community who were not afraid to talk, not afraid to argue, not afraid to … compromise, not afraid to do a whole lot of things.
“I want to be buried up here, among our people,” Virgil Carr said. “I believe personally that the spirits of some of the people that died … are here.”
TED PARKS is a Nashville-based correspondent for The Christian Chronicle. A contributor to the Chronicle since the 1990s, he teaches Spanish at Lipscomb University. To offer feedback on this story, contact [email protected].
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