Successful drive shows what Ocean City is all about
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
OCEAN CITY — The community came through for its oldest church.
A citywide fundraising effort helped Shari Thompson pay off 2019 property taxes last week to avoid a looming tax sale on the Tabernacle Baptist Church, which is at the northwest corner of Eighth Street and West Avenue.
A well-attended special barbecue and yard sale Saturday capped the effort, raising about an additional $4,000 — more than enough to allow Thompson, president of the church’s board of trustees, to pay off the outstanding 2020 taxes this week.
This puts the church close to ending a sordid saga and back on the road to ministry as a community resource.
“Honestly, it means on a very heartfelt level that the community is supporting us even in the midst of all of the bad things that have been going on over the past 20 years,” Thompson said.
She talked about how the previous pastor, the Rev. Charles Frazier, locked out the community after it raised $400,000 to complete a four-year renovation project in 2003, and then, in March 2019, improperly got the church deeded over to him and his wife for $1 and tried to sell it last fall. Trustees were able to block the sale at the last minute and get the deed back, but for the short amount of time it was in the (now late) pastor’s hands, it became taxable, owing about $16,000 to the city between 2019 and 2020.
“That the community would then open its arms to us and support us this way is just very heartening and we’re very grateful,” Thompson said. “And we’re very grateful and also very prayerful about doing what God wants us to do in this place. We want everyone to feel welcome to come here. We want to see everyone, we want to say ‘hi,’ we want to say ‘thank you.’”
The saga unfolded publicly in early August when Thompson appeared before Ocean City Council to plead for help because the church was facing a tax sale. The city solicitor said the local government’s hands were tied, that it could neither forgive the taxes nor prevent the tax sale. By the late-August council meeting, the city was offering a potential solution of an installment plan to pay the taxes off over five years, thus avoiding the tax sale, but a private effort supported by City Council members helped raise the money to avoid the tax sale, which had been set for Oct. 1.
Thompson said the church is still in mediation with the late pastor’s family. They are trying to get the family to agree that the deed transfer never should have happened. The mediation was scheduled to take place last Thursday, Sept. 24, but the family was not prepared. The mediation has been rescheduled for this Thursday.
If successful, Thompson said the church hopes to convince the judge overseeing the case to agree the deed transfer was improper — going from a nonprofit to private hands — and to void it. If voided, the church never would have lost its tax-exempt status and could apply to the city to get its tax payments back.
In the meanwhile, the church is filing paperwork before Oct. 1 for its tax-exempt status, just in case, so it does not accrue new taxes.
“It was lovely to go and pay that off a week early,” Thompson said Saturday as the sun broke through after a quick downpour and people started to return to the yard sale and to inquire about the barbecue meals they purchased to sate their appetites and the church’s fundraising needs.
“That means, with the help of our yard sale and our barbecue, I may be able to do a second triumphant walk on Monday to pay off 2020,” she said.
(On Monday morning, while taking a different type of walk through Ocean City — this one for exercise — she confirmed the church surpassed its goals.)
Thompson said the church wants to be a “multiethnic congregation. Our doors are open to the community.” She added they plan to have visiting pastors for the first year because they don’t want to rush into the position they found themselves in with the Rev. Frazier.
“What we want to do is build up the membership and the leadership so this could never happen again, so we’re taking our time. We’ve experienced trauma so we’re definitely gun-shy about jumping into another pastor,” she said. “We’re going to be very careful about that process, build up our board, build up our membership so we’re stronger, so when we bring someone in, they won’t be able to do to us what just happened ever again. That’s really where we are with that.”
There is work to be done on the church, including an exterior paint job and replacing the chairlift that leads to the worship space on the second floor.
She thanked the community volunteers who came out to support the church, including Suzanne Hornick, who heads the OC Flooding Committee, and its members, who worked on preparing and manning the yard sale.
“She’s been wonderful,” Thompson said. “The whole group has been supportive.”
There also was a large Thompson family contingent including her siblings — sister Tammee Thompson and brothers Wayne Thompson and the Rev. Tyrone Thompson, who was scheduled as a guest preacher Sunday, along with members from the prior and subsequent Thompson generations.
Wayne and Tyrone Thompson were in charge of the barbecue, with a pair of smokers going.
“He’s barbecuing today and preaching tomorrow,” she said of Tyrone. “This is the dueling Thompson grills.”
City Council supports cause
Ocean City Council was powerless to do anything official about the tax sale, except to support a resolution allowing for an installment payment plan, but council worked unofficially to help the fundraising effort, which drew Thompson’s public praise at the Sept. 24 council meeting.
On Saturday, Councilman Keith Hartzell, who was among the vocal supporters of the church, said it was important to help Tabernacle Baptist because of its history as the first church in town, and its importance to the overall community and the African-American community.
“The community stepped up and put out $400,000 in the early 2000s and the church was revived. Then it fell onto hard times, but when you have people who are determined to trust in the Lord and pray to get it reopened, you have to jump in and help,” he said.
“It’s amazing because when you do these things and are led by the Lord in prayer, doors open up. Almost everybody we asked to help us helped us. So you can’t even say to yourself that it was me. You realize you are an instrument being used to keep our history, for our town and for the African-American community,” he said.
“They’re good people who are doing this and they’re doing it for the right reasons. They’re going to make sure the church has a wide scope. They’re going to try to bring in speakers, so this … is going to be a community church. And when the community helped back in the early 2000s, the idea was to have a community church with community functions. That is going to go back to the original intent of why this town jumped in and helped.”
Hartzell added, “This is what we do as a town. We’re still a special place. That’s what’s important. I’m proud of the town itself that so many people came out and helped, that so many people wrote checks. Everybody that I asked, 99 percent of the people said they would help in some way. That’s the beauty of Ocean City in a nutshell.”