Birmingham Churches and Their Cornerstones 44

On the corner of 18th Street Avenue North and 13th Street in Bessemer, Alabama, sits a modest-sized brick mid-century traditional church. Once a handsome, but common, red brick it has been recently painted white and given a blue roof. Together the white walls and blue roof evokes Greece. This was probably seen as appropriate for an Orthodox Church and so was chosen by the building’s new owners. (The relatively recently constructed St. Symeon Orthodox Church in Birmingham is also faced with painted white bricks).

The repainting of red bricks reminds me of what has happened with so many houses in Birmingham and at Faithful Few Baptist Church in Avondale.

I was first by the church in 2021, when the church building was still red. The building’s sign advertised “Oasis Squad Ministry” meeting there every Sunday afternoon at 3 p.m., The cornerstone showed that it had been erected as a Church of God in 1959 when A.B. Nichols was pastor. I’m not sure which Church of God denomination that was, but I expect it was the Holiness movement headquartered in Anderson, Indiana, not the Pentecostal denomination based in Cleveland, Tennessee

St. John Cassian is named after the fourth century Christian monk who was near modern Bulgaria, lived as a monk in Egypt, and brought cenobitic (i.e., communal) monasticism to France. The chapel is part of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia (ROCOR). The community was previously located in Shelby County. It is one of three Orthodox churches from the Russian tradition in Birmingham. The others are St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Brookside (Russian Patriarchate) and St. Symeon in Birmingham (Orthodox Church in America).

Read this first post for more on this series on Birmingham churches and their cornerstones.

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