Refining fire

Mark Bethea was tired—a good kind of tired—when he pulled into his driveway last Sept. 29. After a COVID hiatus, Wednesday nights were rolling at First Baptist Church Montgomery, and for the first time since being named senior pastor a year earlier, he was getting used to shaking hands instead of sending Zoom links. Just before lights-out that night, Bethea, 34, remembered to update his phone. He hit “do not disturb,” too. Wouldn’t want to hang up the new iOS 15 install.

That’s why the pastor didn’t get notified when hours later alarms sounded inside the church’s complex of buildings. While he slept, firefighters from Montgomery Fire Station No. 2 responded, and the entering point man soon announced he smelled smoke.

Firefighters extinguished flames in three buildings on the 10-acre campus, and noting signs of arson, called in criminal investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). By the time Bethea arrived just before sunrise, the scene was buzzing.

“I couldn’t process it. At first I thought it wasn’t that bad, and then I walked into the main sanctuary,” he recalls. “The air was this thick, hazy fog. Alarms were still going off, and the speakers were saying, ‘It’s an emergency, get out.’ That’s when alarms started going off in my soul, like what in the world is going on here?”

Within hours, Bethea had some answers.

Watching surveillance videos alongside law enforcement officers, he leaned in for a better look at the slight figure darting from the shadows. Incredulous, the pastor told them he knew who she was, just as sure as footage showed her dousing pews and setting them ablaze.

Bethea admits that left him with a lot of whys. “We’re not a church steeped in politics. We just love Jesus, and we try to lift up His name,” he says. “When I think of all that’s happened in that sanctuary—all the conversions, missionary commissionings, baptisms, weddings, funerals—why would someone want to destroy it?”

But even as a magistrate issued an arrest warrant for 27-year-old Chinese national Xiaoquin Yan, Bethea knew he couldn’t camp out in the whys. Instead, he’d need to focus on a different question, one that’s kept him up more than a few nights since then. How could he steward this season?

Smoke fills the main sanctuary of First Baptist Church. First Baptist Church Montgomery

MONTGOMERY IS A HISTORY HOT SPOT, whether as the original capital of the Confederacy or the original owner of Rosa Park’s Bus No. 2857. First Baptist has some history of its own, starting with abolitionist, Creek Indian–sympathizing Pastor Lee Compere, who founded the body in 1829. Some 30 years later another of their pastors would deliver the invocation at Jefferson Davis’ inauguration.

These days the church’s most visible historical lean is buildings with stone exteriors modeled after a cathedral in Florence, Italy. On the church’s website, African-American faces smile from the staff listing. Public schools have used the newer, larger sanctuary for graduations.

First Baptist has a big campus—377,000 square feet covering more than a city block—in a location that comes with security challenges. Pastor Bethea calls it the “beautiful difficulty of being a downtown church.” He says some Sundays he’s preaching and a homeless person will wander in and worship alongside the governor. “That’s beautiful.”

The decision to anchor First Baptist in the heart of downtown wasn’t made by members living today, but the decision to remain there was. Scattered among three counties, congregants in 2000 had a big choice to make. They voted to stay put.

Associate Pastor Kenny Hoomes has been on staff for most of the two decades since, and he believes a move would have been a mistake. “We’ve found our location has kept us near the need.”

Hoomes says their community ministries assist some 20,000 people a year, and the fastest-growing arm of those efforts is the international programs. Language classes meet four days a week, and Sunday school teachers teach in Laotian; Thai; and beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels of English. A mentor walks participants through the citizenship process.

Carolyn Bryan is one of 80 church members involved in those ministries, and her circle of friends is wide. “It’s part of the Great Commission, going and reaching all nations, and if you’re going out in the city of Montgomery, then you’re going to see international people,” she said. Maybe that’s because a local branch of Auburn University attracts international students, as does the Air War College at nearby Maxwell Air Force Base.

But it was a tourist visa that brought Xiaoquin Yan to Montgomery—and through doors at First Baptist—in 2019. Back then, Yan was living with a female friend of Bryan’s, a church member who has since moved out of state. Bryan doesn’t remember many specifics from their few meetings, but she did notice Yan needed some friends: “But who doesn’t, right?”

Bryan hadn’t seen Yan in more than a year when local news stations identified her as the church’s suspected arsonist. She says watching Yan’s mugshot spread across TV screens was hard: “She didn’t look like the same person to me. She’d changed her hair, but that wasn’t it. She had a look of cold callousness.” Bryan admits feeling betrayed, but she’s also concerned about Yan. “With that crime, there’s some kind of hurt behind it. I know she’s hurting, but I don’t know why.”

Asians make up less than 2 percent of the population in Alabama, and Pastor Dawson Zhang believes Montgomery County may have 1,000 Chinese residents at most. Even so, his church plant on the outskirts of town, Montgomery Chinese Christian Church, has about 40 regular attendees and is growing. On a bright Saturday morning in January, four Lexus sedans fill parking spaces near the church’s main entrance. Inside, an exercise class is meeting. Ladies stretch while a recording of hymns—sung in Chinese—plays.

Zhang says Xiaoquin Yan in months past made her way to church members, and others, as she sought help with living expenses and other needs. Some members who got to know her described her as aggressive. “She wanted to achieve something here in the United States,” he says. “Start a business. Maybe marry someone rich.” When the pandemic hit, Yan dropped off the church circuit and went to work trying to extend her tourist visa into a student visa. Authorities denied her application in early September 2021.

That may have started the downward spiral that led to Yan’s arson charges and bail amounts that increased fivefold almost overnight. One judge ordered a mental evaluation for her. Treatment, too, if the mental assessment uncovered a problem.

When news of Yan’s arrest reached Zhang, the pastor grew concerned it would bring trouble to Montgomery’s Chinese community. He contacted Mark Bethea and ended up taking a guided tour of the damaged buildings. The next Sunday his congregation collected $1,800 for First Baptist. “We wanted to show them our love,” Zhang explains. “God’s love can conquer hate. We wanted them to know we are loving them, instead of hating. That we are one body in Christ Jesus.” Bethea invited Zhang to deliver the gift at First Baptist’s Oct. 17 worship service. He did, offering an open-air prayer as First Baptist met in its parking lot.

Billy Irvin was at that service and all the others held outdoors in the weeks following the fires. Standing on sidewalks along South Perry Street, the Christian radio executive and ninth grade boys’ Sunday school teacher points to the spot where he and other deacons set up chairs. Irvin smiles when he tells what they did if they finished early: “We went prayer-walking up and down the streets around the church,” he remembers. “We even prayed that she [Yan] might look out that jail window over there and hear us worshiping the Lord.”

Several pews of First Baptist Church were set on fire. Jake Crandall/The Montgomery Advertiser via AP

SOME OF THE PIECES of the puzzling arson event at First Baptist are still missing, but members and staff have come forward with details that show the alleged crime was planned weeks in advance. Church custodian Ronald Phillips told ATF agents he met Yan on Sept. 15. He says she wanted to walk through the facilities, and she asked questions about the church’s security cameras. She also made a comment about the church’s past pastors being “rich white men.”

Yan left the campus that day only to return hours later minus her long hair. Phillips and a security guard thought that was odd, but they didn’t question her dramatic haircut or her story about coming back to look for her friend. They did take down the license plate number on her 2001 Buick LeSabre.

Eleven days later Pastor Bethea had his own encounter with Yan. He was packing up to leave after Sept. 26’s Sunday morning services when he noticed someone round a corner down a hall. “It’s not uncommon for people to forget their keys and stuff, so I approached her,” he remembers. Bethea says Yan’s English was good and they had a cordial conversation. She was respectful of his position and said she didn’t want to take too much of the pastor’s time.

Looking back, Bethea can’t think of anything that would point to what he now thinks she was doing—casing the facility. “We chatted for about five minutes as we moved downstairs and into a courtyard. Nothing struck me as ‘she’s an arsonist’ or that she hates this church, she hates the Lord, she hates our country.”

Well, maybe one thing did give Bethea pause. He asked Yan if she knew Carolyn Bryan. “Carolyn is very recognizable in our international ministry, and she didn’t know who Carolyn was,” he explains. “I thought that was a little bizarre.”

Surveillance videos from the evening of Sept. 29 show the perpetrator carried two duffel bags through doors on the west side of the church as members exited. Bethea believes she took an elevator to the third floor where she hid out until video picks up her movement around 2 a.m. After starting four fires, she fled the scene.

ATF agents on Oct. 4 searched an apartment where Yan had been living. In addition to Walmart receipts for gas cans and lighters, they found a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol with a loaded magazine.

Most arsonists are men, and the less than 20 percent who aren’t are predominantly Caucasian. That makes Yan’s arrest a rarity, but the crime she’s accused of isn’t. The National Fire Protection Association reported that from 2007 to 2011, religious properties averaged 1,600 fires a year, with more than $100 million in direct property damage. The NFPA said 16 percent were arson. 

At First Baptist, the Sept. 30 fires destroyed a reception office, but fire-retardant carpeting in the old and new sanctuaries mitigated damage firefighters said “could have been much worse,” especially in Stakely Sanctuary, built in 1905. Still, soot—filmy, noxious, and transported throughout the facilities via the air conditioning system—continues to keep air purifiers and Servpro workers busy four months later. They’ve painted walls, wiped fixtures, removed truckloads of ceiling tiles, and replaced baby bed mattresses. But a dozen massive chandeliers, lowered to platforms where they wait for their turn to be sanitized, testify to the enormity of the task. Some jobs are so specialized they’re outsourced, like cleanup of two organs with 5,000 pipes between them. It’s extensive, expensive work. The church’s insurance carrier, the Cincinnati Insurance Companies, declined comment for this story. 

The aftermath of arson is inconvenient, too. Even though they’ve returned to parts of their campus, First Baptist’s 5,000 members are in flux. On a Sunday morning complete with surprise snow flurries, greeters decked out in coats and gloves stand at doorways, answering questions about who meets where and when. Parents, in search of bathrooms that aren’t cordoned off, maneuver small children between buildings. Bethea preaches three back-to-back services, while some Sunday school classes meet off-site, and one even meets in his office. 

Meanwhile, Yan pleaded “not guilty” to second-degree arson in federal court on Dec. 22. Christine Freeman, executive director of attorneys at Alabama Middle District Federal Defenders—Yan’s legal representation—declined to comment on the case. 

Doug Howard of the U.S. Attorney’s Office says Yan will remain in U.S. Marshals’ custody until her April 4 trial. If convicted, she’s facing a prison sentence of not less than five years and not more than 20 years. The federal system does not offer parole.

Pastor Mark Bethea looks at fire damage in the main sanctuary. Jake Crandall/The Montgomery Advertiser via AP

THESE DAYS, SIGNS OF ARSON at First Baptist are disappearing, except in the main sanctuary where fire-retardant carpets are melted and scarred by twisting lines of burning gasoline. They’ll come up when delayed replacements arrive, explains Bethea, skirting around the bases of five stories of scaffolding. He stepped to a spot in a center aisle and made a sentimental revelation: During construction in 2003, he used a Sharpie to write a Bible verse on the concrete beneath him.

Bethea has been at First Baptist since he turned 13, but he’s young in the ministry. “This has been overwhelming,” the father of three preschoolers admits. “They didn’t teach us in seminary how to lead through a church fire.” He says he reached a turning point at Yan’s initial hearing. “I realized I could spin my wheels trying to figure out why, but it won’t do any good, because I know that everybody that had contact with her—from the Chinese church to our church, and everybody in between—showed her love. Showed her Christlikeness.”

He says the question now is where to go from here, how to keep racism from harming important outreach efforts like their conversational English classes. As church members took communion on the Sunday after the fires, Bethea says, they prayed for Yan: “We prayed that maybe one day she could take communion with us, that she would come to know the Lord. And that through us or through somebody, she would know the error of her ways and repent. There are earthly consequences to sin, and we want all that to play out, but eternity—that’s our greatest concern.”

Bethea says he and Pastor Zhang have tried unsuccessfully to get into the prison to see Yan. She’s in a unique situation, with her visa revoked. She’s alone, with no family nearby.

Media attention not only publicized the fires but also the church’s outdoor meetings. Even now, friends and family pepper members with questions about what’s going on at First Baptist. Bethea calls it an “open door for the gospel,” and he says the congregation has a new sense of unity.

“It’s shown us that we can be flexible. I think we will walk away being appreciative of the space we have and what it allows us to do, but we’ll be unified around God’s mission and purpose for us, rather than our buildings.”

For now, the congregation is meeting in the older Stakely Sanctuary, where the baptistry sat in disrepair until December. That’s when some of the most important restoration work was done, allowing Bethea to baptize two new believers from Thailand, fruit of their ministry to internationals.