The beige block and stucco church is tucked comfortably among homes and small businesses along Tallevast Road.
To many, Mount Tabor Missionary Baptist Church is the heart and soul of this close-knit southern Manatee County community.
“The church is the most important thing in my life,” said Virginia Massie, 71, who was born and raised in Tallevast. “It’s always been here. It’s rewarding. It’s steadfast. It’s always there to reinforce my faith in God and mankind.”
Massie, who has been the church clerk for 20 years, just as her mother and grandmother before her, was busy last week with several other members of the congregation preparing for the weeklong centennial celebration of the church.
The 150-member church was founded in 1909 when Tallevast was a small sawmill town, surrounded with vegetable and strawberry fields by the sons and daughters of former slaves.
Massie’s grandparents were four of those founding members of Mount Tabor, named after the mountain in Galliee said to be the site of Jesus’ Transfiguration.
From the humble beginnings of home church meetings, the church grew and a small chapel was built near the railway station that carried the lumber and farm products to distant markets.
As the congregation grew, a larger, frame sanctuary was constructed in the 1920s and was used for worship until the present church was built in the 1960s.
“The congregation rejoiced about the new church,” said Pastor Ezell Patterson, who started preaching at Mount Tabor 33 years ago. “It was like a new spirit came upon them.”
The newer, larger church energized the spiritual life of the congregation and its tradition of ministry to the community, the Rev. Patterson said.
For Clifford Ward, who is one of Massie’s six siblings and chairman of the church Board of Deacons, the celebration of 100 years is a witness of the work of the Lord in the community.
“The church itself to me is a representation of God in our midst,” said Ward, as he prepared the historical documents that line the walls of the church fellowship hall. “So we can look to the church for peace and comfort and the help we need.”
He said the church provides spiritual nourishment.
“It is from this place we can get the kind of change in our spirit that will make us ready for eternal existence in God’s presence,” said Ward, who is a semi-retired dentist working with his daughter, also a dentist, in an office next to the church.
“To be able to say, ‘I’ve been the part of something that has been in place for 100 years,’ means a lot to me,” he said, “because of the fact that my family, both on the maternal and paternal grandparents’ sides, was instrumental in packaging this, which would be a vessel to transport me and mine to place of higher existence.”
Through the years the mission of the church to provide that spiritual guidance has remained strong within the community, the only thing that has changed is the times and local issues that the congregation has had to deal with.
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