Cut from Royal cloth: Downtown's oldest Black congregation installs 16th pastor

Vinson Royal’s father was a pastor. His four brothers were pastors. So you’d be forgiven for believing that that lineage, and those family ties, would more likely have called him to the pulpit long before he went off to college.

“Ironically, I was born into it, but I decided I was not going to do that until the Lord directly called me into ministry. I was good at math so, all right, I might be an accountant or do something where I can make a lot of money,” says Royal, who was installed Jan. 22 as the 16th pastor of Springfield Baptist Church.

Royal now finds himself occupying the basement office of the church at 600 E. McBee Ave. in downtown Greenville. The white cinder-block walls include photographs of some of the pastors who have led the congregation that began to gather after the Civil War.

At the time, African American and white worshippers shared the pews of Greenville Baptist Church, now Grace Church in the former First Baptist Church building less than a mile away on West McBee. In 1867, freed-slave members formed their own congregation, and in 1870, they completed their new sanctuary, according to a church history.

A century later, in 1972, a fire consumed the building.

“One of the deacons told me how he sat on the hill when the church burned down, he could feel the fire, he could feel the heat from the fire,” says Royal, who is now charged with keeping Springfield’s spiritual embers glowing since the new house of worship opened in 1976.

Still, it wasn’t until March 1991, when Royal was visiting a church in Miami where one of his older brothers was preaching, that he says he received his call to the ministry.

“Like, literally, the Lord and I had a conversation,” he says of that day. “He’s, like, ‘You’re not going that way, buddy.’”

Then, last year, at the behest of a friend living in Seneca, Royal, who was leading his third church, sent out three resumes to churches in California and Texas. Two came back stamped, “Return to Sender.”

Asked for his reaction to Springfield’s offer to assume the pulpit, he says, “Floored. Amazed. That I was part of history.”

That history includes prominent figures who were members of or left their mark on the church and the city.

Those included the likes of A.J. Whittenberg, a civil rights leader after whom an elementary school is named in Greenville; Helen Burns Jackson, mother of the Rev. Jesse Jackson; and Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier and who in 1960 led more than 1,000 marchers from Springfield to Greenville Downtown Airport, where he had just been detained.

Now Royal belongs — and has been hired — to protect and extend that legacy for the church whose membership totals around 400.

“Every day I wake up, I realize that I’m no longer just in a historical place, but I’m making history myself because what we do in ministry now has to be more than just the status quo,” he says.

In the 1970s, Rev. S.J. Royal Sr. bucked the status quo and told his brand-new congregation in Louisville, Kentucky, that he would tear down the church and build a bigger, modernized sanctuary—because, as the younger Royal recalls, the Lord told him to.

“People thought he was crazy,” Royal remembers—that is, until the elder pastor built a nursing home behind the new church, an assisted-living facility on the other side, and then another center for the elderly across town.

“So coming here (to Springfield Baptist Church) is something that I think God prepared me for in my childhood,” says Royal.

Connell Clinkscales, who is in his third year on the church’s board of trustees, likewise says the church is prepared for Royal.

“I think he has jumped in to be in the forefront of getting Springfield Baptist Church to be known in communities,” he says. “Pastor Royal is an individual that’s going to take us to different levels for a structure, guidance and direction for the future of this church.”

And seeing as how Royal assumed Springfield’s pastorship the week before Black History Month, he says he tends to look forward to his future and that of the church.

“I’m beyond grateful and humbled to even be in this position. I don’t take it lightly,” he says. “My ancestors who have fought and died, who have done all the things that we’ll be remembering the history in February, always reminded us that history does not stop, it continues.”