The rear of Bright Hope Baptist Church at 12th and Cecil B. Moore is also the William H. Gray III Youth Center. (Photo by Sheena Allen)

On the corner of 12th and Cecil B. Moore streets is Bright Hope Baptist Church. Bright Hope boasts over 2,500 members and has many programs it offers to the community. There is a weekly Bible study, a women’s day, a men’s day, etiquette classes,Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, homework help, meals for the homeless, meals for college students, health fairs, choirs, a credit union and many other programs geared toward the community.

Norman Greene has lived in Yorktown for 22 years and attended Bright Hope Baptist Church for the same amount of time. Greene works as a volunteer teller at the credit union. His father is the treasurer and his sister is the manager.

Bright Hope is more than a place of worship for Greene; it also acts as a place where he can learn. “We have professors, English teachers, math teachers, vocal teachers, businessmen, lawyers, doctors. Our pastor was in Congress. He was the head of the NAACP. So wherever you turn in Bright Hope, you can pretty much find the answer.”

Everyone in Bright Hope seems to smile. They say hello even if they do not know your name or recognize your face.

“If you need help, you can come to Bright Hope,” said Sheryl Welton, who has lived in Yorktown for over 40 years and attended Bright Hope Baptist for about 35 years. She attends the weekly Bible Study because she enjoys the fellowship she finds with her parishioners and studying her Bible.

It’s the same kind of fellowship she finds in Yorktown. “We are a neighborhood of neighbors. A lot of us have been here since the beginning of Yorktown. A lot of us reach out. If you have a problem, you could always go to your neighbor, just to talk. If you need some other sort of help they could direct you to a community leader who would be able to help you.”

The Bible Study lesson that night was about how to live deliberately. As a part of the study people broke into groups to ask each other what advice they could give one another to live a happy life. Prayer was a common answer. The second most common answer was to reach out to neighbors and to live as a community.

Kadyjah Jalloh does not actually live in Yorktown. But because of her participation with Bright Hope she feels as though she is a neighbor. “Just because I don’t live here, I do feel a sense of family, of community. Everybody knows your name here or they know who you are if they don’t know your name.”

Jalloh feels that some of the programs Bright Hope offers are more for the community than for the church itself. She enjoys going into the community and helping through the church. “Yorktown is a really friendly place to be, to live. And the church is a really central part of that.”

The interior of Bright Hope Baptist Church is beautiful with a large stained-glass window. (Photo by Carolyn Steeves)

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