Savannah church bench stands in for lowly manger

Joe Westbury/Index

John Anderson Jr. was the first person to discover the newborn on the bench outside the church doors. Pastor Gary Bradham said the two benches had recently been installed as a resting place for senior citizens. He didn’t expect the bench on which Anderson sits to become a makeshift manger.

SAVANNAH — At first glance the bundle resting on the bench outside the front doors of New Vision Baptist Church looked like a child’s plaything, perhaps “a doll baby or plastic puppy.”

That’s what flashed through the mind of praise band member John Anderson Jr. Nov. 26 as he and others stepped onto the small porch to practice on a late November evening.

“I didn’t pay it any attention at first, but then my curiosity got the best of me and I walked a little closer and pried back the cloth and saw the baby’s head. I still thought it was a toy … and then it moved. That’s when I jumped back just a little,” he says.

That’s how Anderson discovered the newborn baby abandoned on the bench the Monday after Thanksgiving.

“The baby was just laying there, struggling a little, in the bloody towel. I was shocked,” he added.

The first thing he did was bring the baby inside and lay it on the altar to get a closer inspection. That’s when he called 911 to alert the authorities who sent an Emergency Medical Team. And, that’s when the praise team members discovered that the child’s umbilical cord was still attached and its mouth had not been suctioned.

“It couldn’t have been very old, and the EMT’s told us they believed it was less than three hours old when we found it. The umbilical cord looked like it had been severed with a knife; that’s when we became as concerned for the mother as we were for the child,” he explained.

Anderson and the praise team, who are members of New Life Apostolic Temple that shares worship space at the church, never practice on Monday evenings. And on this particular evening, it was so difficult to get everyone together after work that they didn’t begin arriving until after 9 p.m.

It was nothing short of a miracle that the baby was found that evening. Even with temperatures hovering near 70 degrees, the child would have had a difficult time making it though the night on its own, says New Vision pastor Gary Bradham of the host church.

Bradham said the baby was taken to Memorial Health University Hospital but the congregation has since lost all contact with the child. Some members offered to adopt the baby but the hospital has declined to release any information. And, the Chatham County Department of Family and Children Services, who will take custody once the child is released into its care, has discouraged any further inquires.

The infant is now known simply as baby Jane Doe.

Joe Westbury/Index

Members of New Vision Baptist have been denied information about the health of the newborn found at the front door of the Savannah church, even though some have offered to adopt the infant. Pastor Gary Bradham says the congregation is doing all that it can do under the circumstances – encouraging passersby to pray for the health of the child and the unknown mother.

Honored with trust

Under Georgia’s Safe Haven Law, the mother could have brought the newborn to a hospital and left it with an employee with no questions asked. But churches are not included in the law and, as such, members have no legal right to additional information, Bradham explains.

Detectives working with the case have said they feel confident that the mother may have some connection with the congregation. Bradham agrees.

“We have always had a strong ministry to youth and have had dozens of young girls come through our church, but as soon as they reach puberty and the hormones kick in, they drop like flies. They leave the church and we never see them again.

“We think the mother is very likely one of those girls from our past who had a good experience at New Vision and in her time of need thought of the church as the best place to leave her child. She honored us with that trust.

“We tried to use media and other outlets to let the mother know we were concerned about her health as well as that of the baby and asked her to contact us, but were also discouraged by the authorities from doing that. So we’ve taken to posting a message on our church sign asking our community to remember to pray for her and the baby. That’s the best we can do under the circumstances,” he says.

Bradham said the congregation had just voted to install the benches a couple of weeks earlier to provide a place for senior members to rest while they wait for their transportation at the end of the worship services. But they never thought the benches would become a substitute manger for a newborn entering the world at the beginning of the Christmas season.

As a result of the media coverage the congregation received more state and national publicity in the first week following the discovery than it has in decades. Television stations from Savannah to Jacksonville, Fla., covered the story and one church member reported seeing it on CNN.

“All we feel we can do at this time is to bathe that child and its mother in prayer and ask the Lord to give it a long and healthy life in which it can come to know Him,” the Savannah native stated.

Bradham is praying the exposure will draw more individuals to the church, which has a strong outreach ministry and is active in the Savannah Baptist Association. He is chairman of the Coastal Empire Ministries hosted by the association and the congregation is active with the ministry of the Baptist Center in downtown Savannah.

Bradham, who has served as pastor of the church for eight years, formerly served as pastor at Antioch Baptist Church in Evans County.