INDIANTOWN — At the entrance to Booker Park sits a boarded-up migrant farm worker camp, a monument to Indiantown’s history as a company town. Beyond that is a community consisting mostly of dilapidated shacks and block homes that George Bozone, director of missional outreach for First United Methodist Church, Stuart, says is worse than many Third World communities. In the middle of the community is a concrete slab that, three years ago, was the Apostle Faith Church of Jesus.

By the end of this summer, Pastor Rother L. Pierce Sr. hopes his congregation will once again be worshipping God in a church built on that slab, and members of the Stuart church are helping make that hope a reality.

In the early morning hours of Sept. 15, 1996, Pierce received a call that the Apostle Faith church was on fire. A few hours later, the concrete and wood structure was a total loss. “When fire comes, everything’s got to get out of the way,” Pierce said.

The investigation into the cause of the fire is still ongoing, Pierce said, and church members are waiting to hear from local and federal investigators.

“It was a great tragedy that hit this small family of worshippers,” he said, “but we have the motivation to build again.”

Motivation alone was not enough to rebuild the church, however. Since the building was not insured, the congregation had to somehow raise $80,000 to build a new church building and an additional $50,000 to furnish the inside, according to Pierce. There was also fear that parking and land use regulations would prevent the church from obtaining the permits it needed.

Just over 20 miles east in the city of Stuart, First United Methodist Church was already prepared to help, according to Bozone. “We’re very active in mission outreach of all kinds,” he said. “The missions committee had discussed it [church burnings] and said that if it happened to any church in this area, we would help rebuild.”

The first group to respond was Stuart’s youth group, who had recently been to a youth rally in Indiantown. They helped clean up the rubble at the burned church. Bozone helped find money for materials and volunteers to rebuild.

Working with Bozone and Joe Hamilton, coordinator of United Methodist Volunteers in Missions (UMVIM) for the Southeastern Jurisdiction, the Indiantown church obtained a $35,000 grant from the denomination’s General Board of Global Ministries’ Advance Special No. 982700-1 for burned churches and $11,000 from the North Alabama Conference’s fund for rebuilding churches, according to Pierce. Bishop Robert E. Fannin of the North Alabama Conference, who was pastor at the Stuart church from 1981-1986, traveled to Indiantown to present the check to Pierce.

Local contractor Curtis Boyd helped the church get its permits and is overseeing the construction. “When I saw the church, it hit me that these guys are going to need someone to pull permits and stuff,” Boyd said. “I thought, ‘If I don’t do it, who’s going to?’ ”

The county did grant the permits, but “then things ground to a halt,” Bozone said. Another church in Ft. Lauderdale with a similar name filed a law suit against the Apostle Church of Jesus claiming that the building, land and grant money belonged to them. By the time the suit was settled, the building permits had expired, he said.

Just before Easter, Bozone received a call that an extension on the permits had been granted, and on April 10 work began on the new sanctuary for the recently renamed Greater Apostle Faith Church. Working with UMVIM coordinators in the Melbourne and West Palm Beach districts, Bozone is hoping to supply the church with enough volunteer labor to get the sanctuary completed by midsummer.