Hilton Head’s senior pastor retiring after 29 years at Queen Chapel AME

Babies don’t cry in church anymore.

It’s not because they have renounced the devil.

It’s because they aren’t in church.

That worries the Rev. Edward B. Alston as he retires after 29 years in the pulpit at Hilton Head Island’s historic Queen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

“Most churches are experiencing the same situation,” he says about a number of tectonic changes rocking the way faith is practiced in America, if it is practiced at all.

Pastors are facing aging congregations, and young families that pop in and out rather than let the church give them an anchor in life, he said.

Churches are caught in a swirl of social change sweeping the globe, and that’s been hard on both the shepherd and the flock in churches like Alston’s that don’t want to use the pulpit to bash individuals.

“I don’t love the sin, but I love the sinner,” said Alston, who is Hilton Head’s senior pastor. “I love unconditionally.”

Then the coronavirus pandemic turned church life upside down in 2020, closing in-person services for months at Queen Chapel AME, and then showing parishioners how nice it is to sit at home and worship via Zoom.

“We are now gradually, gradually seeing in-person attendance picking up again,” Alston said.

He doesn’t cry about the pandemic’s impact.

“It’s a fact of life,” he said.

And despite all the change, Alston knows that Queen Chapel has survived the roiling facts of life for 158 years. It is the second oldest of the six Black churches that, come hell or high water, have survived as the island’s oldest institutions.

Alston also knows that the Black church has been as sturdy for American society as the anvil that, with the cross, forms the AME denomination’s logo.

And as he packs to leave, he well knows the crucial role of the Black pastor, proclaimed by W.E.B. DuBois in 1903 as “the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil.”

Beaufort County native

Alston’s career will be celebrated at a banquet this Saturday at Campbell Chapel AME Church in Bluffton.

A resolution from Mayor Alan Perry cites Saturday, Aug. 19, “as the Town of Hilton Head Island’s observance and recognition of the many contributions of the Rev. Edward B. Alston and thank him for his exemplary service to our community.”

His retirement in September is mandatory as he turns 75.

Church was central in Alston’s family of five boys as he was reared in the Dale community in northern Beaufort County.

He brought to his call to ministry degrees from the segregated Robert Smalls High School in Beaufort and Allen University in Columbia. He served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, and retired from the Army Reserves as a master sergeant after 23 years. He has worked as a civilian contract administrator at the VA hospital in Charleston, and at the two Marine Corps installations in Beaufort.

He was a church lay leader, but his family had mixed feelings when he announced his call to ministry. His wife, Thelma, promised to stick by him.

“She has,” the pastor says. “She has.”

After three years leading his home church, Mt. Pisgah AME in Seabrook, he was assigned to Queen Chapel in October 1994.

He said they “dated for 6 1/2 years” as he and the congregation got to know and fully trust each other.

He has learned “you can’t talk to any two persons exactly the same. Everyone is different. You learn how to work with and try to bring all these people together for a common goal. It’s not an easy task.”

Call it providence that he has yet to hit a deer in his countless commutes from his home in the Gillisonville area of Jasper County. But he always answered the call, presiding over an unknown number of funerals and weddings, and baptizing five generations in a single family.

Through a number of initiatives — after-school tutoring, classes for expectant mothers, hosting the Sandalwood Community Food Pantry, wellness seminars — the church has tried to nurture physical, emotional and spiritual lives community-wide. That is the historical role of the Black church, the Black pastor and the AME church.

But it was a sagging roof that led to Alston’s greatest legacy.

Hilton Head legacy

Alston recalls coming to the church on Beach City Road on a Saturday night to find a government sticker on the doorway warning that you would enter the building at your own risk.

The sanctuary built in 1954, to replace one built in 1892, had to be renovated or replaced. The congregation had been working with architect Doug Corkern, who showed them many options and recommended building a new sanctuary from the ground up without destroying the old one.

Alston was new to the church. He said the congregation unanimously approved the plan but had no money. But with pledges and fundraisers, including dinner theater performances organized by Scott Gibbs of Beaufort, the $1.1 million, 300-seat sanctuary was dedicated in July 2002, and the mortgage will be burned in late 2024 or early 2025, Alston said.

Queen Chapel has nurtured three members into the ministry during Alston’s tenure: Vanessa Johnson, pastor at St. Stephen AME in

Hardeeville, local elder Latrice Campbell, and itinerate elder the Rev. Dr. Nannette Pierson.

The church has been a rock for native island families to include Grants, Burkes, Singletons, Campbells and Aikens as well as long-term islanders like the Wilborns.

He nods in full agreement at the words of the late Rosa Simmons, who worshiped at First African Baptist Church founded in 1862.

She once told the newspaper that the island’s six Black churches are the greatest heritage of the island’s Black residents.

“The foreparents started these churches, and we just want to keep them going,” she said.

“They’re the only thing we have that we can say, ‘This is ours and no one can take it from us.’ ”

Alston now leaves to future generations the unknown facts of life that will challenge them with these words: “We need to hear more babies crying.”

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.