Albany church damaged by car crash

ALBANY, Ga. (WALB) - An Albany church is damaged after a truck ended up in its entrance—leaving behind significant damage for the church to clean up.

The accident happened Saturday morning. A driver veered off Moultrie Road, jumped a ditch and took out some power lines before crashing into the Mercedes Baptist Church.

“I was pretty shocked, to be honest with you,” said Chris Hall, the church pastor.

In-person church was canceled Sunday at the church because of the incident. Dougherty County Police are investigating the cause of how a white truck ended up inside the church’s entrance. The man inside the truck was not hurt in the crash.

“Fortunately when we got here, we were informed that the gentleman was okay and that was the most important thing to us,” Hall said.

The church now has a caved-in front side, a missing beam and no power. It’s boarded up now, so the damage outside doesn’t look as bad as it did when the accident happened, but the inside of the church says it all.

“When it hit it just shattered glass, our glass door all over our foyer area,” Hall said.

The room with the most damage is the church’s Sunday School classroom. Luckily no one was inside when the truck came crashing in. Looking ahead, Pastor Hall said he expects repairs to be around $100,000.

“It’ll be a process, but our church is used to these kinds of challenges,” he said.

During the summer of last year, the church faced over $40,000 in repairs. This was after its air conditioning units were vandalized with copper stolen from three of them. Still, Hall said he’s confident the church will once again overcome another setback.

“We’re going to do what we do as a church, you know. We’ve been through this. It’s not a pleasant experience obviously when these things happen but you always kind of look for the positive that comes out of the negative,” he said.

That positivity in this situation came from the church’s congregation who immediately came to help with clean-up efforts. Hill said it’s because of those efforts that the church can be opened as early as Wednesday.

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