Today we’d like to introduce you to Pastor Matthew D. Long, Jr..
Hi Pastor Matthew D., we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I am Pastor Matthew D. Long Jr., Senior Pastor of Rock Hill Baptist Church II in Greenville, South Carolina.
Understand where this church sits before you understand anything else about it.
Rock Hill Baptist Church II stands on Plantation Road, on land that was once a working plantation. The streets surrounding us still carry the family names of the people who owned that ground and the descendants who came after them. Drive through this neighborhood and you are reading a map of who held the deed. That history did not disappear. It got paved over and renamed, and it is still under our feet every Sunday morning.
We were founded in 1885 in a community once called Rock Hill in Greenville SC. Do the math on that. Twenty years after emancipation, our people gathered on the same soil where their parents had been counted as property after meeting in a brush harbor, and they built a house of worship. Not a shelter. A sanctuary. And they did not stop with themselves. This congregation became a mother church of District 25, helping plant and strengthen other churches across the area voluntarily and in-voluntarily . They were told what they could not own, could not organize, and could not build. They built it anyway, and then they helped everybody else build too.
That kind of history hands you a decision. You can guard it or you can continue it. My assignment is to make sure that after one hundred and forty one years, this church is still producing, still planting, still reaching, still loving.
So I lead with a major conviction. The church cannot afford to be present in a community without being present for the community.
On Tuesday, August 25th, that conviction got tested.
I woke up to an email telling me a tractor trailer was coming. I had requested it, but didn’t have any follow up meetings about it being approved. I had not planned for it. One of our missions partners wanted to bless Greenville, because this church had supported their work in other communities, and the blessing was already on the road. I had four days.
I felt like I had been dropped into a race I did not know I had entered. So I did what leadership actually requires when the clock is running. I stopped and prayed and allowed the Lord to show me who I needed to reach out to.
I built the plan that day. Site layout, distribution flow, volunteer roles, unloading crews, traffic, tables, who greets, who guides, who carries. As incomplete as my plan was I went back to the Lord and he reassured me he was in control and the plan and people would come together. Then I started calling. Texting. Emailing. Pastors, principals, child care directors, organizational leaders, community partners. I tried to send a polished invitation. I told them my plan and my dilemma in the same breath and I asked them straight. Nobody asked me for a proposal. They asked me what time.
I also set one standard before anybody showed up, and I would not move off of it. Nobody who walks onto this lot gets handled. They get hosted. We were not running an assembly line for people who were already carrying enough. Every volunteer was briefed to greet first, help second, and remember we are neighbors showing care for each other. That was the assignment I gave, and it is the part of the day I am proudest of.
By 8 AM Saturday, August 29th, they were in the parking lot. Volunteers emptied that tractor trailer in seventy-five minutes and had the entire care distribution event set up and ready to open with a line sprawling the length of the road. Nearly $250,000 worth of electronics, food, clothing, household goods and supplies went home with more than 250 of our neighbors, not including area churches.
Then I looked up and saw who had come.
Children and youth. Seniors. Adults. Our unhoused neighbors. African American, Asian, Caucasian, Latino, Ukrainian, Russian. Neighbors who are blind. Neighbors who are deaf. One person standing in that crowd told me it reminded them of Pentecost, all these different people descending on one place at one time. Acts chapter two says they were all with one accord in one place, and every man heard in his own language. That is what was happening on Plantation Road.
Sit with that. Land that once separated people by bloodline and by price now had every kind of neighbor standing shoulder to shoulder receiving the same blessing. The ground did not change. God changed what happens on it. The gift was never the merchandise. The gift was that for a few hours, on a street named after somebody’s plantation, a divided city looked like the kingdom.
Even the sky cooperated. The forecast called for rain. Then it moved to overcast. Then the sun came out. The Lord guided us the entire way.
This did not happen because of one church. It happened because a whole community decided that the need in front of us mattered more than the invisible lines between us. I made the calls, but they made the choice. District 25 came, and they brought everybody they knew.
New Zion The Love Center FBH Church, Rock of Ages Baptist Church, Antioch Baptist Church, Flat Rock Baptist Church, Long Branch Baptist Church, Open Heart Baptist Church, Golden View Baptist Church, Piedmont Manor Baptist Church, ValleyBrook Outreach Baptist Church, New Hope Greenville, and The King’s Worship Center. Unique Kids at Davis Academy and Pleasant Valley Connection. Hughes Academy of Science and Technology. Goodwill Industries, the District 25 Social Club, Azah Temple #140 Shriners, Pastor Alfred Johnson and Without Walls Ministries, Safe Industries, Ware Shoals Presbyterian Church, the NAACP Greenville Branch, and Upstate Circle of Friends. Pastor Sean Dogan, who has poured into me as a mentor and then showed up as a laborer. Bishop Randy Borders who called to pray, Pastor Richard Donald, Pastor Terry King, Pastor Wilbur Simpson, Pastor Terrance Wilson, Rev. Julius Hunt. Shay Long, Princella Lee Bridges, Eric Benjamin, Nicole Gary. And the members of Rock Hill Baptist Church II, who worked tirelessly up until the very last second.
That is my story. I am not trying to build a bigger church. I am trying to make sure that on the same ground where our ancestors were owned, this church is still worth being in the neighborhood.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The first obstacle was the clock.
Four days. That is all the time there was between the email on Tuesday morning and the doors opening on Saturday. No planning committee. No runway. No budget line waiting to absorb it. A tractor trailer of donated goods sounds like a blessing on paper. In practice it is labor, coordination, storage, traffic flow, security, sorting, and setup, and every bit of it had to be built from nothing while the truck was already in motion.
The second obstacle was the honest inventory of what I had to work with.
I pastor a growing church that serves seven generations, and I say that with real pride. But the backbone of this congregation is our senior members. These are the ones who never left, never quit, and never let this church close. They are faithful. They are present. They will outgive anybody in the building with heart. What they cannot do is unload a forty eight foot trailer in the August heat.
So I had to admit the gap out loud. I had no pallet jacks. I had no forklift when this started. I had no event coordinators, no traffic directors, no setup crew, no breakdown crew. I had a sanctuary full of people with tremendous heart and limited physical capacity, and I had a truck coming whether I was ready or not.
That is when Luke chapter five started reading me instead of me reading it.
Simon had fished all night and caught nothing. Jesus tells him to launch out into the deep and let down the net, and when he does, the Bible says they enclosed a great multitude of fishes and their net brake. Watch that. The net did not break from failure. It broke from abundance. The blessing was bigger than the equipment Simon had to receive it with.
That was my Tuesday morning. I was not looking at a shortage. I was looking at a catch that was going to tear my nets, and I had no gear, no crew, and no time to build either one.
The text tells you exactly what Simon did next. He beckoned unto his partners which were in the other ship, that they should come and help them. He did not try to save face. He did not try to haul it alone and lose the whole catch. He waved at the other boat.
That brings me to the third obstacle, and it was mine to deal with first. Ministry has a long history of protecting turf. We serve the same families as the school down the road, the child care center around the corner, and the church three blocks over, and too often we never speak to each other. I had to pick up the phone and tell other leaders that a blessing had landed on my lot that I could not carry by myself. That is not a comfortable call for a pastor to make. It is the call that made everything else possible.
And the other boats came. Equipment came. Muscle came. Younger members from area churches came. People who knew how to move freight, run lanes, work lines, load, unload, set up and tear down. In under two hours that trailer was empty and the event was standing.
The fourth obstacle was the city itself.
Greenville is growing. The cranes are up and the story being told is a story of prosperity. But United Way of Greenville County reports that poverty affects approximately 21 percent of Black residents and 22 percent of Hispanic residents, compared with 9 percent of white residents. Its 2025 Impact Report documents nearly 28,000 connections made for neighbors seeking help with housing, food, utilities and crisis support. Raising urgency in a boom town is its own kind of work, because a rising skyline can hide a sinking family.
The fifth obstacle was the one nobody puts in a press release. Dignity is harder to organize than distribution.
It is not difficult to hand somebody a box. It is difficult to hand somebody a box without costing them their pride. We had a crowd that crossed languages, ages, abilities and housing situations. Every volunteer had to be briefed to greet first and help second, and to never make a neighbor explain why they came. That standard was not negotiable, and holding it with a crew assembled in four days took intention at every point of contact.
And the weather threatened us right up to the morning of. Rain, then clouds, then sunshine.
Luke says when the other ship came, they filled both the ships, so that they began to sink. Even shared, it was heavy. That is the honest word. This stretched all of us. But nothing was lost, and nobody was left holding it alone.
Galatians 6:2 says bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. That verse does not say solve the burden. It says share the weight.
Four days was never enough time for one church. It was exactly enough time for a community.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.myrockhill2.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/myrockhill2/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rhbc2/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/myrockhill2/
- Twitter: https://x.com/myrockhill2
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@myrockhill2
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/rock-hill-baptist-church-ii-greenville?osq=rock+hill+baptist+church
- Other: https://www.matthewlongjr.com
