The Bethel congregation, which has about 40 members, worships in a small white sanctuary perched on a corner in a residential neighborhood of Gainesville, a city of about 40,000 people an hour’s drive northeast of Atlanta. The African Methodist Episcopal denomination was one of the first Protestant churches created by black people, and has several thousand congregations around the country.

The Rev. Dr. Michelle Rizer-Pool, Bethel’s pastor, said that she went to the church to pray as soon as she heard of the plot last week. And on Sunday, she said, she comforted her congregation, who were stunned and hurt by the news.

“I tried to let them know, let us not be afraid,” she said, adding that she sought to impress upon them that “God is with us.”

The plot has been an unwelcome reminder of the massacre on June 17, 2015, at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, the denomination’s oldest congregation in the Deep South and one with a rich two-century history of resisting slavery and supporting the civil rights movement.

In that attack, a 21-year-old white man fueled by racial hatred sat through Bible study and then opened fire, killing nine people. The gunman, who was condemned to death by a federal jury in 2017, wrote in a jailhouse manifesto that he “would rather live in prison knowing I took action for my race than live with the torture of sitting idle.”

Law enforcement officials have said they believe that the Charleston attack, which rattled the nation, has incited would-be imitators, like a 29-year-old South Carolina man in 2017 who told an undercover federal agent, from whom he was buying a handgun, that he had plans inspired by the Charleston gunman.