After a hurricane, one of the first reactions is, “Look at this mess! Do something, fix it.” And a reaction that takes longer is, “I might not be able to fix this on my own after all.”
In the months since Florida hit the four-fecta — hammered by four hurricanes in just six weeks — Presbyterians in the affected areas have learned some lessons. They have learned to measure progress by standing atop a highway overpass and counting how many blue tarps still are covering roofs. They understand what it means to an elderly church member when a Presbyterian comes knocking on the door — if there is still a door — to check on them and find out what they need.
They have felt the power of worshipping in a church parking lot, grateful to be together and alive and to have the chance to sing again to God, “our help in ages past.”
They understand what a “connectional church” means when a check arrives from Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, or a work team from a church far away volunteers to come down with carpenters and roofers and strong young backs.
They’ve learned to think of “recovery” not in days or weeks, but long months, possibly even years.
“Boy, we got clobbered — it’s unbelievable,” said Jim Kirk, who is associate pastor at Moorings church in Naples and co-chair of Peace River presbytery’s hurricane response task force.
Kirk also is a national volunteer for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance — traveling to other parts of the country where communities are hard-hit by storms and fires and floods — and he said, “this disaster is unprecedented in terms of the direct impact on the Presbyterian family” in the United States. In this case, for some reason, lots of Presbyterians were in harm’s way.
And Presbyterians have been generous too: so far, donations have allowed Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to provide $275,500 to about 30 affected congregations, to help with such things as reconstruction and insurance deductibles, and to give $346,000 to help individuals who suffered damage because of the storms.
Among the hardest hit: First church in Punta Gorda, near the west coast of Florida, whose building was destroyed by Hurricane Charley; Chapel By The Sea on Fort Myers Beach, which suffered significant wind and water damage; and First church in Port Charlotte, whose pastor, Russ Hickman, also, quite literally, saw his home take a direct hit — he was standing inside with his wife when it happened.
The recovery will involve a long process of enforced patience — in many cases the insurance payments will be too low to cover rebuilding costs, and construction companies, if they call back at all, are taking big deposits for work they’ll do months from now.
And those affected are learning, step-by-step, how a congregation recovers from a trauma or natural disaster. In other places, for other Presbyterians, it’s been flooding or fire or tornadoes. In Florida, this time, it was hurricanes. And people are discovering that rebuilding involves money and shingles and drywall — but, just as important, a spiritual rebuilding as well.
The first time the Punta Gorda congregation worshipped after Charley, in a tent in the parking lot, “that was very emotional,” Pastor Steve Mock said. “That was the first time we’d gathered together as a congregation. It was just so great to see everyone. The emphasis of my preaching since Charley has been hope, that God is with us and God will carry us into a better future than we had before.”
Graham Hart, executive presbyter in Peace River, said: “When I first went out to the Punta Gorda church and saw — it looked like someone put dynamite on the corners and it imploded. I had tears for that congregation and its pastor, that sense of loss.”
But when Hart returned that Sunday for worship, and heard people praising God outside, under the skies, he thought, “to me that’s what it’s about, that as the church we’re not abandoned, God’s with us. That’s what the Brief Statement of Faith affirms, that in life and death we belong to God. There are no guarantees, other than we’re not alone in this.”
There have been, in the aftermath, some amazing stories. One congregation had its pews damaged by water during Frances; the pews were taken to a warehouse for repairs. Then Jeanne came along and took the roof off the warehouse and finished off the pews, said Larry Graham-Johnson, a pastor who involved with the rebuilding effort in Tropical Florida presbytery.
A family from Indian River church in Fort Pierce went out to buy a generator because the electricity was off. Then “the generator exploded and burned their house to the ground, and their two cats with it,” Graham-Johnson said.
For congregations, the weeks following the hurricanes have brought complicated questions and issues of survival. Some are facing significant debt — for example, Mock said rebuilding his destroyed church in Punta Gorda will cost $500,000 to $800,000 more than insurance will pay.
In some cases, congregations were unable to worship directly after the hurricane hits, which meant there was no weekly collection — no money coming in. They’ve seen their members scattered, living in temporary housing or with relatives. They’re trying to conduct capital campaigns as people face inflated construction costs to rebuild their own homes. Some people have said they’re fed up — they’ve had enough of Florida storms, they don’t want to stay.
“People aren’t coming back,” Mock said. “We’re a retiree church . . . We have seasonal people who used to be very active in support of this church who won’t be coming back,” at least not this year. The congregation, which is worshipping in the fellowship hall of a nearby church, now is drawing about 120 people to Sunday worship, compared to about 180 before Charley.
Congregations that had stresses or tension before the storms may find that the crisis brings those points of difficulty straight to the top, said Laurie Kraus, a pastor from Miami who’s active in the relief effort in Tropical Florida presbytery and is a national volunteer with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance.
There can be questions of survival — to rebuild in the same place or move, go it alone or try to merge with another congregation?
For some congregations, as difficult as things have been, the recovery has brought new beginnings too — a chance to do something different.
At Punta Gorda, they’re working to keep morale up — planning, for example, to offer a “40 Days of Purpose” program during Lent “to draw people closer to God and to one another,” Mock said.
As hard as it’s been, “God has been awesome through this whole experience and provided for us in ways that have been wonderful,” he said. “I looked at the church after the initial shock and thought, `It looks like we’re going to get a new building whether we wanted it or not.’ There’s a deeper affection and love for one another because we’ve gone through a common experience. The mutual support is even better than it was before.”
At Peace church in Stuart, Frances knocked shingles off the roof and “the water poured in,” said Pastor James Bailey. They lost the carpeting, the pews and the drywall; the sanctuary now is just concrete and wood. The water stood two inches deep in the fellowship hall, but the church was lucky to get a general contractor right away and get the fellowship hall roof fixed, so has been worshipping there ever since.
Bailey doesn’t preach in a robe these days — just a shirt and a tie. Instead of one big service in the sanctuary, the congregation is split between two smaller ones in the fellowship hall (they used to wait to start a second service until the snowbirds — the winter retirees — poured in.) But the congregation has worshiped every Sunday except for the ones right after Frances and Jeanne.
They’re planning to return to the sanctuary Easter Sunday, “kind of a symbolic new birth and regeneration, the idea of starting anew,” Bailey said. “That’s our prayer.”
Bailey knows exactly how difficult this hurricane has been for folks: his home, 20 miles away in Port Saint Lucie, was wrecked. It still doesn’t have a roof; in places the drywall has crumbled and the ceiling collapsed.
“Every time it rains, you worry about the water coming in,” Bailey said. “It’s depressing . . . I come to church and there’s plastic over the sanctuary. I go home and there’s a blue tarp. There’s no relief psychologically. My poor wife!”
But Bailey also has sensed that, with maybe 200 instead of 400 people in worship because of the split into two services, it feels more intimate. People seem more willing to mention prayer concerns, and the services feel informal and welcoming. Only a few families, including his, had their homes damaged, “which I thank the Lord for.”
Immediately after the hurricane, Bailey preached about difficult times, reminding people that “the sunshine and the rain descend on us all, whether we’re Christians or not, and tragedies are part of life.”
Then, before long, he went straight back to the lectionary, trying through Thanksgiving, Advent and Christmas to keep things as normal as possible.
People in Florida also are redefining what “normal” means for them.
Before last fall, “people had become fairly complacent down here,” Kirk said. “Andrew was the last one of great significance to hit us and that was over 10 years ago.” But after Charley landed, that changed.
Charley wasn’t expected to hit where it did — it was expected to make land near Tampa Bay, but took a jog to the east instead and intensified. “It really caught people by surprise, and many people didn’t have a chance to evacuate” or if they did they went to the wrong places, “evacuating right into the path,” Kirk said.
Then, with more hurricanes on the horizon, “there was a lot of anxiety over the next storms,” he said. “In a lot of ways people were more anxious for Jeanne and Frances and Ivan than they were for Charley. All of a sudden they realized what a major hurricane can do. It came one after the other. People didn’t know what to do. People were almost emotionally paralyzed, (wondering) `Do we stay, do we go, do we board up, do we seek shelter?’ “ And “almost all the storms seemed to come on weekends,” disrupting worship life.
At first, “it’s a survival mentality,” Graham-Johnson said. “First you try to find out what you’ve got left, how badly you’ve been damaged. Then you begin to realize you’re hungry and you’re thirsty, and there are no restaurants and the supermarkets are closed. And then you realize why people tell you to have three days of water and food in your home” before the storm hits.
Immediately after a hurricane, people are shocked at the damage and overwhelmed, “everything is urgent, everything is overwhelming . . . and everyone thinks pragmatic right away,” Hart said. “There’s just so much pragmatic nuts and bolts recovery stuff that has to happen, from the cleanup to roof repair to families with housing needs. That’s where the government works extremely well in high gear and the first response teams. I think the tendency for people is to keep in that mode.”
But with time comes recognition, Hart said, that even with hard work and construction crews, things won’t ever go back to being just as they were. One person told him that “it’s helping people get back to a new normal” — the old “normal” is gone — and coming to terms with what the new reality will be.
In a crisis, pastors tend to push themselves hard, to feel responsible for everything. But “at a certain point, spiritually, you’ve got to take a time out,” Hart said. “Lots of folks who were affected didn’t really understand that,” although he’s encouraged pastors to take some time off (others have offered use of their condos at the beach so pastors could take a break, and retired pastors have volunteered to help with pastoral care or preaching.)
The presbytery has provided opportunities for what Hart calls “redemptive storytelling” — a chance to talk honestly about what happened, to speak from the heart about what the highs and lows have been.
The congregations and presbyteries have learned “trauma tips” that might be helpful for others to know too. For example, Hart said one of his first priorities after Charley was to touch base with every pastor in Peace River. But the phones weren’t working, and he quickly discovered that many of the addresses the presbytery had on file for pastors were their church addresses — they had no home addresses or cell phone numbers.
Once the pastors were found, presbyteries used church directories to send deacons and Stephen ministers door-to-door to talk to folks — touching base, finding out what the storm had done to them and what their needs were.
Peace River presbytery has hired Graham-Johnson as a rebuilding coordinator for the long-term — he’s a pastor and a veteran of the Andrew rebuilding effort, and will coordinate rebuilding work for individuals. The damage from Andrew was more concentrated, he said — a clear path of amazing destruction. But the impact of the 2004 hurricanes was more scattered, with pockets of damage spread all over Florida, and the recovery will require what Laurie Kraus, a pastor who’s also involved in the recovery work, described as “a strong core of energy.”
The repeated battering kept the hurricane shutters up and people stuck in the emergency phase longer, Kraus said. Now, people are recognizing that recovery takes time and resources — not just physical ones, but emotional, spiritual and financial support as well. For some people, Graham-Johnson said, it’s difficult to admit just how hard it’s been.
“I’ve seen several congregations where they’re still in the same way they were the day after Jeanne, with the exception that they’ve cleaned the branches off the yard,” he said. “People are hurt. There’s a certain depression, whatever it is — a lack of motivation. It’s like any grieving process. You’ve got to stop denying that you got hurt and really own up to the fact that `Yeah, this hurt’ “ and that you need some help to heal.
Kraus said Christians come to realize that “our life, our congregation, our building is in crisis now” and “we can’t really go back to the way it was.” And some begin to ask: “What’s the opportunity to go in a new direction? What’s the sense of loss and out-of-controlness doing to us spiritually?” Along with being sad and disoriented and exhausted, “how can I open myself to it?”
For Floridians, there’s also the recognition that — as unusual as last fall’s cluster of hurricanes was — next summer will bring with it the start of another hurricane season and the potential for more trouble. Some people take it in stride — if you live in Florida, they say, you know there will be hurricanes (“It beats the snow,” one pastor said.). But others will start the season out more fearful than before.
By then, some homes damaged this time around still won’t be repaired. “Can you imagine going into next year’s hurricane season with nothing between you and the elements but a blue tarp?” Kirk asked. “It doesn’t even take a tropical storm, just a good old Florida thunderstorm,” to do more damage then.
Whatever happens, though, Presbyterians are promising they will be there to help.
What’s still needed? Prayers, work teams, and especially money for rebuilding — that’s what Presbyterians in other places can give. Kraus said some conservative churches in Florida that had been skeptical about the national church have seen firsthand the value of being connected.
“God hasn’t abandoned us, the church hasn’t abandoned us,” Graham-Johnson said. “If it took 20 years, we’d be here.”
