First Christian Church keeps the faith
Published 11:52 am Tuesday, December 12, 2017
The marquee in front of First Christian Church tells a lot about the congregation inside – “I will never leave you nor forsake you, God.”
The church, 5856 Ninth Ave., is located less than a mile from the Robert A. Bob Bowers Civic Center where rescued residents were forced from their safe haven by the catastrophic flooding of Tropical Storm Harvey.
The spacious church facility; about 32,000 square foot in size, lost a lot but its congregation of about 90 people pulled together and helped community members in need during their own time of distress. They’ve also had some help from national organizations and volunteers but the work is far from over.
A white board inside the gym tells some of their story where members of Poured Out Ministries, which is affiliated with The Wesleyan Church, penned the names of their hometown.
“From east coast to west coast and all between and we’re not sure that everybody signed the board,” The Rev. Scott Wallace, senior pastor at First Christian Church, said.
Poured Out members brought in teams which generally stayed a week at a time and went out into the community pulling out wet sheetrock and mucking homes and more. When they could they did work at the church that hosted them, sleeping on cots in a makeshift dormitories.
Wallace, along with Thad Borne, a board chairman for the church, walked past Joann Richards, administrative assistant who was in the process of making lunch for the volunteers in the kitchen. The men noted the kitchen sink area they jokingly call Frankenstein because it was pieced together with scrap materials. The Formica counter and sink was salvaged from before the flood, cabinets came from the Sunday School area and the ends of the cabinets came from wood from Wallace’s office.
The gym is filled with various church storage items and tables and chairs where volunteers dine. Act 1 Scene 1, a local theater group, is helping out to repair the gym walls where the sheetrock was damaged.
A long hall in another section of the church complex shows some of the damage, some of the repairs and a lot left to do.
“The walls from four-foot on down had to be torn out,” Borne said.
Wallace stands near one of the rooms and flips through photos on his cell phone chronicling what he saw when he was able to make it back in after the late August disaster. Debris lines from the water and muck stuck to bricks and walls, a room where long cafeteria style tables had floated and landed in a pile of sorts and a library filled with books that could not be salvaged.
A group of professionals is set to arrive and spend about a week doing sheetrock work.
The tour of the buildings led through what was the main chapel area. All of the pews are gone, tossed out due to the dirty floodwaters that entered the church. Some of the altar is still intact but the irreplaceable pipe organ was lost leaving only the top pipes up high on the wall. Wallace said a potential buyer for the top pipes has contacted them.
“When we first came back we held service in the garage. It was hot,” Borne said as he moved down the hall. “Later we moved services to the fellowship hall.”
The fellowship hall, which isn’t as large as the sanctuary area, is filled with chairs and an altar. A few blankets lay across the chairs and a man was in the front of the area mopping near a Christmas tree. At another area of the room- where it attaches to the kitchen, is a cardboard door with homemade handle. Plastic covers places where windows once were, blue painters tape keeping it in place.
A man with Aqua One, a professional mitigation service, walked through and greeted people. Wallace explained that the company had done some work at the church and the man had come back to work as a volunteer.
“Fifteen (church) members were flooded out, me included,” Borne said. “When I’m not here I’m home working on my house.”
The devastation of the catastrophic flooding has not caused church members to lose faith though.
For Wallace, it led to prioritizing. For Borne, it reinforced his faith.
“When you look at what God said, that he would not use water to destroy the world again, we’re not worried about the rest of this, it’s just stuff,” Borne said. “We changed the place we worship and keep on.”