KERR COUNTY — The crowd that gathered in Louise Hays Park was a quiet one — a few hundred people sitting in lawn chairs arranged in rows like pews, most praying silently or in small groups and low voices.
David Payne stood facing them, his back to the Guadalupe River as it flowed calmly by.
Payne, senior pastor at Kerrville First United Methodist Church, led the attendees through a series of prayers: for those killed in the July 4 flood a year ago, for their families, and for a community in which everyone was “affected in some way.”
The meeting, dubbed Prayer in the Park, was a collaboration between local churches, aiming to bring people together during “a difficult week,” — the run up to first anniversary of the flood that tore through Kerr County last summer and killed 119 people.
But it was also a time for a prayer of gratitude, Payne said, for “an army of people who have come together” in Kerr County, bringing supplies and donations and volunteering their time “to work to bring recovery and wholeness.”
Much of that came from local churches, Payne said. “Your churches, your ministers, have been vital in the recovery and the progress that we have made.”
As Kerr County has worked to rebuild and recover over the past year, local churches have played a key role in that effort. offering spiritual and physical support, sending out volunteers and supplies and doling out millions of dollars.
Faith leaders said they’ve focused on figuring out where there are unmet needs, and how they can fill them — as Bert Baetz, rector at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church put it: “finding the gap and filling the gap.”
‘First line of defense’
In the days following the flood, dozens of aid groups, hundreds of state and federal responders and thousands of volunteers descended on Kerr County.
But in the midst of the disaster and in its immediate aftermath, the area’s churches were a critical lifeline for flood survivors and people who had nowhere else to go.
Churches were “the first line of defense,” said Payne, who chairs the emotional and spiritual care working group of Kerr Together, the local entity formed to coordinate flood response efforts.
“Before there was an organized recovery effort, before funds started flowing, churches were sheltering, feeding, picking up the gap, all of that kind of stuff,” he said. “And they have continued that.”
In western Kerr County, where the flooding struck first, two churches were on the front lines.
“It was a place where people came to evacuate initially, because it was high enough ground here,” said CA Martin, a coordinating trustee at Hunt United Methodist Church and chairman of its disaster relief effort. Then, he said, “we functioned as a central location for food, clothing, you name it. We were open 24 hours a day, for weeks, and basically the door was left open. If you need something, just come in here and find it.”
At Hunt Baptist Church, “every available inch of space” was full of supplies to hand out, said church member Ruth Johnson.
It kept coming, she said. “We’d leave in the evening thinking, ‘we’re wiped out of this one particular thing, what will we do tomorrow? ‘” she said. “And tomorrow, more would show up. God’s great provision.”
Churches across Kerr County moved quickly to organize relief efforts. Some had volunteer groups from across the country arriving; others were marshalling their own congregations.
First Presbyterian Church in Kerrville was a reunification center for Camp La Junta families, Senior Pastor Jasiel Hernandez Garcia said, as well as a temporary shelter for the Red Cross. In the months that followed, the church hosted volunteer groups for weeks at a time, and for a few months, the Small Business Administration operated an office on the church’s campus. The church is currently hosting the Ecumenical Center, a San Antonio organization providing free counseling.
After Notre Dame Catholic Church put out a call for donations, “we were kind of overwhelmed with the response we got so quickly,” said Wyatt Wentrcek, the church’s director of faith formation.
Church leaders turned an empty building on the church property into a distribution center. It’s still open a year later, being run by Catholic Charities of San Antonio.
Teams from the Churches of Christ Disaster Relief Effort arrived at the Riverside Church of Christ in Kerrville on July 6 with “an 18-wheeler’s worth of supplies,” said Pulpit Minister Chris Carrillo, including pallets of bleach, shovels and other materials for cleaning out flooded buildings. For the next month or so, another group, the Church of Christ Disaster Response Team, used the building to as a hub and as housing for volunteers.
In the first days after the flood, Kerrville Church of Christ was asked by local officials to house a first responder assistance center, becoming a hub for first responders for about six weeks, Senior Minister Scott Warner said.
“That kind of captured our hearts about how long this was going to last,” he said.
At Southern Oaks Church, Senior Pastor Joe Taylor said his daughter posted on social media about accepting donations early on July 4, and the posts quickly gained national attention. Within a few days, “every room, the foyer to the sanctuary, was covered up in donations,” he said.
Managing millions in donations
Alongside supplies and volunteers, money also poured into churches — more than they knew what to do with.
“There was not one class in seminary on disaster relief,” Taylor said. He was initially unsure how to manage $750,000 in donations that arrived in short order, an amount that ultimately climbed to more than $1.5 million.
Warner, whose church received about $972,000 in donations for flood relief, said the same.
“At first, it was, OK, this is great, when it was $50,000, $100,000,” he said. “When it reached half a million dollars, we were overwhelmed with trying to figure out how to use this.”
“I’m a minister, right? I haven’t been trained in how to handle million-dollar funds,” he said.
But while they weren’t used to disbursing donations of that scope, churches did have some advantages over other relief agencies: They could act quickly and nimbly. And that’s exactly what they did, setting up simple application processes and committees to dole out the money quickly.
First Presbyterian created an emergency assistance fund that started handing out money five days after the flood, Garcia said. The church distributed about $300,000 in the first six weeks.
While donations came from all over the country, a chunk of the relief funding came from the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, which used the churches as a way to get money into people’s hands.
“We as the Community Foundation are unable to give grants directly to individuals,” said CEO Austin Dickson. “So we felt it prudent to make grants to churches who were already helping people directly and could provide cash assistance.”
In the first 45 days after the flood, the foundation distributed $1,962,500 to 13 area churches to disburse as emergency grants, he said.
The money was earmarked for people affected by the flood, but churches had autonomy to decide how exactly to hand it out, Dickson said. “We trusted those grantees and churches to make fair and thorough decisions,” he said, and they were required to submit formal reports back to the foundation detailing how it was used.
Church leaders said they tried to make their internal processes as simple as possible for flood victims — seeking enough information to verify how they were affected and to identify their needs, without dragging them through too much red tape.
“We tried to have checks out by the next week, within seven days of their application,” Wentrcek said.
Some applicants were residents who lost their home or needed help replacing a flooded vehicle or medical equipment; others were struggling with ripple effects from the disaster, which reverberated throughout the community.
“It was really kind of a wide range,” Wentrcek said. Some applicants were people who worked cleaning houses and pools in Hunt, who were suddenly out of work. “Their home wasn’t affected but they went to zero income, we had a few people like that,” he said.
As of this week, Notre Dame had distributed $1,017,731, he said.
Warner said Kerrville Church of Christ has disbursed about $490,000 of its donations for housing and another $120,000 on neighborhood projects, including partnering with Southern Oaks to pay to repair damaged wells in two subdivisions.
“Where else does a Church of Christ and a Baptist church ever work together on anything?” Southern Oaks’ Taylor said. “That’s a miracle.”
Riverside Church of Christ received more than $2 million — much of which came from other Texas congregations, Carrillo said. Most of that went to pay contractors to rebuild more than 40 homes, he said.
Martin said Hunt United Methodist Church also received more than $1 million, including $250,000 from the Community Foundation.
The first grant from the organization was for $50,000. The church received more than 50 applications and distributed about $1,000 to each applicant to get it into people’s hands as quickly as possible. As more money came in, the church reopened its application process and received about 150 more requests, he said.
Churches were able to fill “unmet needs,” Garcia said, stepping in where people didn’t qualify for other programs or had exhausted other funding options. First Presbyterian received almost $650,000 in direct contributions, he said, and had distributed about $500,000 as of late May.
Requests are still coming in. The church just received a request to help pay a $7,200 bill for a new water pump and system, from a household that didn’t qualify for other aid programs, Garcia said.
‘The whole church gets behind it’
Bill Blackburn, the former mayor of Kerrville and a longtime Baptist minister, said it’s impossible to tally all the ways Kerr County churches have been involved in flood relief. In addition to financial support, they served meals, coordinated and housed volunteer groups and helped in other ways that went under the radar, he said.
“I think there is a spirit of cooperation that has served us very well,” he said.
Dickson said churches have also stepped in other ways to support the Community Foundation’s efforts.
First Presbyterian Church is administering the foundation’s temporary housing assistance program. The nonprofit has provided almost $1.5 million to the church for that effort, which is covering rent and utility payments for affected families for up to a year. There are currently 127 households in that program, Dickson said.
First Presbyterian is also one of three churches that received Community Foundation money to pay case managers, along with St. Peter’s Episcopal and Kerrville First United Methodist Church.
The foundation has funded 32 case managers to help guide people through rebuilding and navigating resources. While not all of those are based in a particular church, the ones who are have also rallied support from their congregations, Dickson said.
“Part of case management is about helping a family figure out what’s next, and then go and source what a family needs, whether that’s furniture or housing or mental health support, helping get school supplies or helping get somebody out to the house to test a well, just navigating life,” he said. “When the church itself is involved in case management, it’s like the whole church gets behind it.”
Case managers from St. Peter’s have worked with about 150 families, said Katherine Boyette, the church’s Help and Hope Coordinator, and about half of those cases are still active.
St. Peter’s has also set up a long-term presence in Hunt. The church put two trailers near the Hunt Store, one of which is used for regular meetings with community leaders to discuss needs. The other is dedicated to the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas, a San Antonio-based nonprofit that provides grief support for kids. Counselors are meeting there regularly with children from the Hunt School, Baetz said.
That’s an example of how churches can fill gaps, he said: not getting in the way of professionals, but helping facilitate their work.
The church also started weekly worship services in Hunt last summer, meeting for the first time under the pavilion in the Hunt Preservation Society’s Preservation Park on July 20. That “pop-up chapel” continued meeting there weekly until it got too cold, when they moved into the Hunt School, before returning outdoors earlier this year. “One thing led to another,” Baetz said, and some parishioners gifted an acre of land in Hunt, where the church plans to build a permanent chapel and keep a presence in west Kerr County.
‘Helping people be made whole’
As the first anniversary of the flood approaches, churches said the requests for financial help have slowed.
But they’ve shifted their focus to meeting some of the other needs, including an increased focus on supporting mental health and healing.
“There’s a lot of folks helping with rebuilding homes and replacing material things, and I think that’s vitally important,” said Warner, of Kerrville Church of Christ. “But we wanted to make sure we’re helping the helpers and helping people be made whole in their spirit, mind and heart.”
The church has partnered with counselors in both Kerr County and San Antonio to cover the costs of therapy for people affected by the flood. Some need help because their insurance won’t cover it, while others, especially those working as first responders, don’t want to go through their employers’ insurance out of fear that it might “prevent them from being fit to serve,” Warner said.
“We said, ‘just tell them we’ll cover it,’” he said. The providers send invoices directly to the church to pay, without any patient information, he said.
“We’ve probably sponsored about 60 different people to have therapy,” Warner said, and the church has set aside money to continue to pay for that. They also paid for local counselors to get additional trauma-specific training, he said.
“We want to invest long-term in this,” he said.
St. Peter’s is also funding recreation therapy efforts, including equine therapy for children and families, and fly fishing retreats, dubbed “Healing on the Fly.” The first retreat for men was held in May, and a second, for women, is scheduled for September, along with a songwriter’s retreat this fall, modeled after similar programs used for veterans coping with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“It’s therapeutic, it’s a way by which we can connect with others, and it’s a way to make amends with the river,” Baetz said.
Garcia said church leaders are also trying to alleviate stigma around seeking help, particularly in their own faith communities.
“For us, it’s to say, ‘yes, God is in control, and we have faith in God,’” he said, “and yet we must also find ways in which we can be healthy and talk to someone and seek resources.”
‘Real conversations’ about the disaster
Payne, the working group chairman, said churches are continuing to work with local leaders, mental health providers and others “to identify needs and holes, and trying to provide resources to our community.”
The group recently launched a county-wide campaign, “Y’all OK?” aimed at encouraging people to check in on their friends and neighbors and to seek out help.
“We’re just beginning to experience the mental health crisis in our community,” Payne said. “Especially as we near the anniversary date, that need is becoming more expressed.”
Warner said some of those challenges escalated with the return of summer rituals, which were once routine.
“The word ‘river’ and the word ‘camp’ used to be just really positive, joy-inducing words for us, and now they’re not,” he said. “Now, those words bring anxiety.”
“There’s still a lot of folks who have not been able to sit down and try to work through what they experienced,” he said. “Sooner or later, these things are going to need to be faced and worked through.”
As they try to help their congregations and the community recover from the flood’s trauma, church leaders are also having “real conversations” with people who are struggling to make sense of the natural disaster and why it happened, Payne said.
“I think people are looking for a real response, not a Hallmark card of, God makes everything OK,” he said. “This is beyond our understanding, but as far as being a Christian pastor, my faith in God tells me that even when I don’t understand things, He’s working for my good. So that’s where faith comes in.”
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