Wynne pastor recalls what’s lost and what remains
a typical day, it takes Matt Carter about 7 minutes to walk from his home in Wynne to his place of employment: the city’s First United Methodist Church.
The church campus and its main building — constructed in 1960 and the home to up to 125 parishioners on a given Sunday — sit on the main drag through the town of roughly 8,300, located at 800 N. Falls Blvd.
A look to the left of the church would find another campus, this one belonging to Wynne High School.
Well, at least before March 31, 2023.
That day, a Friday, was not typical. It took Carter more than five hours to reach the church.
Slowing Carter down were the trees, debris and people needing help that were left behind by the F3 tornado that had ripped through town.
By the time Carter — head pastor of the church since 2019 — finally got to First Methodist, it was around 11 p.m.
“It was very quiet,” Carter recalled. “Everybody had shut down for the evening and a curfew was in place.”
Carter went through the building to retrieve some computers.
“But I just didn’t understand or realize the devastation until the next morning when I came through and saw just how bad it was,” Carter said.
The church’s main steeple no longer sat atop the structure. It had been sent crashing onto the church’s day school.
Almost all the windows in the building had been blown out.
The building to the left of the main hall was missing its front wall. On an exposed girder, someone named Robert Burnett had inscribed his name in paint and added the date of “8-10-76.”
It looked like a bomb had gone off.
Carter, originally from El Dorado, is familiar with the aftermath of tornadoes.
He worked for a company there that cleaned up after tornadoes, which occurred “on a regular basis.”
Carter knew friends whose homes had been victims of such storms.
However, said Carter, “This was the first time I’ve looked out my window and seen trees on my neighbors’ houses.”
In his roughly five years as lead pastor of First United Methodist Church, “it’s been one thing after another” for Carter. “I have not had what you would call a normal time here at all.”
Within six months after he arrived, so did covid.
At the same time, the United Methodist Church system was embroiled in a schism that has resulted in roughly one-fourth of churches voting to disaffiliate over dissatisfaction with the denomination’s handling of issues such as same-sex marriage and the ordination of gay clergy.
“The stuff that’s going on in the Methodist Church as a whole, we’ve got to weather that together,” Carter said. Then came the tornado. At some point in the past year, a small wooden cross was erected atop two bricks on the sidewalk leading up to the sanctuary.
A message was on it, one that reflected what the church and town had experienced, but contrasted with what the Methodist denomination was going through.
On the spine, “United We Stand Together” had been written.
On the arms was the date of the tornado.
Twelve months later, Carter’s congregation still hasn’t returned to 800 Falls Blvd. and rebuilding hasn’t yet begun, partially due to “ridiculous issues” with insurance.
“I guess that’s the nature of it when things like this happen,” Carter said. “Really, just getting groups in to assess the realistic part of the damage and the realistic rebuild has been what’s taken so long. We’ve had a contractor on hand since two days after the storm. Just waiting to get green lights and verifications and things like that has been a little bit more challenging than we had anticipated.”
When it actually does get underway, it could be a fourto five-year project.
“We’ve got one building that if we can get the green light to go ahead to start on it we could be back in it in six, seven months and start having church there while the rest of it is being built,” Carter said.
“But we’ve just got to get to that point first.”
In the meantime, the church needed a new home.
They found it when the Knights of Columbus Hall, located in a building behind a local Catholic church, allowed the Methodists to use it.
“So they opened it up and gave us basically free run of the place,” Carter said. “They canceled all their stuff that they have going on to just allow us to be able to go in there and set up and have church and do our things. It’s been good having that as a resource. And it’s been good creating some connections and relationships with people.”
A year after the tornado, Carter acknowledges that his congregation is “very, very fortunate.”
The destroyed church is “just a building.”
“Wynne lost four residents in the storm,” Carter added, “but we didn’t have any church members pass away as a result of the storm. So even though we lost a building, that’s all it was … a building. It hasn’t affected our mission. It hasn’t affected the job that we’ve been called to do.”