DON’T MIND THE MUD
In times of disaster, hardy Methodists march in to do God’s work
CONROE — The Rev. Scott Moore knows mud well.
He can eyeball a soggy field and sure-footedly find a way to cross it. From scattered, incomplete reports received from the scene of a natural disaster, he — and his United Methodist church colleagues — can assess the degree of need and work to effectively address it.
Moore, a one-time Beaumont policeman-turned-minister, is executive director of the Methodist church’s $1.4 million state-of-the-art emergency response center rising on high ground on the outskirts of Conroe.
Opening this fall, the cavernous metal structure will provide a central warehouse for heavy equipment and supplies, administrative offices and classrooms for training volunteers. It is a project of the denomination’s Houston-based Texas Annual Conference, a 700-church district stretching from Texarkana to Beaumont and west to College Station.
“Anytime we have a major humanitarian disaster, there’s a good possibility we will be there,” Moore said. “We’ve responded to hurricanes in Florida, Mississippi and Alabama; wildfires in New Mexico; flooding and tornadoes in Oklahoma. We sent 20 people to New York for Hurricane Sandy.”
Most major Houston-area faith groups offer solace and service to victims of whimsically destructive nature. Some provide money, food, clothes or household necessities. Southern Baptists are renowned for their prowess with chain saws. Methodists are experts at tarping roofs.
Earlier this summer as workers put the final touches on the Methodist command center, tens of thousands of Louisiana residents were driven from their homes by unprecedented floods.
East Texas Methodists immediately began collecting money for the displaced and awaited the call for volunteer clean up and repair teams.
“Theologically as Christians, the heart of our understanding of the gospel is to help anyone who needs assistance,” Moore said. “
... If it means patching a hole in a roof after a tornado or sitting and holding someone’s hand and letting them tell their story, that’s what we’re going to do.”
As a member of the United Methodists’ international Committee on Relief, the Texas Annual Conference’s cadre of 300 trained volunteers may respond to crises anywhere in the nation, said Diane McGehee, director of the conference’s Center for Missional Excellence.
“Over the last year, six areas in Texas were declared federal disaster areas,” she said. “Five of them were within the Texas Annual Conference.”
Conroe was chosen as the new center’s site, McGehee said, because it was deemed safely distant from the Gulf Coast. The command center will include an 8,000-squarefoot warehouse and 5,000-square-foot space for offices and classrooms.
Previously, Moore said, equipment, scattered across East Texas, sometimes was inaccessible in times of emergency.
Methodists, Moore said, are not firstresponders. Their role typically is that of secondwave relief workers.
Methodists, said McGehee, are the ones who make the scene with buckets and clean-up supplies.
Typical was Houston’s 2015 Memorial Day flood when a Meyerlandarea Methodist church becamew an operations center for Methodist and other faith-based volunteers aiding residents in the stricken neighborhood.
“We went door to door in apartment complexes offering assistance,” Moore said. “We helped people pack and move belongings to higher ground.”
When volunteers offered a teenage boy a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the youth burst into grateful tears. He hadn’t eaten in two days, he told the relief workers.
In addition to having boots on the ground, churches in the Houstonbased conference respond by opening their pocketbooks. During Hurricane Katrina, conference churches raised $2 million for victims; during Hurricane Rita, $50,000; during Hurricane Ike, $750,000.
Once roofs have been covered and watersaturated dry wall removed, Methodists settle in for the long haul.
Conference case managers help with filing insurance claims and loan applications and an array of post-disaster chores. At times, they aid victims in lobbying city governments for infrastructure improvements to minimize future flooding.
“Case managers are there every step of the way,” Moore said. “They’re there until everything has returned to the ‘new normal.’ Things may never get back to the normal folks knew before, but, through recovery work and advocacy, we can get to new normals.”
Such managers, he said, are still at work on the administrative aftermath of Houston’s 2015 and early 2016 floods. Recovery efforts, he said, can stretch for years.
Beyond disaster relief, McGehee’s Center for Missional Excellence oversees church advocacy on a host of troubling social issues. Classrooms at the Conroe facility will be used to educate volunteers on issues surrounding immigration, homelessness, human trafficking and criminal justice.
“That’s our vision, and we’re going to live into it,” she said. “Not only will we be prepared to deploy people in disaster situations, but we will train and equip churches to respond to the social and justice issues we’re called to address as people who follow Jesus.
“These are the things we care about, and, with all of us working, we will figure out a way through.”