Five months after Hurricane Helene, Black Mountain Presbyterian Church continues providing recovery and relief
The church continues to answer its mission statement: ‘Has everyone been fed?’
In late September, Hurricane Helene swept across the southeastern United States and brought unprecedented devastation to the mountain communities of western North Carolina and elsewhere. Black Mountain Presbyterian Church found itself the hub of a massive disaster relief effort, providing a staging ground for recovery teams and serving tens of thousands of meals, just days after unveiling the church’s new mission statement — or question, rather: Has everyone been fed?
Five months later, much of the world has moved on to more recent disasters, more current events, and the threat of new crises. But for those who bore the brunt of Helene’s impact, recovery and rebuilding continues to be a slowly unfolding, daily reality. And while the day-to-day work has evolved, Black Mountain Presbyterian Church continues to minister in the aftermath.
On Sunday, Feb. 2, Kitty Fouche, a church member, offered an update on the church’s relief efforts during a congregational meeting. Her report was later shared on the church’s Facebook page. As of the report, Fouche said the church had received funds in support of relief efforts from 4,558 donors from all 50 states and the District of Columbia totaling $2,870,632.
“People from states who are well acquainted with hurricanes responded, like Louisiana, who donated a collective $21,000, and Florida, who gave $166,000,” Fouche reported. “Residents from California, not knowing what lay ahead for them, donated just shy of $284,000.”
In fact, the Rev. Mary Katherine Robinson, the church’s pastor and head of staff, shared that the largest single donation — $250,000 —came from a church in San Diego. A member there had lived through the devastation of the 2004 wildfires there and wanted to support other churches recovering from natural disasters.
Reflecting on how the church first became so involved in relief efforts, Robinson noted its strategic location. The church sits on the edge of downtown Black Mountain, across the street from the fire station and the police station. That street also leads to Montreat Conference Center and Montreat College.
Since all the emergency personnel were operating nearby, the church became the best hope for getting any cell service. Once church staff and members were able to leave their homes, they came to the church and began offering cold water from their melting ice machine, then grilled frozen hot dogs on the church’s propane-powered grills. Others eventually brought food from their own thawing freezers.
“We would allow people from the community to come in — some people we didn’t even know — but they showed up and they wanted to help … some of the people that I don’t have the same views as politically, socially,” Robinson said. “It just took an opening of our heart to allow these people to come in. And it’s transformed their life as well.”
An abundance perspective
Robinson explained that she felt her role as head pastor in those early days was to remind everyone to approach the situation from the perspective of abundance, trusting that there was enough for everyone. Robinson credited her family and her religious teachers like the Rev. Dr. Shirley Guthrie and Dr. Walter Brueggemann with instilling such trust in abundance in her.
“I grew up in a family that really shaped me to look through the lens of abundance and that everybody has gifts to share and we all can share those gifts with the people that are hurting right now,” she said.
For days, the church fed hundreds of people. It housed first responders and collected and distributed supplies. As the operation grew, Black Mountain Presbyterian Church partnered with Montreat for additional storage and with a local restaurant called the Railyard for serving meals.
In the first weeks after the storm, the work was around the clock. Entire families of church members showed up to volunteer. So did countless older members. A slew of young adults began getting involved by day three.
Robinson said they had daily morning and afternoon meetings to coordinate their plans for the day. One volunteer kept a list of supplies on hand and what was still needed or no longer needed. The situation shifted daily, and the church shifted its efforts to match.
Black Mountain Presbyterian Church’s associate pastor, the Rev. David Carter Florence, explained that they tried to discern what they could do that was traditionally pastoral work alongside being a distribution center and base for relief efforts. In the end, they tried to do it all.
“Not many people wanted to talk in a separate way — it happened on the fly,” he said. “So really being engaged in these other modes was a safer way to talk about the trauma and grief.”
Over time, the needs of the community evolved. Rather than immediate supplies, people needed cash support to cover expenses like rent, car payments, utilities and medical care.
Once the first responders left, the focus turned more fully toward local businesses and community services that had been displaced and needed a way to resume operations. The church prioritized reopening its playground — which had been closed due to a fallen tree — so that its weekday school could reopen. They also took in a Montessori school whose property wasn’t usable. The Black Mountain Counseling Center began to operate out of the church house.
After five or six weeks, local restaurants reopened and needed customers. The lines for meals grew smaller.
Meanwhile, Robinson and Carter Florence discerned that the community was moving into the grief and disillusionment stage of recovery. They began to talk more openly about the storm with people and preached about it in their sermons.
“Once people started coming back — once the emergency was over — they wanted us to be church,” Robinson said. Room by room, they worked to restore the church to its primary functions.
Young Adult Service Corps forms
At the same time, the wider community was still engaged on the slow and arduous work of recovery and rebuilding, and still in need of tangible support. Recognizing this, the church organized the Young Adult Service Corps, hiring several of the young adults who had been volunteering since the early days after the storm to continue hands-on recovery efforts and coordination on a day-to-day basis.
Jacob Churchman was hired as the lead of that team, though he resisted the title of boss. Churchman is a 24-year-old graduate of the University of Alabama Birmingham’s engineering program. Prior to Hurricane Helene, he was working remotely for a solar panel company. He isn’t a member of Black Mountain Presbyterian Church — he actually attends the Episcopal church down the street. However, his mother is Black Mountain Presbyterian Church’s bookkeeper, and that connected him to the church’s efforts.
Unable to do his job in the aftermath of the storm, Churchman committed himself to engaging in the work that Black Mountain Presbyterian Church was doing from the earliest days. He explained that his engineering background trained him to see the needs and solutions systematically and to recognize how everything needed to be organized.
“I’ve always been someone naturally motivated to lead,” Churchman said. “So over that first week, I started to point fingers and say, ‘Can you do this and you do this?’ I saw gaps that needed to be filled.”
People kept coming back to him, asking what they could do next. And Churchman kept finding answers. Eventually, the Young Adult Service Corps was formed in late November out of dual desires to support young people in the community like him — many of whom had lost their jobs after the storm — and continue providing disaster relief support while the church staff returned to its regular work. Now they provide about 150 hours of relief work per week. Their efforts are funded through May.
A lot of their time is spent inventorying supplies and coordinating with other organizations to get those supplies into the hands of the people that need them. The work feels different — perhaps a little less urgent in some ways — than it did at the beginning, but the needs are still there and the team is determined to be as useful as they can be.
Robinson, Carter Florence, and Churchman were all quick to emphasize that the needs in the wake of a disaster such as this one are varied, complex and contextual.
“Everyone processes at their own time and differently,” Robinson observed, speaking about how they’ve sought to minister to the congregation. “And you can’t force anyone to grieve.”
Initially, Carter Florence said, it felt almost like they couldn’t discuss the storm too directly, while now it sometimes feels like they talk about it too much.
“And yet, it’s still present. It’s still with us,” he said, acknowledging that rebuilding and recovery will take years and years.
Ministering to a diverse community
The community includes a lot of socioeconomic diversity. While many in and near to town are fairly affluent, the town is surrounded by less affluent communities like those in the Swannanoa Valley, as well as rural and isolated mountain families who experience significant ongoing poverty.
Pre-existing realities of such poverty have made recovering from the storm much more complicated, Robinson said. She explained that some in the community lost their homes, and now have to use funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other resources simply to clean up and remove their destroyed property, with no support left to build a new home.
Appalachian culture is also marked by a strong sense of pride and privacy, which has made some resistant to offers of support from outsiders. Carter Florence praised the individuals from the church’s Young Adult Service Corps for their commitment to showing up for these families and respecting their pride and privacy while trying to earn trust.
Churchman feels that their relationship-building is aided by the fact that they are connected to a church while not being explicitly religious themselves. They have also worked alongside others who share more in common in terms of race and background with some of the families they are helping, which allowed them to establish more trust and understanding.
Another group that experienced Hurricane Helene and its aftermath through a unique lens are those Robinson referred to as climate refugees. During the Covid pandemic, the area saw an influx of new residents from California who were hoping to settle in an area not as at risk from the sort of destruction they had experienced from wildfires in the West. At least one individual relocated to western North Carolina from the South Pacific, hoping to be free from storms. Now, these newcomers are experiencing the kind of natural disaster that no one in the area expected to see.
While Robinson and Carter Florence agree that there is no one narrative for Helene’s impact on Black Mountain and the surrounding area, there is a shared sense that they are forever changed.
A community volunteer who managed the church’s response logistics in the first weeks after the storm has committed himself to doing whatever he can to make sure that Appalachian families aren’t forced out of their home. He now works as the lead contractor for the Fuller Center for Housing, which is based in Americus, Georgia, and has groups coming into western North Carolina.
Churchman and his fellow Service Corps members are looking to their own futures and what comes after this. In fact, the church recently hired someone to help them in this discernment effort as they reflect on and try to make sense of their experiences with the storm and all that followed.
Churchman recently accepted a new job working for a disaster rebuilding company, where he’ll be able to do the construction and project management work he feels drawn to while still being able to help others.
Robinson and Carter Florence look to the ongoing work of ministering to their congregation and town while giving thanks for a deepened sense of connection within their community and beyond.
“We are so grateful for the ways in which other Presbyterian churches have responded to the need and the disaster here,” Robinson said. “It has helped me to really see the nature of the connectional church. It’s hard for us sometimes to be connectional, but in times of need and disaster, how beautiful it is!”
Carter Florence expressed appreciation for the boundary-crossing solidarity shared among those living in the region, noting that they used “all of their geographic reach to be community.”
“We crossed denominational lines, political lines, to serve one another and serve our neighbors together and stay focused on what’s right in front of us,” he said. “In the midst of all the political turmoil, there’s hope in just service.”
He encouraged any churches struggling with a sense of stagnation or questioning their purpose to reconsider the words of Matthew 25.
“If we look back to Matthew 25 and really settle in on that — well, of course there’s plenty right in front of us that will revive a sense of living the gospel,” Carter Florence said. “It’s a way to live.”
As for the people of Black Mountain Presbyterian Church, they remain as committed as ever to the “mission question” they embraced and then embodied right as Hurricane Helene hit.
“Has everyone been fed?” Kitty Fouche asked again as she closed her report to the congregation. “No,” she answered. “Feeding is an ongoing necessity. We can’t stop. Thank you to all our partners in Christ’s service.”
Read another Presbyterian News Service account of Black Mountain Presbyterian Church’s hurricane recovery ministry here.
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