Through Fire and Flood

(based on text from the 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study)

Midday on January 11, 2002, West Side Presbyterian Church in Ridgewood, New Jersey, caught fire. Flames swept through the 90-year-old sanctuary, and within two hours the entire structure was destroyed. The adjacent, recently renovated Christian education building was damaged by smoke that left the church offices uninhabitable for months.

The fire elicited a range of emotions in the congregation of nearly 1,500 members — shock, horror, anguish, among others. But most profoundly, the congregation experienced a coming together. As Deborah Holden-Holloway, associate minister of music, remarked to the press: “The church is fine. It’s the building that’s toast.”

And the church was fine. All of the programs with the exception of Monday evening meals (due to lack of a kitchen) continued. Worship was held in a public middle school and a Catholic high school. Committee meetings and small groups met in people’s homes. Eleven youth and adult choirs rehearsed in nearby churches. Church offices were established offsite for a year, compliments of a national corporation. Christian educators toted their supplies in plastic bins from location to location. At one point, the congregation and staff were meeting in 17 different locations.

The devastation of that January fire left a burning in the hearts of its members that motivated empathy and compassion. The experience of the fire required West Side to push beyond its borders and support others in their crises. They tithed the first funds raised for the rebuilding of their devastated sanctuary toward mission. New church development projects in the Presbytery of the Palisades received $25,000 of West Side’s initial giving. Not once did the church waver in its annual mission pledge to the connectional church. The experience compelled them to support others in their crises, and they developed a strategic platform for identifying mission priorities.

It was perhaps their experience of being without a church home that motivated them to reach out in Christian love with support for those who lost their homes in hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In January 2006, West Side Presbyterian Church led 23 members from four congregations in the presbytery on a mission trip in New Orleans through the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance volunteer program. Their work was primarily with the members of Lakeview and Berean Presbyterian churches: the two congregations that the Presbytery of the Palisades has committed to support in the coming years of recovery. The work team completely gutted five homes and took a 10-room nursery school down to its studs. The workers also moved salvaged household items from church members’ homes.

It was important for the work team members to understand from the start that to be true ministers of compassion in this extraordinary ordeal, they must show unconditional respect, care and love.  These families in New Orleans opened their homes to the volunteers, regardless of the condition of their property. They entrusted their belongings to these Christian brothers and sisters in a most intimate way. It was the volunteers’ charge to respect as sacred the treasures that held special meaning and hand them over to the people who owned them — knowing that some things just have to be saved, at least for a while. And who better would understand the importance of items salvaged from a catastrophe than those who had experienced the destruction of their own church property?

The day before Easter in 2006, a beautiful basket of flowers from Lakeview Presbyterian Church in New Orleans was delivered to West Side’s new church home. “We were very moved,” writes the Rev. Beverly Dempsey, interim associate pastor of parish life, “knowing that this gift was sent by those who had lost nearly everything after Hurricane Katrina a few months before. This act of caring helped affirm for us the strength of our connectional church.”

The next day, Easter Sunday, marked West Side’s rising from the ashes as the congregation worshiped at home again for the first time in over four years. Through their fiery ordeal and their commitment to reach out to others in the midst of struggle, they rediscovered what it means to be the church: people of God who care for one another and provide for one another, people who give during times of affliction and times of abundance, people for whom tragedy will not overwhelm joy and hope.

To read this story in its entirety, look to the color section of the 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study. Copies of the color section insert alone can be ordered using item #1571530797. Beverly Dempsey wrote the color section story from which this article was taken. She serves West Side Presbyterian Church in Ridgewood, New Jersey. For more information about the 2007 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study and the 2007 Children’s Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, contact the editor, Billie Healy, at (888) 728-7228, x5689, or via the Mission Yearbook Web site.