No More Kayaking in Church! (2024)

No More Kayaking in Church!

Flood damage in Spencer, Iowa, lies between Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Hugo according to the Red Cross. More than 75 percent of homes are damaged by flood or sewer backup. Two LCMC congregations suffered serious damage to our buildings. At Faith Lutheran, we had knee-deep water and sewer back-up. Trinity Lutheran had ten feet of water in its basem*nt and a week without electricity.

Flood Day
Saturday, June 22

My phone rang at 5:51 A.M. The County Emergency Management Director, a member of Faith, called to alert me that we could not have Men’s Bible Study that morning because the church parking lot was flooded. He was rescuing someone from a nearby ditch. There was no water in the church building, but overnight, flooding had reached levels no one had ever seen.

I pedaled my bike up to the church. US Highway 71 was blocked there, but vehicles drove through anyway, even though a car was stalled in the water. I rode back south to the river in the center of the city and discovered it was blocked. The Little Sioux River, instead of lazily winding many feet below the bridge, was roiling up against it.

I rode to help fill sandbags and found Faith members, from teenagers to 80-year-olds, straining their muscles. Pastor Eric Patten interrupted my sandbagging at 10:40 A.M. with a phone call. He had driven in behind the church building and was making his way toward the door. Once inside, he reported a foot of water. Twenty of us church members rushed to join him.

We plodded through cold, murky hip-deep water in the parking lot and found dark water in the building rising toward our knees. Our structure is a 300-foot by 100-foot former farm supply store on a slab. We rushed to move our sanctuary chairs onto the altar platform, but we were too late. We saved several pieces of handmade furniture, and then many books by moving them above the rising water. A few of our members skipped the drenching walk and kayaked across the parking lot and throughout the building.

Many of our members and their families had their basem*nts flooded, and in some of their homes, the first floor. One member awoke at 3:00 A.M. and heard his sump pump chugging nonstop. He moved his son and his bed above ground, along with many belongings, before the water engulfed the basem*nt. Another member was enjoying her Saturday morning coffee when she saw water coming in under her front door. She looked outside and discovered it was too late to drive away. Over the next hour and a half, her car flooded, and she moved as many things as she could from her first floor to her second floor. Her next step was onto her roof, where she waited for a rescue boat. At an emergency center, a mother and daughter asked for shoes for the barefoot girl. When did the girl last remember wearing her flip-flops? “When we were running across the roof of Casey’s” convenience store, she said.

Digging through Disaster
June 23 - July 6

The morning after the flood, Sunday, June 23, no one could drive across Spencer. Most roads in and out of the city were closed. Our worship director was stranded in her second-floor apartment without electricity, and her car was drowned. We gathered online to worship, with our previous worship director leading our singing from her mission program in Scotland.

On Monday afternoon, with the water receding, a few of us trudged through the flood to assess the inside of our church building. The water was gone, but there was 1/8 inch of slime over 30,000 square feet of floor. To avoid mold, we invited the congregation to join in gutting the building, beginning the next morning.

For two weeks, we lifted, cut, hammered, crowbarred, shoveled, power-washed, mopped and swept. At 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M., we stopped to pray.

Our congregation of brilliant craftsmen created a six-foot squeegee to attach to a skid loader and de-muck the floor, powered lights from a generator, and solved impossible problems.

Gone…are our worship chairs, our fellowship chairs, our office and classroom furniture, our kitchen cabinets, our carpeting from offices and classrooms, the bottom four feet of all our wallboard, and hundreds of books!

One week into cleanup, on Sunday, June 30, we invited members to join us at the church building at our regular worship time, simply to pray. Then we proceeded to the Clay County Fairgrounds to join Trinity Lutheran and other congregations in a community worship service.

Rebuilding from the Floor Up
July 7, 2024 - ?

The following Sunday, July 7, Faith Lutheran Church resumed Sunday morning worship in our disinfected, hollowed-out building. Our worship invitation these days is BYOC—Bring Your Own Chair. Lutherans understand the church as Christians gathered around Word and sacrament. So we gather…simply.

When the wood dries out in August, we will begin to rebuild. Pray for wisdom as we consider space usage and furnishings in the light of our mission: Inviting all people to worship. Come and worship. Go and work. Pray for wisdom and resources as we manage the costs of restoration.

We are deeply grateful to Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ for a grant from the Lutheran Disaster Assistance Fund!

The Lutheran Disaster Assistance Fund provides relief to victims of natural disasters. For more information or to make a donation, click here.

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