Los Angeles has had wildfires before, but residents have never seen anything like the wildfires rolling through their city now, burning through brush and buildings and leveling whole neighborhoods. It’s the worst destruction in local history.
But the sight of block after block of destroyed homes stings with familiarity for residents of Paradise, California, whose community similarly went up in flames in the 2018 Camp Fire.
Pastors there know the grief of such widespread, incomprehensible devastation—and the challenges of rebuilding.
“The loss of your home and community in basically a few hours—every aspect, all at once—you go through the mourning process,” said Samuel Walker, a pastor in Paradise who lost five congregants and his home when the town caught fire six years ago. “You don’t realize, ‘Why is this so hard?’ It’s because you’re mourning the loss of so many things all at once.”
Today, hundreds of miles south, 100-mile-per-hour winds are whipping up flames around LA, with the Palisades Fire spreading to the coast, the Hurst and Kenneth fires igniting northwest of the city, and the Eaton Fire burning near Altadena and Pasadena to the east.
Since Tuesday, the fires have destroyed entire blocks of homes, businesses, and churches—more than 10,000 structures so far. People have scratchy throats from breathing in smoke, and evacuation orders are continually shifting. At least seven people have died.
Firefighters and water supplies have been stretched thin to fight the fires over tens of thousands of acres. Local pastors recounted widespread loss of homes among their congregants. They couldn’t give a number because the fires were still burning and information was unfolding; as of Friday morning, officials described the Palisades Fire as eight percent contained and the Eaton Fire as zero percent contained.
“It feels like we’re losing part of our city. The Palisades seems to just be gone,” said Alex Watlington, senior pastor of Pacific Crossroads Church in Santa Monica. “There’s not just damage; it’s just gone. Like it was never there.”
Two elders at Pacific Crossroads and many of its congregants living in the Palisades and on the east side of LA have lost everything; the church is coordinating aid through its Hope for LA ministry.
“Everybody needs help, but you don’t know where to start,” Watlington said. “In ministry, whenever someone dies and you do a funeral, you feel really under-resourced and under-equipped to walk into that. It’s not the same thing, but it’s akin to that. You’re walking into people’s loss, and it’s just irretrievable.”
Walker remembers that overwhelming feeling. The Camp Fire had burned for more than two weeks, displacing 50,000 people and smoldering 19,000 buildings. He found himself weeping uncontrollably over a close friend who died, and then furious about someone breaking into his car and stealing the last two objects his family had saved from the fire.
But getting his emotions out helped him be ready to listen and pray with his congregants. Walker was incredibly angry at God for allowing the fire, and he found it healthy to admit that rather than pretend he was fine.
So he advises pastors in LA: Cry if you need to cry, and yell if you need to yell.
“Let the Lord do what he wants to do in you, so you in turn can minister to the people,” he said. “The biggest thing people will need right away, besides basic needs … is hope. Somebody to share their story with.”
Fellow pastors who survived California wildfires said churches in Los Angeles should prepare for a long and nonlinear recovery. The early days are focused on meeting basic needs like housing and meals. But then grief begins to set in, as well as angst about moving or staying to rebuild.
“What you find three or four months later, there are spiritual challenges—people disagreeing on how long grieving should take or missing their old church building. All the baggage that comes with hurt,” said Josh Lee, the lead pastor of Ridge Presbyterian Church in Paradise, which lost its building in the Camp Fire. “That’s the kind of thing you have to have your eyes open to in pastoral ministry. All the brokenness that comes afterward.”
Watlington in Santa Monica understands that rebuilding could be too emotionally taxing for some who have lost their homes; he knows that in the weeks and months ahead, he’ll inevitably be helping people move away to start over.
Joshua Jamison, who pastors Jubilee Church in Paradise alongside his wife, Melissa Jamison, remembers volunteers helping survivors sift through the ashes of their homes, sometimes finding a piece of jewelry or some memento.
“Most of the time, people didn’t find much of anything, but … the time people would spend sifting through the ashes was just so powerful,” he said. (Returning to the rubble may pose a health risk, he said, but he thinks people can be safe with protective equipment.)
No two disasters are the same, but Paradise, which used to have a population of around 26,000, was about the same size as Pacific Palisades, California. Most churches in Paradise burned down overnight in the Camp Fire in 2018.
Many of them have rebuilt; some only just opened their new buildings last year. One congregation that lost its building, Ridge Lifeline Church, now meets in a bowling alley that survived. After the fire, the town’s population fell to a low of 4,000 before rebounding to around 10,000.
“If you had told me we were going to start a church in Paradise again, I would have laughed and said, ‘No, it’s gone,’” said Lee of Ridge Presbyterian. But the church did begin again, slowly.
“It’s alive, and I don’t know how that happened,” said Lee.
Recovery comes haltingly. For a time, Ridge Presbyterian had no children showing up to Sunday school; now the recovering church has about 10 or 15 elementary schoolers. Lee said people in his community are worried about a big increase in home insurance that might force them to move even after rebuilding.
“But God is at work,” he said he would say to people recovering in Los Angeles. “Trust that, even though it seems very scattered and not linear.”
In the LA area, the current fires have destroyed or severely damaged at least a dozen churches.
In the Palisades, that includes Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church, Pacific Palisades Community United Methodist Church, Corpus Christi Church (a Catholic parish), and two rectories of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church.
In Altadena and nearby Pasadena, the fire destroyed Lifeline Fellowship Christian Center, St. Mark’s Episcopal, Altadena United Methodist Church, Altadena Church of the Nazarene, Atladena Community Church, and Pasadena Church of Christ. Hillside Tabernacle City of Faith (Church of God in Christ) in Altadena also sustained serious damage.
“If I haven’t gotten back to you today, please forgive me,” Hillside Tabernacle pastor G. LaKeith Kenebrew wrote on Facebook. He said his own house and his in-laws’ house had “burned to nothing” and added that “between checking on members, trying to keep the church from completely burning down and realizing that our city looks like a scene out of an apocalyptic movie … either I could not answer or my phone was dead.”
Calvary Church in Pacific Palisades said its sanctuary was severely damaged, but the pastor Justin Anderson called it a “miracle” that the rest of the campus, including a gym that the congregation could worship in, was unharmed. Dozens of families in the church lost homes, according to Anderson, who just started pastoring the church this week.
Paradise survivors said other undamaged churches might need to welcome displaced people. In 2018, Chico Church of Christ in nearby Chico, California, took in the Paradise Church of Christ congregation when its building burned.
With nowhere to go, people from Paradise had brought their pets to church with them, said Chico Church of Christ office manager Christie Presswood.
Over time, Chico’s status as a landing ground for so many displaced people changed the town, too, she remembered. She advises churches in that position to “be as understanding as you can be, because they’re going through a lot of trauma.”
“Seeing the news reports I’m seeing now in LA, it brings it all back,” Presswood said.
In this initial stage of recovery, Jamison recommends giving survivors cash, gift cards, or gas cards. He knows church people like to deliver food and clothing, but he said funds are better so people can get what they need.
The Paradise pastor also urged churches to plug into existing disaster-aid infrastructure, like a local assistance center that coordinates aid in California after fires. Being part of that process prepared his church to respond to subsequent disasters in the area, and Jamison now leads the Oroville Hope Center, which distributes resources to people in need.
Distributing water also became an important task of the local Christian community. For two years, the Hope Center distributed water to people in Paradise. Contaminants from the fire in the water system meant people weren’t ready to drink Paradise water for a while.
The recovery process has been slow and sometimes sad.
“It was depressing, looking out there and seeing charred buildings and burnt trees,” said Walker, who pastors First Baptist Church of Paradise.
For three years, he and his family didn’t have a settled home, but they have one now. Looking back, he said he sees how God “gently” cared for him and his congregation after he felt so much anger about the fire.
First Baptist had about 75 people attending before the fire. The number dropped afterward, and there were times when leadership thought the church would have to close. But in the last couple of years, attendance has grown with new people, and now 100 come on a Sunday.
For Los Angeles residents in destroyed communities, Walker said life will never be the same.
“But it’s going to be good. It will be a different good,” he said. “There will be joy again, but allow yourself time to go through the process of mourning. … Don’t feel like God is judging your response. I don’t think he is. I think he knows our hearts; he knows what we can handle. He wants us to just bring it to him.”
The LA fires are still raging, so local pastors aren’t quite thinking about recovery yet. They are praying for winds to die down and for firefighting resources to arrive to contain the blazes.
“We need a gentle miracle,” Watlington said.
Maybe some of that miracle could come from rebuilt churches in Paradise. According to Walker, a young firefighter who was baptized at First Baptist in Paradise a couple of weeks ago was just sent down to fight the inferno in Los Angeles.
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