Covenant congregations in Spokane, Washington, have opened a neighbourhood relief fund and thrown open their spare rooms after the most destructive wildfire event in the state's history. The Old Trails Fire broke out less than half a mile from Immanuel Evangelical Covenant Church, one of several Evangelical Covenant Church congregations in the city. Investigators say the blaze was deliberately set and timed to catch the highest winds of the season. Driven by gusts of up to 45 miles an hour, it jumped the Spokane River within hours and pushed north through one neighbourhood after another.
Together with two neighbouring fires, the blaze scorched close to 10,000 acres, destroyed around a thousand structures and forced roughly 67,000 people from their homes. Remarkably, no one was killed. "It is a miracle that nobody has been killed in these fires," said Mark Finney, a licensed Covenant minister serving Emmaus Church in Spokane. "A thousand structures burned down, and we don't have any fatalities. That's unbelievable." The Evangelical Covenant Church, a member of the wider free evangelical family in North America, maintains a Domestic Disaster Response Fund precisely for the long months of case management, rebuilding and pastoral care that follow once the news cameras leave.
The day after his own neighbourhood was evacuated, Immanuel's lead pastor Rob Fairbanks stood before his congregation and did something he says he rarely does. "I don't ask you for money much, but today's the day," he told them. The church started a fire relief fund on the spot, raising $7,000 within days and handing out $1,000 grants with no strings attached. The fund has since grown to nearly $12,000. A former staff member, Michelle Areta, who teaches at a middle school serving most of the neighbourhoods that burned, helped identify which families were in need, connecting the church with more than fifty displaced households whose homes were left uninhabitable by smoke and structural damage. "She's the hero of our story," Fairbanks said. "She gives us real flesh and blood people to move toward and love."
Perhaps the most striking figure to emerge from the disaster concerns where people actually went. Of the 67,000 forced out of their homes, fewer than one percent ended up in Red Cross shelters; roughly 60,000 were absorbed into networks of friends, family and congregations. "Churches were just letting their friends stay, crash in their Sunday school room," Finney said. He credits a decade of learning to care for immigrant and refugee neighbours in the city with building the "connective tissue" now carrying the response. Both pastors are already looking past the immediate emergency. "The church is never going to be a disaster response agency like World Vision or the Red Cross," Finney said. "But to absorb the people within our sphere of influence and to provide the long-term spiritual, emotional, and material support beyond the headlines — that's our wheelhouse."
Source: Evangelical Covenant Church / Covenant Companion — covchurch.org
