As worshipers walked into Spartanburg’s St. James United Methodist Church on Sunday morning, ‘do you have power’ was the greeting of the day.
The Rev. Andrew Wolfe said his power was restored the night before delivering his sermon after more than a week in the dark.
“The needs here in Spartanburg are great, but as we go farther up the mountain, the needs get greater and greater,” he said.
Like churches across the region, his church has been collecting supplies for Western North Carolina; theirs will be sent to Bethel United Methodist Church in Spartanburg, the centralized distribution location. The supplies will arrive in North Carolina midweek.
Wolfe's church had planned a major fundraiser, selling BBQ plates. They were set to start just hours after the storm had brought trees down all across the Woodland Heights neighborhood in Spartanburg, and well beyond their neighborhood.
Instead of canceling and letting the meat spoil, they just kept cooking.
And they invited the neighborhood, said Mary Lu Saylor, a church administrator.
She said the church served more than 300 meals the first day after the storm, including some reserved for first responders who weren't able to find much else.
They've kept inviting the neighborhood for showers and to use the church's kitchen to cook up food. And the Kickin' Kids afterschool program, which had previously planned to move into the church that same week, immediately expanded.
The handful of afterschool kids expected for a few hours became around 50 for an all-day camp, Saylor said.
About 900 homes in the Woodland Heights neighborhood, which surrounds the church, were still without power on Sunday afternoon, according to a Duke Energy outage tracker.Many of the initial outages have been fixed but more than 20,000 people in Spartanburg County have no electrical service.
Several houses in the neighborhood have trees on top and many streets remain littered with tall piles of debris, trees, and limbs.
“If things are messed up or a little messy, that’s just who we are as a church,” Wolfe said.
Antonio Booker, a church member, said he got his power restored early but his mother lives at a retirement center that didn’t get power back until Saturday.
But others have had it far worse, Booker said, and it pains him to see the suffering in Western North Carolina.
As the service began, a crew of electric workers continued to cut debris and reconnect lines just outside the church's walls.
South Carolina Baptist Convention
The Rev. Bryant Sims, chief operations officer for the South Carolina Southern Baptist Convention, said the convention has provided 10,000 meals, more than 1,400 days worth of volunteering, and crews have honored hundreds of chainsaw requests, all for free, in South Carolina since the storm. He expects mud-out crews to soon go to North Carolina and Tennessee to help residents with water damage.
"We expect our relief efforts to be going strong three, four months from now," Sims said.
Sims said many of the convention's crown jewels — Anderson University, North Greenville University, Connie Maxwell Children's Ministry in Greenwood, and Camp McCall in Sunset — had significant tree damage, including damage to some buildings.
"Helene brought destruction, but one of the things about South Carolina. Baptist disaster relief," he said, "is as long as people are calling for help, we'll keep working."
Contact Mike Ellis at mellis@gannett.com or 864-376-0787
This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Church on Sunday: The needs in Spartanburg are great but 'greater as we go up the mountain'
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