Louisiana floods news update: Local churches move to aid victims despite own losses

Christian churches disregarded their own losses as they provided relief for Louisiana flood victims who lost almost everything in one of the state's worst natural disasters.

Jared Stockstill, administrator of the nondenominational megachurch Bethany Church in northern Baton Rouge, set out Aug. 13 together with other church members on his boat to pick up stranded neighbors while the church's south Baton Rouge campus provided flood victims with food, clothing, toiletries, and other emergency supplies.

"What we're trying to see happen is for people to see that God loves them by seeing his church move like we are moving," said Stockstill's brother and the church's lead pastor, Jonathan Stockstill, according to Religion News Service (RNS).

The church's north campus suffered immense damage that was not covered by flood insurance.

The heavy rainfall that started Aug. 12 inundated South Louisiana with two feet of rain in just a couple of days. Widely considered as the worst natural calamity since Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the historic flooding killed 13 and ravaged more than 60,000 homes.

South Walker Baptist Church also provided shelter, hot meals, donations, and prayer services for flood victims and volunteers.

"My story is no different than anybody's down the road," church member Chuck Craft told the Associated Press. "Everybody's life is out on the curb to be picked up by garbage," he added.

The First Methodist of Denham Springs also became a Red Cross-designated relief and staging area as a way to "pay it forward" to a community that helped the church spring back from various calamities since the 1920s.

Carol Parker, the finance secretary at Baton Rouge's Star Hill Church, expressed her congregation's optimism despite the hardships they faced.

"Just like my pastor said ... we didn't lose everything," RNS quoted Parker as saying on PBS program "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly." He then continued to say, "We've got family and we've got God, so do not say we lost everything."

Faith-based groups Catholic Charities, Samaritan's Purse, Southern Baptist Disaster Relief and Operation Blessing dispatched equipment and volunteers while Mercy Chefs with its professional chef volunteers served 9,000 meals for evacuees, first responders, and law enforcement.

"To come to a disaster area — folks that have lost everything — and share a meal with them brings some semblance of hope," founder Gary LeBlanc told RNS and added, "you should do that over a good meal, the best meal you are able to make, not just something you opened and heated and slopped out."