'As long as we’re together': Celebrating Easter away from home churches Hurricane Ian ruined
It’s Sunday, and a lot of things haven’t changed for the members of St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church.
They sing in church pews with their red hymnals in hand. They pray, heads bowed, as they’re bathed in colored light from stained-glass windows. They take Holy Communion. The Rev. Bill Van Oss gives a sermon.
All fairly typical for this recent Palm Sunday service.
But one thing is very different, though: This isn’t actually their church.
They’re only borrowing the place.
Their own church was badly damaged when Hurricane Ian stormed onto Sanibel Island on Sept. 28 and flooded its sanctuary and other rooms. And it’ll likely be another year before they can hold full church services there again.
Meanwhile, south Fort Myers’ Peace Lutheran Church has opened its doors to the church’s 400-or-so members, and those members say they’re thankful for the generosity.
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There’s just something special about gathering in person for church, says Mary Chasseur of Sanibel Island.
“It’s wonderful that we have a place to meet where we can be with our family,” Chasseur says as she sits in a pew and waits for Palm Sunday service to start. “We were in Michigan for two months and the first day we came back, we came here and it was just very healing.
“So it really doesn’t matter about the building, although we love our building. It’s all the people here.”
Displaced SW Florida churches worship elsewhere Easter Sunday
St. Michael and All Angels is far from alone, of course. Hurricane Ian damaged or destroyed many other churches in Southwest Florida, especially on Sanibel Island and Fort Myers Beach.
More than six months later, some of those churches remain homeless and will find themselves celebrating this Easter Sunday in borrowed pews.
It’s not ideal, of course. Pretty much everyone at St. Michael and All Angels would probably rather be in their own building again.
But it’s better than not meeting at all, says member Susie Scutakes of Sanibel Island.
“As long as we’re together, that’s all we need,” Scutakes says. “We’re all very lucky, because this IS our family.”
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Other displaced congregations include Fort Myers Beach’s oldest church, Chapel By The Sea (meeting at Cypress Lake Presbyterian Church in Fort Myers); Sanibel Community Church (meeting at both Fort Myers Community Church and its recently reopened original church); and the Beach’s St. Peter Lutheran Church ― also meeting at Peace Lutheran.
Peace Lutheran’s pastor, Andreas Stein, says it’s more than just kindness that urged him to open his church sanctuary to two other congregations.
It’s a calling from God.
Peace Lutheran suffered no significant damage from Ian, Stein says, and he took that as a sign to help other churches, as well as other local groups that meet there, too.
“God spared our building in such a powerful way,” Stein says. “It is a calling to really do everything we can to help as many as we can with everything that we can. …
“It feels good to be able to be a blessing for other churches, and it’s truly an honor to be able to do this.”
Many of Southwest Florida’s displaced churches plan to rebuild and resume services in their old buildings. Indeed, Sanibel Community Church now has two services on Sundays: One in its borrowed home and another in its original church, which reopened its sanctuary in February.
Sanibel Community Church had been slowly returning to its old campus in stages since Nov. 13, starting with a small service in the church’s less-damaged nursery room.
“It was this kind of ripped-out, down-to-the-studs children’s nursery room that we squeezed, like 60 people in plastic chairs, but no electricity and no amplification,” says Jeramie Rinne, pastor of Sanibel Community Church. “It was just kind of like a bunch of people stuffed in a room. We called it post-apocalyptic church.”
Rinne says it feels great being back in their own, original church again after six months away.
“We have a new appreciation for being able to meet in a building,” he says. “When you’re there under normal circumstances, you can take it for granted. But we have come to really appreciate it.”
Other churches aren’t so lucky.
Chapel By The Sea held a “Hope and Healing” service in its parking lot March 19, but church leaders are still in the process of deciding how they can rebuild ― or if they’re able to rebuild at all, says church administrator Denise Armstrong.
Meanwhile, about 40 of its members are meeting at Cypress Lake Presbyterian Church in south Fort Myers, where they mix in with the usual Sunday service and share the same pastors and duties such as ushering.
“It is a place to have community and feel like you have a temporary home,” Armstrong says about the church’s members, “but they still long to go back to their church.”
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Armstrong was one of the first people to see Chapel by the Sea after Hurricane Ian. And it was an awful sight.
“My heart sank,” Armstrong says. “It’s sad because your whole life is in there, your community you supported, your mission, the people. It was devastating.”
Ian blew out the church’s walls, and flood waters swept away everything inside, from the altar to all the chairs.
“Everything was washed away,” Armstrong says. “We had four grand pianos that we can’t find.”
They did manage to salvage a few items, though, including the original church bell from 1942. “It was damaged, but it was recovered,” Armstrong says. “It rings. This church here, Cypress Lake, helped us build a stand for it so that we can ring it during services on Sunday.”
It’s not easy seeing your spiritual home reduced to so much hurricane debris, says Van Oss of St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church.
The Sanibel church got about five feet of floodwater, he says. He saw the building for the first time Oct. 7 after taking a boat to the end of Tarpon Bay Road and walking the rest of the way.
“It was a little difficult getting into the doors, because they had swelled with all the moisture,” Van Oss says. “Once we got in, it was just heartbreaking, because this holy place where we prayed and sang and received communion and had fellowship with each other was just ― it was covered with mud, and it looked like the inside of a washing machine.
“Stuff was just strewn all about. Pews were off of their moorings and toppled over. It was awful. It was hot and humid and it smelled terrible. And there was that gray muck that covered everything. It was heartbreaking.”
Temporary homes for Sunday church service
Yet church leaders couldn’t just wallow in despair and do nothing. They had their congregations to think about.
So they immediately set to work trying to find another way to hold church services.
A few days after Ian, Rinne and about 100 members of Sanibel Community Church started with an impromptu prayer service in an east coast Florida condo. A week later, they’d found a temporary home at Fort Myers Community Church and started meeting there Sunday afternoons after the church’s own services.
At one point, Sanibel Community Church had about 300 people there. That’s dwindled to about 60-70 since the church’s original building reopened, and church leaders are considering establishing an entirely separate congregation in Fort Myers to meet the demand.
The reopened sanctuary at Sanibel Community Church isn’t back to its usual self, Rinne admits. There’s no carpet on the floor, and there’s a lot of stuff piled against the wall.
But the congregation doesn’t seem to mind.
“It looks like a mess,” Rinne says. “And yet people are so happy.”
Online services for some churches
Not everyone can meet in person, though.
Beach Baptist Church saw about 20 feet of storm water, says associate pastor Mallie Critser, and its roof was destroyed, too. “It’s just one big skylight right now,” she says and laughs.
But it didn’t make much sense to find a temporary home. Their approximately 200 members are mostly seasonal, and many of them hadn’t even arrived yet when Ian struck.
With just 20 year-round members, Critser says, they decided to hold online services instead.
It’s been a struggle sometimes, she says, but church members across the country have made the most of it. Some even gather together in each other’s homes to watch the streaming service.
“We have kind of little, tiny mini congregations popping up across the U.S.,” Critser says. “Which is really cool to hear.”
Of course, Critser would rather meet her congregation on person, she says. And the church ― which will have to be demolished and rebuilt from the ground up ― has managed two in-person gatherings for food, singing and fellowship under a tent in the Beach Baptist parking lot: One on Feb. 19 and another this Easter Sunday.
“I want to have face-to-face conversations,” Critser says. “I want to talk to people. I want to hug people. I want to be with my kingdom family.”
Still, she thinks God is using her in a different way now. At the moment, the church is focused on feeding people on Fort Myers Beach. They operate a 9-to-5 pantry and also serve 253 hot meals a day on their property to people on the island, Critser says.
And that’s important, too.
“I think He had this plan from the beginning, and He knew that I can connect with people over the Internet just as much as I can connect in person ― and maybe even more, now that it’s accessible to anyone internationally,” she says. “Is it a struggle? Yes, it’s a struggle emotionally. But I don’t think He’s struggling at all to get the message out there.”
‘People want to be together’
For other churches, though, gathering together is an absolute must. It’s simply not church without in-person fellowship and worship.
“We believe that following Jesus involves, necessarily, gathering with people who follow Jesus to encourage each other and spur each other on in the faith,” says Rinne of Sanibel Community Church. “You can’t be a Biblical Christian and be on your own, detached from a local church. …
“I don’t want people quote-unquote ‘doing church’ on their couch at home. Because I actually think that ‘online church’ is an oxymoron. Church is gathering together with physical people in the same space.”
Van Oss of St. Michael and All Angels also prefers in-person services, although the church does offer online services, too.
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“People want to be together,” he says. “People want to be together to support each other. And even our people who are coming in on livestream, they’ll say, ‘It’s just so good to see my friends. It’s just so good to see other people.’”
That’s the way Barbara McDonald of south Fort Myers feels, too. Sure, she misses St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church, she says. But she’s so glad Peace Lutheran has opened its doors to them so she can be in the same room with her church family.
“We’re grateful to these people who have given us their church,” McDonald says. “Not everyone would do that. So at least we can all be together for a time on Sunday.”
Connect with this reporter: Charles Runnells is an arts and entertainment reporter for The News-Press and the Naples Daily News. Email him at crunnells@gannett.com or connect on Facebook (facebook.com/charles.runnells.7), Twitter (@charlesrunnells) and Instagram (@crunnells1). You can also call at 239-335-0368.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Hurricane Ian: Sanibel, Fort Myers Beach churches find temporary homes
