Texas church partners with Jeep club to shelter elderly during winter storm
Texans taking shelter at OpenDoor Church. Photo from OpenDoor’s Facebook page.
NEW YORK— With the help of OpenDoor Church in Burleson, Texas — about 50 miles from Dallas — a local Jeep club is rescuing families snowed in or without power and water and driving them to the church’s warming shelter this week.
They’re one of thousands of faith and community partnerships responding to crisis around the state. More than 4 million Texans have been experiencing power outages and frozen pipes during a record-breaking winter storm that brought snow and freezing temperatures late Feb. 14. As of Feb. 18, about 300,000 Texans are still without power, and 13 million are being advised to boil water before using it.
OpenDoor Senior Pastor Troy Brewer estimates that his church has provided temporary shelter to about 1,700 Texans this week, whether that was just for a meal or an overnight stay in the warmth.
“Our team really responds so well to crisis,” Brewer told Religion Unplugged. “We didn't start off as a church; we started off as an outreach center. And so it’s just in our DNA to respond to crisis.”
OpenDoor is a non-denominational church that began as a food pantry in 1995 and now has a congregation of approximately 5,000. Brewer says they still donate 8 million pounds of food to the community each year.
Matthew Gee, an Army veteran and North Texas Jeep Club member who also provided search and rescue during Hurricane Harvey, has led the rescue effort in the area. He says a city council member asked him to form an emergency response team, and he did so with about 30 community members and Jeep owners — many of whom are veterans themselves.
“They're just pretty much just answering the call of serving,” Gee said. “So if somebody asks for help, we're there to help.”
The Jeeps make for safer, more reliable driving on the 3-5 inches of snow averaged in the area and icy roads. Last week, the Dallas-Fort Worth area was rocked by a massive 135-car pile up that killed six people on an icy highway.
“I pulled up a full-sized Chevy Z71 out of the ditch and a dually pick-up truck earlier this morning,” Gee said. “They're just built to do this stuff. A friend of mine pulled out an 18-Wheeler.”
The volunteers are driving to the homes of the elderly in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with no family or transportation to bring them into the shelter and working with local hospitals to pick up hospice patients. They’ve also driven from warming shelters to retirement homes to retrieve medicine and other essentials residents left behind.
Some of the Texans without heat are facing life-threatening cold. Six Texans died from the cold in a West Texas county, the AP reported, and more have died from treacherous road conditions and other causes.
Gee answered a call from a hospice patient in a rural area a half-hour away who needed to reach the hospital, but by the time Gee made it to his home, it was too late to care for him. Paramedics who arrived to the scene shortly after said he most likely wouldn’t make it to the hospital.
Gee and his volunteers have faced similar tragedies this week — he’s received calls from people in Austin, Houston and San Antonio who are snowed in and he can’t help, about 1,500 calls a day.
Visitors of the warming shelter at OpenDoor are varied. About 100 homeless people from the streets of Fort Worth were brought to the shelter to escape the cold. Their youngest visitor was a five-day-old newborn and their oldest a 102-year-old woman.
In preparation for the winter storm, the church purchased two generators to keep the electricity on. It meant that when the power went off, they were the only place in town with power.
But other churches in the area — such as the Alsbury Baptist Church, Pathway Church and others — without power have stepped up to provide other resources, like cots for overnight visitors.
OpenDoor has also provided multiple meals a day to temporary residents of the warming center in buffet-style dining. Churches cooked and contributed food, some was provided by chefs staffed at OpenDoor and a local pizza place brought 31 pizzas to the church.
Other churches with power or generators across the state have been opening as warming shelters. One of the largest and most notable is Houston’s Lakewood Church, pastored by Prosperity Gospel televangelist Joel Osteen. The church shared on Twitter that almost 400 people stayed there on Tuesday night.
Millions of homes have already begun to have their power restored, but Texas officials have not said officially when power will be fully restored. Through OpenDoor’s collaboration with the state government, Brewer says he doesn’t expect water or electricity to be restored to the community until late next week.
But Brewer says he and his team of volunteers plan to work with the families one by one to ensure their needs are met and the church can phase out of its full-time shelter role.
“What we're trying to do is we're trying to find a family in our church for every single family that came here,” Brewer said, “because when they go home, their pipes are going to be busted. And when they go home, their electricity may or may not be reliable. They're going to have electrical issues, they're going to have transportation issues, all of those kinds of things. So we're asking every family in the church to adopt a family and just take care of them.”
And they plan to have church on Sunday in person to worship together.
“It’s been an amazing week of ministry,” Brewer said. “It’s been a hard week, but it’s been a very, very fruitful week.”
Jillian Cheney is a Poynter-Koch fellow for Religion Unplugged who loves consuming good culture and writing about it. She also reports on American Protestantism and evangelical Christianity. You can find her on Twitter @_jilliancheney.