“One of the windstorms blew, and it was like a fireball, and it blew straight toward me. All I could do was just back up, and that was it. I had to get out of there.”

Eon Walk — chief financial officer for the Pasadena Church of Christ, also known as the Kinneloa congregation — recounted her experience trying to enter the Southern California church building as the Eaton Fire encroached.

She wanted to save the building blueprints and grab a fire extinguisher to stop a nearby bush fire from spreading. But she returned home empty-handed.

Soon after, her daughter, Tamyra Simpson, sent her a video from KABC-TV showing the Pasadena church building engulfed in flames. Firefighters were attempting to extinguish the blaze, but strong winds prevented water from reaching the building, blowing it back toward the fire trucks.

The Eaton Fire in the Pasadena area was one of four wildfires that broke out around Los Angeles in early January. The others were the Palisades Fire along the Pacific Coast Highway between Malibu and Santa Monica and the smaller Kenneth and Hurst fires.

By mid-January, the fires destroyed thousands of homes and other buildings in an area of greater than 62 square miles, killing at least 24.

Walk said the nine-member Pasadena church — of which she’s been a member for 39 years — requests prayers as it determines how to move forward and hopefully rebuild.

“This is hard,” she told The Christian Chronicle. “My daughter is devastated. This is the only church that she’s ever known. She’s been there since she was 1 year old — she’ll be 40 this year — and she’s just beside herself. This is their history.”

Blaze strikes a second church 

The Eaton Fire also destroyed the meeting place of the Altadena Church of Christ, along with the home of one member.

Several of Altedana’s 20 or so members worshiped the following Sunday with the nearby Lincoln Avenue Church of Christ, a 75-member congregation that meets just across the freeway from the fire-ravaged Altadena area.

That morning, Lincoln Avenue minister Rodney Davis delivered a message on the “God of all comfort,” as the apostle Paul described him in 2 Corinthians 1.

“God is a God of restoration,” Davis told the Chronicle. “And anytime (we’re) reduced to a little, we have to, by faith, recognize … that little is much when God is in it. So the message to those that have lost everything is that God will restore them, as long as our faith stands strong.”

Davis surveyed the damage with his wife, Lejuene, after much of the wildfire had dissipated — but many homes were still ablaze.

“The fact that 90 percent of Altadena is gone is disheartening … because many people have lived there for multiple years through generations,” the minister said.

“They’re in the third and fourth generations, and they’ve lost everything. Many are wondering what they are going to do now, especially since a lot of insurance companies have dropped them.”

Church families among the victims

Among those who lost their homes: 10 families who are Lincoln Avenue members. 

While most are staying with nearby relatives, the congregation has created a fund to help. Money raised will cover temporary housing and other needs as the fellow Christians look to rebuild or find new homes.

But even many whose homes survived the fire — including the Davises — face hardship and loss of the use of their residences. 

They were forced to evacuate as the Eaton Fire drew near. 

“Three houses from our house, there was fire in the backyards of our neighbors,” Rodney Davis recalled. “We could see the flames, and then (came) the police with their microphones flying down our street.”

“Evacuate! Evacuate!” he recalled the officers yelling. “This is an evacuation order. Please evacuate your homes immediately, because the winds are carrying the embers into this area.” 

“So we had to get what we could and just leave,” the minister explained.

Minister’s home sustains smoke damage

The Davises returned a few days later to find their home still intact. 

But power and gas outages remained, and officials had advised the family not to drink from or even bathe in the municipal water. Smoke had also caused significant damage. 

“When you go into the house, you can smell the stench of the smoke,” Rodney Davis said. “It’s real thick, and it’s in your furniture — it’s in your clothes. So we’ve been asked to go ahead and file a claim with our insurance.”

The minister said he and his wife are blessed to be able to stay in the Lincoln Avenue annex, which has showers and room for an air mattress.

Given the church’s proximity to the Eaton Fire, many community members have come looking for water, toiletries and other necessities, Davis said. Thanks to the generosity of many nearby congregations, Lincoln Avenue has been able to provide for many of those needs.

Additionally, Churches of Christ Disaster Relief Effort sent a semi-truckload of essential supplies for the church to distribute. The ministry, based in Nashville, Tenn., also sent truckloads to the Baldwin Park and La Puente Churches of Christ, both about 15 miles southeast of the Eaton Fire.

Pepperdine moves to online classes

Pepperdine University, about 2.5 miles west of the edge of the Palisades Fire, was not under direct threat. Back in December, students sheltered as the Franklin Fire raced past the Malibu campus, lighting the sky red and igniting spot fires.

A month later, this new spurt of fires left many students and employees without homes and forced them to evacuate, while police shut down many roads leading into campus. The spring semester for the university, which is associated with Churches of Christ, began with most classes online as a result.

Emma Perkins, a Pepperdine law student, had just flown back from Christmas break in Oklahoma when the Palisades Fire broke out.

She was studying for finals postponed from the December fire at her rented home off the Pacific Coast Highway, between Malibu and the Pacific Palisades community, where the latest blaze began.

“An orange glow filled the house,” Perkins told the Chronicle. “And so we were looking outside, and that's when we saw tons and tons of smoke. The ocean literally turned orange. … We've had multiple fires within the last month or so, and I’d never seen it like that.”

She and one of her three roommates, Jennifer Gash — the other two had not yet returned to California — decided to evacuate just before officials issued a mandatory evacuation order.

They went to stay with Gash’s family — her father, Jim Gash, is Pepperdine’s president — along with several other displaced students.

The next morning, thanks to a video from a neighbor, they learned their house had burned down.

“It is completely leveled,” Perkins noted. “Nothing to sift through or salvage.”

But she said the amount of support from Pepperdine, the on-campus Waves Church she attends and even her congregation back in Oklahoma City — the Memorial Road Church of Christ — has been overwhelming.

Amid the disaster, the university created the Pepperdine Strong Fund to support affected students, faculty and staff with temporary housing, transportation and essential items.

And while Perkins lost the majority of her possessions in the home, she’s more concerned about the broader effects of the wildfires.

“It’s really just devastating, the impact, and knowing whenever we go back east into LA, it’s just not going to look the same,” Perkins said. “It’s not going to look the same for years.”

‘I’m sorry, but the house is gone’

Another Pepperdine law student, Colton Powell, was still in Tennessee with his family as he anxiously monitored the fires.

He later found a news video that showed the area of his rental house — also along the Pacific Coast Highway east of Pepperdine — and messaged the reporter to ask if she could check on it.

“I’m sorry, but the house is gone,” she texted him, along with a video and photos of the wreckage.

“Thankfully, I wasn’t there, you know, safety wise,” Powell told the Chronicle. “The unfortunate thing was, I wasn’t able to get any of my stuff out. … It’s a weird feeling, I’ll say, watching fire get closer and closer to your house but being 1,000 miles away, not being able to do anything about it.”

Losing sentimental items that can’t be replaced — journals, letters, souvenirs from travels — is especially tough, he said. 

But Powell, too, has received an outpouring of love from friends and fellow Christians.

“I’ve been very blessed,” said Powell, who worships with the University Church of Christ at Pepperdine and the Harpeth Hills Church of Christ in Brentwood, Tenn. “I’ve had a lot of outreach and support from so many people offering to let me stay on their couch or pull out a bed or something like that.”

‘It look apocalyptic,’ preacher says

Greg Daum, a communications professor at Pepperdine and preacher for the Woodland Hills Church of Christ, had to evacuate his home in Calabasas, just north of the Palisades Fire.

“It looks apocalyptic,” he said of the devastation. “There are neighborhoods that are completely wiped out.”

Though Daum’s house survived, he’s also experienced a flood of kindness from colleagues, former students and Christians from across the U.S.

“I can very easily talk about the difficulties and challenges that other people and myself have experienced, and all of that is very real and very valid,” Daum said. “But the part that keeps coming to the forefront of my mind is just how beautiful the response has been from people. … There is some beauty that can be seen in the ashes.”

This piece is republished with permission from The Christian Chronicle.

Calvin Cockrell is a freelance digital media specialist, media editor for The Christian Chronicle and copyeditor for Religion Unplugged. He also serves as the young adults minister for the North Tuscaloosa Church of Christ in Alabama.