“It’s amazing how great a really lousy week can be!”

Floodwaters recede in the basement of Benton UMC

Following is an edited transcript of an interview with Matthew Verstraeten, Pastor of Benton and Waller United Methodist Churches, after devastating floods in Benton, Pa., in late August, 2018. Photos and a brief call to action were featured in the September 2018 issue of Susquehanna LINK.

August 20 — We knew rain was coming, with some flood warnings. It was a Monday morning and I just happened to be at the church. At 9:30 am there was a little water in the basement and we knew that the water levels were rising around town. It started raining very hard and very quickly. I went home, then came back a little later to check on some things, and by that point there was four inches of water in the basement. Within ten to fifteen minutes, the water level rose from four inches to four feet. Water came in from Main Street through an unfinished part of the basement. It came in really fast and destroyed everything in its path.
In one of our main rooms, used for children’s ministry, the water level reached 75 inches, just over six feet deep. And of course, not just at the church but throughout the town. People were dealing with it in their homes. It came out of nowhere.

Monday was just the helplessness of waiting through it and trying to be patient. Main Street was a river. People saw it on the World News. By late in the afternoon, things had calmed down to where we could walk through town a little bit. As my family and I explored town, we met up with some other people from the church in the parking lot and saw how much water there was. The church has been through this before, so they knew a little of what to expect.
Tuesday was just ‘get to work!’

The great thing was, for as many people as we had working at the church, trying to start this really long clean-up process, we had as many people, if not more, going door-to-door, house-to-house, seeing what they could do, seeing what the needs were. We had people making food, and delivering flood buckets.
I’ve been really pleased with the response of our people being concerned for our neighbors, seeing this as an opportunity to reach out. We had been talking and praying a lot about opportunities to serve our community and share Jesus. Right in the midst of being intentional about that, God opened this incredible door. In the midst of this tragedy, we had a wonderful opportunity to be the hands and feet of Jesus.

Initially the folks who came to help were people from the church and people from the area, but as the week progressed we met new people as they were carrying mud out of our basement. It was really awesome to see the community come together. And again, it created new opportunities for new relationships and opened new doors. Mission Central’s response was great too. We’ve seen help come through our United Methodist connection and we’ve met people from across the Conference who just showed up to help in any way that they could. We’ve experienced an incredible outpouring of support.

We lost half of our church, half of our space, the space that we use for education. It’s the space we created so my kids and other kids can learn about Jesus.
Moving on, we are in a process of discernment; trying to figure out how we can re-create that space as soon as possible. We’re trying to find temporary solutions while thinking about long-term solutions. We are fortunate that just a couple years ago, we bought a house to move our offices into. We also bought a house to move the youth ministry into. So, in the midst of cleaning up, we are trying to re purpose some of those spaces so we can get Sunday School and the other children’s ministries, scouts, and Kids For Christ, our after-school ministry, started just as soon as we can.

Short term we need a few hands and feet on the ground, probably over the next couple of months. In the long term, we have some really tough decisions to make. Should we renovate or rebuild? Do we need to think about doing a brand-new thing in a new space, and if so, financial support in the future is going to be critical.



The continued prayers and the outpouring of support from people in the community have been outstanding, as have been the expressions of support from clergy and laity throughout the conference—people I’ve never met, people that don’t know me—who are reaching out and wanting to know how they can help and be supportive. Knowing that they have been in intentional prayer for us has been very life-giving.

There really have been a lot of ‘God moments.’ The thing I’ve said to people is, “It’s amazing how great a really lousy week can be!” It has allowed us to focus, to come together, and to see that the Lord is working even through less-than-ideal circumstances in the opportunities that we have been given, and the opportunity to grow closer to our sister church in Waller. To see people be incredibly intentional about being the hands and feet of Jesus, in any way that they can, to help people that they have never met before, is incredibly life-giving and just really encouraging as a pastor. It gives me a lot of hope for this church’s future.

 I think our members have a strong conviction that this is a building, and they are the church. The foundations may have been underwater here, but their foundation is Jesus—a foundation that’s never shaken—and so I think there is a bright future for this church.

A future with hope

A building Visioning Team has been appointed to discern how to move forward. Renovate? Rebuild? Add on?

It took about three weeks to clean up and re purpose the two church-owned houses and set them up for children’s ministry and Sunday school. It is hoped the KFC after-school program will resume in January after the church basement renovation is complete.

The basement is being reinforced and renovated. They are installing a wall surface that, in the case of future flooding, can be taken off, cleaned, and reinstalled.

A man who had come to help with the cleanup recently started coming to church services. “He asked me what service my husband and I went to,” said church secretary Tracy Fritz, “And then he asked if he could sit with us!”
The young adult group has grown from 20 to 29 participants since the flooding. “I think it’s because there is so much love,” said Tracy. “It feels like a big family here.”

“Financial assistance would be a huge blessing!” said Verstraeton. If you’d like to give or help, contact Pastor Matthew Verstraeten at 570-925-6858 or email mverstraeten@susumc.org.