John Crowder and his First Baptist Church of West, Texas, helped the city recover from a 2013 fertilizer plant explosion. Now he’s taking what he learned from the experience to help other pastors in disaster areas.
If anyone knows about responding to disasters, it’s John Crowder, the pastor at First Baptist Church in West, Texas.
The town held the nation’s gaze for several terrible weeks in 2013 after a fertilizer plant explosion killed 15 people, most of them first responders, and injured more than 250.
In the immediate aftermath, and for months afterward, First Baptist served as the hub of short- and long-term recovery efforts for the entire city, with Crowder helping direct volunteer armies, construction companies and even government agencies.
So after a rash of deadly tornadoes that struck the Dallas area in December, the disaster recovery team at the Baptist General Convention of Texas tapped Crowder to help other pastors whose communities have been struck with calamity.
“I will meet with pastors who go through disasters to encourage them and help them navigate the chaos,” Crowder shared on Facebook recently. “While it’s NOT an official title, I will think of myself as the “Disaster Pastor.”
Crowder spoke with Baptist News Global about his new role and how he, his church and community are doing since the explosion.
How is your family doing?
Everything is going well for us. We moved in the new house October of 2014. We love it. It’s basically the same house that we lost except we got to change some things we never liked in the original house…. In the first six weeks after the explosion we moved four times. We just went to wherever there was a place provided us.
How is First Baptist?
Everybody who wanted to return to their places are home, and those who needed to resettle did so smoothly. The few injuries we had have healed. We had one firefighter with broken ribs, a broken ankle and he lost some teeth. He was one of the firefighters injured trying to put out the fire that actually caused the explosion. He is nearly 100 percent.
Is it boring since all the chaos and busyness have ended?
I guess it did seem a little eerily quiet for a while there. We were pretty crazy busy from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. for many, many weeks. Literally hundreds of people were in and out of the church every day. Once things settled down and people had their needs met and it got really quiet, it was another adjustment we had to go through…. That adrenaline gets pumping and it stays pumping day after day, and your body has to readjust to normal levels and heart rates and you calm down to a normal way of living. But … I would always rather move from chaos to peace than from peace to chaos.
How is West as a whole?
Physically, we are almost fully recovered. There’s a little more work to do on the infrastructure, water and sewers, just a few weeks from that. We had to rebuild our high school and middle school. That’s going to be finished in June. Emotionally, I think we were stronger than we were before the disaster. We work together better, we communicate, there is a more positive outlook. There are concerns for specific individuals. There are folks who still and probably always will have some form of PTSD. Some of those have been diagnosed. When there are loud noises you can see people jump. You can still sense just a little bit of anxiety when something doesn’t go right.
Do you ever miss the media attention that followed the disaster?
No. Not at all. We were very grateful for the response from the media…. The media helped folks know how to meet our needs. We were able to accomplish two big things: to receive the various kinds of donations we needed and to say, ‘look what God is going to do here.’ Once we got through that, we were glad to see the media go and to not be in the spotlight any more.
Why did you decide to volunteer with BGCT disaster recovery?
Back when my world was all fuzzy, one of the leaders from that disaster recovery team called me and asked to get in touch with a pastor in the western part of Texas where there had been a disaster, and I never did make that connection. And that weighed on me…. And just recently after a tornado hit Rowlett, Texas, (Director) David Scott called me and asked me to go and see a pastor at Rowlett who said he didn’t know what to do next….
How is this going to work?
On my way to Rowlett … all this information came to mind that I had learned from our disaster. It came together in a very simple format that you can put on paper and I thought wouldn’t it be great if I could pass that along to others? But I also realized I can learn from him…. In each disaster the pastor has to recreate the wheel, but what if we pass on what we know? If we do that, we can recover more quickly.
What are the basics you will be sharing?
The biggest thing that folks need to understand about disasters is that there are two phases to recovery. There is the short term disaster relief and the long term disaster recovery…. I want to show up right after the disaster and talk to the pastor about the first phase. That’s when the volunteer organizations are going to start showing up. Pastors need to know how they can figure out which group shows up and what role they take. And I want to talk to the pastor about how he’s doing physically spiritually, emotionally. Then we need to go back and talk about the second phase and that’s where he needs to look at his relationships with this community, his church and his family.
How are those relationships for you now?
I have been very blessed with an incredibly supportive family. I have always had a strong relationship with my church — we work well together. The community is primarily a Catholic community, so while I had a good relationship with them before, I don’t think I was considered a leader or someone they would turn to in a time of need. That changed in that time of need. They were able to recognize they could trust me.
Looking back, was the explosion a good thing or a bad thing?
The explosion was a terrible thing … but God was bigger than even that terrible explosion. He can work in it and through it to bring about good for his glory. And that’s what I think we are experiencing three years out.