Putting Ministry on the Front Lines

Written by Tony Perkins | Homeland Security is used to handling disasters. But no one ever imagined anything like this. Even FEMA, who’s the first government team on the ground after a catastrophe, is usually only juggling three or four states at a time. Now imagine every county, every American territory, in a state of emergency, Acting Secretary Chad Wolf says. “It’s like a Category 5 tornado hitting all 50 states at the same time.” And without churches and charities on the front lines, who knows where our country would be?

“I’ve been with the department for some time now,” Secretary Wolf told a group of pastors on an FRC conference call Friday. He was there in 2017 during those devastating hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. “And what I saw as we responded, and FEMA responded… is the federal government can provide a role. But it’s really the nonprofits, it’s the faith-based organizations, that come out in force providing anything from housing to essential goods, food, water, shelter. [They are] the backbone of that response that really helps individual states and individual communities respond.” That outreach has never been more critical to America’s survival than now. So “thank you,” he insisted. “Our country needs and values you.”

And not just to meet the physical needs, as his agency well knows, but the spiritual too. The grief of a nation trying to cope with tens of thousands of losses is overwhelming. Patients are dying alone. Bodies are being ravaged by an enemy no doctor understands. Then there are the hospital staffs, bone-weary and traumatized by the faces they can’t forget. “Where is God in this?” one nurse asked a chaplain, crying. “Right here,” Kaitlyn Butler reassured her, “crying with us.”