Men from Ironton church reach out to storm-ravaged city

The city of Moulton, Ala., has a population of less than 4,000. Since April the town has suffered more destruction per square foot than it has seen in its 200 years of existence.

It is also the hometown of Jeremy Sherrill who now pastors the Greater Faith Apostolic Church in Ironton. Ironically Sherrill left Lawrence County, Ala., where his father pastors Harvestfield United Pentecostal to come to Lawrence County, Ohio, to do the same kind of work.

So when massive twisters pounded Moulton, Sherrill and 10 men from the Ironton church were quick to answer a cry for help.

“All families were impacted, but three families suffered total loss,” Sherrill said. “We focused on them. It is one thing to see a photograph. But to see it in person, being directly affected, it affects you in a way that a picture can’t.”

Everywhere the men saw piles of lumber that had once been houses, metal blown up on roofs, cars turned upside down and downed trees like a forest on its side.

“It is a lot of farming and flatland. There were a lot of chicken houses and barns just wiped off,” he said. “People’s careers, businesses just gone.”

The destruction was so intense and widespread that a once familiar landscape has been transformed into an unknown place.

“It didn’t look like my home,” Sherrill said. “It was just a troubling sight.”

In the four days the men lived as guests of the elder Sherrill’s church, they put in 10-hour days doing basic cleaning so homeowners could be ready for contractors to evaluate homes and try to recover.

One family who got the men’s help was a first cousin of Sherrill whose wife was expecting their first child. The young couple had just finished their new home when the storm hit.

“All the work they had put into it, it brought it back to ground level,” Sherrill said.

The cousin had gone to work and his wife got into a storm shelter with friends when word came a severe storm was coming. When he tried to get back to his house, all he saw was the remnants of the tornado’s ferocity.

“Their neighbor’s pontoon and horse trailer were mangled together on the road,” Sherrill said.

Gene Brown, Greater Faith’s outreach pastor, was stunned to see how discriminating the storm’s destruction was.

“It was mainly unbelievable,” Brown said. “There would be two houses completely destroyed. The next one with just a few shingles off of it. All those people went through all that stuff, but they seemed to be in good spirits.”

And it was that resilient spirit that the men have brought back home with them after their trip down South.

“The Bible says it rains on the just and the unjust,” Sherrill said. “We all have to go through suffering. We don’t understand but the Bible says all things work together for good for them called to his purpose. People have stepped up to help. People as far as Pennsylvania. They came down to help. We went down to be a blessing, but I think we received a bigger blessing. You try to help somebody and you can’t help but be helped.”