(Lakeland, Florida) Pastor Aaron Burgner, senior pastor at Lakes Church in Lakeland, Florida says he's blessed to be a part of a very prepared denomination.
When Hurricane Milton was forecast to hit the Florida coast, local officials didn't think it would impact Lakeland (25 miles inland) with flooding and wind damage. There weren't any evacuation orders, so many stayed in their home and woke up to widespread flooding and devastation.
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Pastor Aaron explains, "We're Southern Baptists and so we have 45,000 churches that cooperate together across the country and 3,000 churches in our state that cooperate together and each state typically has a disaster relief program. The Kentucky Baptist Convention sent down their relief team to partner with our church so we have about 300-plus volunteers that are here everyday.
We're preparing hot meals everyday, so about 10,000 meals every day to our community and the surrounding areas.
We partner with the Salvation Army and they actually come to our church and pick up 10,000 meals a day and bring them out to hot spots where people are hurting real bad.
We also have between 1,500-2,000 people drive through our church parking lot as well. It's pretty large in scale. We also have teams mudding out houses and cutting out drywall and putting tarps on roofs...trying to get their house in a good spot so that hopefully when insurance kicks in, they're able to get repairs done.
It's been a blessing to see all the people who've been involved from different ministries, different kingdom ministries just willing to serve the people of our community.
There have been a lot of people who are living in their car and it's really sad to see that but at the same time, it's been a huge blessing to be able to give them a hot meal and share the love of Christ with them but also to see our church...but also people who aren't part of our church but just kind of jumped on board just rally together to say we love you and Christ loves us and He's loved us well and we want to show that love to you."
