In the final days of September 2024, a hurricane making landfall 500 miles away from Asheville, North Carolina, was about to forever change this city nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Hurricane Helene initially hit the coast of Florida, but as it continued to travel upward it would eventually drop 30 inches of rain on Asheville, causing catastrophic flooding and mudslides. Much of the area was left without electricity and running water for weeks. Approximately 80 percent of the city’s art galleries were destroyed.
“We first experienced flooding in our basement,” recalled Gary Ball, a Trevecca alumnus who serves as an Anglican rector in Asheville. “Then the electricity went out. A giant oak tree fell and clipped our chimney and landed on our front porch.”
Overall, Ball says his home was spared from some of the more severe damage that many residents in his area experienced. The building that houses the church and Christian school he helped start after moving to Asheville in 2013 was also still functional.
“On the first Sunday after the storm I thought, ‘I’m just going to open the church and see what happens,’” Ball said. “We didn’t have flushing toilets or electricity. But between 50 and 100 people showed up. We just wept together.”
The congregation that gathered in Ball’s church following the storm began as a church plant more than a decade ago in West Asheville, just a mile from the River Arts District where the majority of the city’s art galleries were located.
Ball and his wife, Susannah, met at Trevecca and served in several Nazarene pastoral roles in central and west Tennessee before moving to California in the early 2000s. While on the west coast, Ball says he became intrigued by the liturgy and sacraments of the Anglican church.
“Wesley was an Anglican, and the more I leaned into my Wesleyan heritage, the more interested I became in Anglicanism,” Ball said. “I’m drawn to it because there’s such an aesthetic element to the way we worship that includes an acknowledgement of God appealing to all our senses.”
Ball met with an Anglican bishop who wanted to start a church in Asheville. “What was interesting to me was my connection to the arts,” Ball shared.
In addition to being a pastor, Ball is an established watercolor painter. He felt drawn to the art culture in Asheville and had a heart to serve the community there.
Over time, Ball’s new church, Redeemer Anglican, began drawing other creatives. “We started with a few people in my living room,” Ball said. “Now we probably average about 220 people on Sundays between our Asheville church and a second location about 20 minutes away on Black Mountain.”
Ball says half the church is younger than 21. “A lot of young people are drawn to traditional churches right now,” he said. “We have those who’ve walked away from the church and are coming back, as well as those moving to the area. Our church reflects the creative culture of the city. We have a lot of artists and those interested in homesteading.”
Ball and his wife aren’t the only Trevecca alumni making an impact in the area. When the couple decided to move to Asheville, they invited some of their Trevecca friends and former classmates to link arms with them in ministry.
Kristina Sanford and her husband, Chris, decided to join. Kristina helped launch Canterbury Classical School, a ministry of the church, in 2015 and has been a teacher there since the beginning.
Wes and Bonnie Furlong, two more former Trevecca students who met at the University and later married, moved to Asheville in 2019. Bonnie, who currently serves as Canterbury’s grammar school principal, attended Trevecca for two years before finishing her bachelor’s degree at Mercer University.
“We have a lot of shared experiences,” Ball said of the alumni now working alongside him. “There is a deep bond because of our past.”
Bonnie Furlong, who has a background in both social work and education, taught at Canterbury for three years and last year became principal. She was only two months into her new role when the flooding from Helene shut down the school for several weeks.
Some of her students witnessed cars and homes being washed away by floodwater. It was particularly difficult for the children who were old enough to have also experienced the effects of the pandemic.
“Sometimes it’s easy to forget what these kids have been through,” she said. She was grateful to have used her training in crisis intervention to bring in counselors and therapy dogs as soon as the K-12 school was able to reopen several weeks after the storm.
In the days immediately following the flood, the shared building space of Redeemer and Canterbury was transformed into a distribution center for donated grocery and toiletry items that were transported through only one of the four highways that remained accessible after the storm.
“We came to the church and just started serving,” Ball said of his family and the other alumni who are part of the church and school. “We became a grocery store for our neighbors because all the other nearby stores were shut down. By nighttime, all the supplies would be gone and the next day someone would arrive and the space would fill back up.”
“The response of our surrounding communities was incredible,” added Furlong, who also volunteered until the school could reopen. “Our kindergarten classroom became a room filled with diapers, wipes and formula. People were desperate for those kinds of things.”
“Volunteers showed up with generators, chainsaws and 400 gallons of gasoline,” Ball said.
They also received huge amounts of donated bottled water. It would be six weeks before the community had safe drinking water restored.
“It felt like a third world country,” Ball said. “FEMA and the National Guard were not here right away. But that gave us the chance to step up. I’m really grateful for the opportunity we had to serve.”
Furlong added, “Being able to be with people and see the best of humanity in those situations kept us going.”
The church also quickly connected with Mercy Chefs, a faith-based relief organization that prepares meals for those affected by natural disasters.
“We served 1,000 meals a day for three weeks in front of our church,” Ball said. “On the last day, someone from the community came up to me and said: ‘I want you to know we see you. We know you’ve been here since day one. The neighbors are really grateful for all you’ve done.’”
Those words meant the world to Ball. “Our neighbors don’t typically think highly of churches or Christianity,” he said.
“West Asheville is very secular,” Furlong explained. “The church and the school are like a city on a hill. Our mission is to be that kind of light.”
“It feels like perhaps we moved here 11 years ago for this moment,” Ball added. “It felt divinely arranged that we would be here to minister to people in the midst of this difficult season.
Read more about Ball’s art and his work to assist local artists.→