‘I’m sorry to tell you, but your church is on fire.”
Manuel Florescu was up at 3:15 a.m. Thursday with his wife, Leslie, and youngest of six children, 2-year-old Sorin, when he got a call from the Troy Police Department in Michigan.
An officer had smelled smoke and discovered ablaze the 71-year-old meeting place of the Troy Church of Christ where Florescu has preached for 16 years.
Maisie Konwinski, a 911 dispatcher who lives nearby, recognized the name of the church and shared Florescu’s number with the officer.
The minister immediately made the 3-mile drive from his home to find the parking lot full of fire engines and firefighters battling the blaze.
Flames burst from the Troy church lobby.
“I couldn’t see any fire,” he said. “There was just huge smoke coming from everywhere around the building and from the eaves of the roof.”
In another 15 minutes, Florescu recalled, flames burst through the roof, which soon collapsed — just after the responders inside had retreated.
Firefighters battle the Troy church fire into daybreak.
Firefighters continued spraying their hoses from the ground and bucket trucks for more than four hours to get the inferno under control, the preacher said.
He wasn’t allowed to enter, but looking through windows and using a drone camera, Florescu was able to see the building’s condition inside.
The Troy church’s lobby lay in ruin after the fire.
“Everything is just charred and and gone,” he told The Christian Chronicle, but no one was injured in the inferno.
The congregation was in the midst of its VBS week, which was scheduled to resume just a few hours later.
Investigators have not determined the cause of the fire, but they seemed to suspect that it originated from a storage room beside the baptistery and above the electrical service panels, Florescu said.
The insurance claim has also not been settled, but the preacher said it appeared to be a total loss and did not expect sufficient payout to rebuild. Smoke also enveloped the nearby church parsonage, but the custodian who lives there made it out safely.
For the next couple days, Florescu set up a lawn chair in front of the building and stayed there to meet members and others who came to see the damage.
The minister described the roller coaster of emotions he and his fellow church members have felt.
Children participate in the Troy church’s VBS before the building fire.
“I saw the fact that they would be one moment encouraging others, and then the next moment I could see that their eyes were teary as they were looking at the building,” he said. “But overall, I believe every single one of them is positive, and they are motivated and resilient in in their faith to go forward.”
Ron Palmer has been a lifelong member — his father helped found the congregation. “My kids grew up here; My daughter was married here,” Palmer told Detroit’s Local 4 News. “We built this church from the ground up.”
But “God is still in control,” he added. “He will make beauty out of the ashes.”
Manuel Florescu preachers under a tent on the Troy church property after the building was destroyed.
The 58-member church met under a tent on the grounds the following Sunday.
Florescu preached a sermon about keeping focus on being together and fulfilling the church’s mission.
“There are still people in Troy that are hurting,” he said in his message. “There are still people that need the truth. There are still people that that need guiding choice. So the mission has not changed. The circumstances have changed a little bit, and we have to continue because we are one body.”
Communion was a little different that morning: In place of small pieces of bread and individually filled cups, one piece of bread broken after prayer and a pitcher of grape juice poured into empty cups in the hands of believers.
“I told them sometimes we don’t realize, but we hang on to different things,” Florescu recalled. “So if this morning we hang on to any type of resentment and pride and whatever else, we need to let it go so that God can fill us, just like we want these cups filled. … So I try to bring as much of a of an image into their minds as possible to comfort them and to give them hope.”
Members of the Troy Church of Christ worship together after their building burned.
The preacher wonders if, perhaps providentially, the building’s destruction may accelerate the church’s 10-year plan to become more of a neighborhood, house church.
For now, the church hopes to rent the nearby Kilgour Scottish Centre for Sunday morning worship, while visiting other nearby congregations and a local nursing home on Sunday afternoons and meeting in small groups in members’ homes on Wednesdays.
“I’m really terrified of the process ahead of us,” Florescu said. “I trust God that he’s going to reveal to us what steps to take when those steps are going to be necessary. But … it’s a lot that’s going through my mind right now.”
CALVIN COCKRELL is Managing Editor for The Christian Chronicle and serves as the young adult minister for the North Tuscaloosa Church of Christ in Alabama. Reach him at calvin@christianchronicle.org.
