When disaster strikes in Attala County, the Attala Baptist Disaster Relief Team responds by providing spiritual assistance, clean-up and more.
The Attala Baptist Disaster Relief Team is part of Mississippi Disaster Relief. Every state in the Southern Baptist Convention has a disaster relief team. The relief teams were organized after a natural disaster in Texas, when a church member installed a portable kitchen in the back of his pickup truck and made meals for people affected by the disaster. It grew from there into a feeding ministry and now offers relief through other functions as well, including chaplaincy, damage assessment and clean-up, covering roof damage with tarps, chainsaw operation, child care, food trailers, and shower and laundry trailers.
The Attala Baptist Disaster Relief Team currently has around 25 members. They have the responsibility of assessing local damage and determining if they can handle the damage themselves or if they need to request assistance from the state disaster relief team. If the state disaster relief team is dispatched but additional assistance is still needed, they can request help from other states.
“It’s a well-organized team of folks,” said Ray Johnson, the coordinator for the Attala Baptist Disaster Relief Team.
The relief team responds to local disasters and can be dispatched by the state organization to other county or state disaster situations.
“The definition that we have operated under is that a disaster is anything that causes a significant disruption to people. And it doesn’t have to be a whole city or a whole county or a whole state; it could be a very small number of people, or just one family,” said Johnson. “Somebody could have a tree on their house, and we would respond. By that definition, it would be their disaster.”
Chaplaincy and damage assessment are the first functions the team focuses on when arriving at a disaster site.
“The task of that is to give spiritual assistance for people who are under stress and to assess what the needs are and make a determination of what resources need to be applied to help them,” Johnson explained.
The relief teams perform services such as removing fallen trees from houses and placing tarps on damaged roofs, but they do not do any reconstructive work.
The function that the Attala Baptist Disaster Relief Team is best equipped for is the chainsaw ministry.
“We have a trailer we’ve had for a number of years that has multiple chainsaws in it, and the equipment that we need to run those saws, that we can pull to a distant site,” explained Johnson.
They also now have a brand-new skid-steer and trailer that they received this year from a donor who wishes to remain anonymous.
Feeding people affected by the disaster is a primary function of the relief team after many large-scale disasters.
“Feeding people is a significant thing,” said Johnson. “A lot of people just don’t have any way to get food. Mississippi, and I think most every other state agency, has trailers that we can pull to the site and prepare meals. Each one of our trailers can prepare more than 10,000 meals a day.”
Another function provided at large-scale disaster areas is supplying trailers where both volunteers and people affected by the disaster can shower and wash their laundry. A child care ministry is also a function provided.
Johnson pointed out that volunteers are not expected to help after every disaster and that it is possible to only work at local disasters.
“It is a volunteer situation and not everybody is going to be able to go every time. And there are people who volunteer who only work locally. They don’t have the ability to go and spend a week in Florida like the members of my team did who went down there. So, there are all sorts of different things that you can do to make a contribution to the community and to the people who are in need, but you don’t have to try to do everything, every time, all the time.”
He also pointed out that a lot of the work done locally could be done on weekends or weekday evenings.
Johnson joined Mississippi Disaster Relief in 2017 and joined the Attala Baptist Disaster Relief Team in 2018, where he has been the coordinator since 2021. He said one of the most rewarding aspects of volunteering has been “the gratitude you see from the people you help, who just did not have any idea that people would go and do that. We always get a question: why do you do this? Basically, we do it because Jesus told us to.”
Those who are interested in volunteering with the Attala Baptist Disaster Relief Team must be a member of a Southern Baptist Church in Attala County and must pass a background check. They can contact Johnson at 512-563-1176 or at rjohnson131@gmail.com.
Those who would like to help but are unable to volunteer can send monetary donations to The Attala Baptist Association, 209 Woodland Drive, Kosciusko, MS 39090 and designate that it is intended for disaster relief. Fuel and equipment used are all funded by contributions. Most of the ingredients used for the meals prepared are funded by The Red Cross.
