This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 20, 2009 - In early March, the Rev. Matthew Bonk placed a green hard hat over his dark hair and stepped into the church he's never officially preached in as pastor.
Saws whirred. Hammers rapped. Music from a radio station filled the space with modern clatter.
He doesn't come here much, maybe once a week or so to see how things are coming. But each week, Saint Alphonsus Rock Church at 1118 N. Grand in north St. Louis comes back a little more.
Now, through fire and water, sawdust and scaffolding, prayers in a gym, people leaving, people coming, he's found hope for his church and his community that only destruction and resurrection could bring.
And, like so many believers before him, Bonk looks forward to Easter this year. He's planning it as the church's first Sunday service back in the church.
FLASH
Aug. 16, 2007, kept Bonk, the church's new pastor, busy unpacking boxes. Outside his new room, the afternoon sky stretched cloudy and humid. He saw no storm clouds. In a T-shirt and shorts, he placed books into his bookshelf.
Around 3 that afternoon, several things happened at once. The hairs on his arms stood up. Lightning and thunder struck. The lights went dark.
Bonk looked out his window, making sure no trees had been struck. That was close, he thought. About 15 minutes later, someone started shouting.
"There's a fire! There's a fire!"
Bonk ran outside. When he looked into the sky, black smoke puffed high from the church's middle steeple and fire fanned out from the bell tower.
He could only stand and watch.
A group of parishioners had gathered in the parking lot across the street, crying, staring. He noticed them for the first time.
Why don't you go and pray with your people, someone said?
And so they prayed, cameras from local news stations filming, people from the community gathering on the sidewalk to watch the fire, the new pastor, looking more prepared for yard work than crisis leadership, questioning why and how and feeling abandoned by the very source that brought him here.
Lord, they prayed, help us.
REBUILDING
Though they prayed for help, after the fire, many from the Rock Church helped themselves.
Nearly every day since, parishioner Mark Kamp has arrived with workers from his company, Wachter Inc. Construction Services, which took on the work right away, not waiting for approval from insurance and not worrying about the cost.
Kamp formed a plan, found an architect, a structural engineer and slowly began surveying all the damage.
"Nobody that has worked on this project has seen anything like it because it's 140-years-old," he says.
How could they rebuild the roof when they'd never worked with those methods or materials? No one knew where to start, but cleanup took up most of their time anyway.
Then, in early September of that year, Kamp got a call from the Rev. Kyle Fisher, a Redemptorist in residence. While digging through some old documents, he found the original roof plans from 1862.
Kamp called the architect. "I said, now, now what can you do?"
Now, the architect replied, I can do the job.
And Kamp returned to all of his jobs. After several trials, he created a temporary roof out of plywood to shield the church from more harm. The electrical system had to be moved. Workers found lead-based paint everywhere and had to abate the walls and ceilings and plaster everything again.
And all that water that had extinguished the fire and should have filled the church the next day left only puddles. Kamp found it in the trenches under the church, where it had collapsed the asbestos-filled dirt walls and contaminated the soil. It also was beginning to erode the stone footings of the church's columns. Those had to be rebuilt.
Many, many times, it would have made more sense to tear the whole church down, Kamp thought to himself.
Instead, he kept right on rebuilding.
O, BROTHER
Like rebuilding the church itself, each day has been full of work and faith in things unseen for Kamp, Bonk and parishioners.
"But we get through, day by day," Bonk says
After moving to the gym for services, though, some people haven't stuck around.
"It's not a sacred space," Bonk says. "Even though we've tried to make it look like one, we all know that it's not."
During the leadership of the Rev. Maurice Nutt, attendance often swelled to between 800 to 900 people. (Nutt left in 2001 under a cloud of scandal.) Now, it's about 500.
But for the people who've remained, the heart of their church has been revealed.
"The church was a beautiful structure," says Garnetta Thames, a member of the parish council. "But it's not the building that makes the church, makes you praise God. It's getting together as a church community and praising God."
Thames feels certain the people who left will, ultimately, return.
"It's my belief that we can actually, in the end, say that we've lost nothing," Bonk agrees. "We've lost some time, probably lost some money."
But even that seems minimal, considering the overall cost.
When reconstruction is complete, Bonk thinks the final price tag will be between $10 million and $11 million. What insurance hasn't covered, $100,000 from the archdiocese helps with. In the end, Bonk thinks the church may owe no more than $11,000.
What's found, what he's learned, seems far more significant to him.
"I sort of see our church as a symbol of our neighborhood," he says. "Our neighborhood was run down, poor, high crime, just really a scary place."
Like the church, it reached a low point before beginning to rise again.
"This area is experiencing something of a renaissance," the Rev. Bonk says. "And I think it's interesting that we had the fire (and) are now being completely rebuilt."
For both, he thinks, it's a sign of hope, which he's seen in force from his parishioners, about 75 percent of whom are African American.
"African Americans have had a very difficult history in our country, obviously," he says. "And one of the things that has been really (apparent) to me is the way my parishioners deal with hardship. I mean, they handle it better than me."
There's resilience in the very being of his congregation, he thinks.
Whatever their race, they've all been tested -- in faith, in patience, in finding new ways to rebuild the old.
"The Rock is a rock," says Ruth Jones, a church elder who joined the congregation in 1966. "And it's a beacon for the city and I didn't think it was ever gonna go down, and as you can see, it didn't."
Jones toured the church once, shortly after the fire. It was heart-wrenching, she says, but she saw the possibilities.
Today, those possibilities are nearly realized. The ceiling rises in blue arches overhead. Light shines through stained glass. Near a statue of a saint, an orange ladder rests against the wall.
Soon, the scaffolding will come down. Kamp, Thames, Jones and their church family will return to their pews. The choir will stand and sing. And Bonk will deliver a message of hope, rebirth and the promise of better things to come.
The Rock in time
1867 – The first limestone cornerstone is placed at Grand and Cook avenues
1887 – The Rev. Augustus Tolton, the region's first black Roman Catholic priest, visits
1945 – Archbishop Joseph Cardinal Ritter issues a directive calling for the end to segregation of churches and schools in St. Louis. The congregation of St. Clements, a black parish, is incorporated into the Rock Church
1967 – The Rock Church celebrates 100 years
2007 – On Aug. 16, the church is struck by a bolt of lightning
2009 – Church is expected to reopen on Easter Sunday