Southwest Florida churches recover after facing three hurricanes in 2022, 2024

[Episcopal News Service] Members of St. Raphael’s Episcopal Church in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, were thrilled when they finally were able to celebrate St. Raphael’s Day in their nave in late October. The church had finished rebuilding more than three years after Hurricane Ian, a strong Category 4 storm, hit just north of the town that is located on Estero Island, a 1.5-mile-wide barrier island off the west coast of Florida, on Sept. 28, 2022.

Like three other Episcopal churches in low-lying areas across the Episcopal Diocese of Southwest Florida, St. Raphael’s was forced out of its building entirely by Ian. While wind did some damage, the real culprit was the water surge coming from the Gulf of Mexico, the Rev. Michael Rowe, told Episcopal News Service. The building’s walls were left standing, but the interior was flooded and had to be completely gutted.

Many other buildings on the island, including homes, hotels and businesses, suffered the same kind of damage. The older the structure, the more damage it had, Rowe said, since current hurricane remediation efforts like strong seals around doors and windows weren’t in place.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, St. Raphael’s congregation first met for worship in a hotel, then outdoors. Once the parish hall was structurally sound, they worshiped there on Sundays, without plumbing or electricity, while contractors worked in the space on weekdays.

Rowe said members decided to start repair work on the parish hall first, rather than the church nave, so it could be used by others in the community who relied on the space for events, like the regular meeting of the town’s Lions Club, as well as St. Raphael’s popular shrimp dinners served several times during the year.

The parish hall and kitchen were fully restored this summer.

At the same time, the Parrish-based diocese was figuring out how to reallocate its resources to help meet the needs of its congregations, Bishop Douglas Scharf told ENS. He had been consecrated as bishop coadjutor just four days before Ian hit the diocese, when he, then-Bishop Dabney Smith, and diocesan staff started working to help churches find other places to meet and ways to begin repairing their buildings, while also providing pastoral care to clergy.

Damage from Ian prompted 24 churches to apply for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, according to information provided to ENS. The diocese paid consultants to help church leaders fill out those claims applications, and decided to cover the insurance deductibles for affected churches and to waive their diocesan apportionment payments.

That support was a way for the diocese to provide a cushion to affected parishes, Scharf said, and free up money for needs beyond rebuilding. “These are resources that can go back into your local community and its needs,” he said.

Both Scharf and Rowe said storm recovery was especially difficult in places where so many had suffered severe damage, including parishioners, clergy and the businesses that churches normally would rely on for rebuilding help.

St. Raphael’s is one of the 45 churches in the diocese – out of a total of 75 congregations – that suffered damage either from Hurricane Ian or the two major hurricanes that struck the area two weeks apart in the fall of 2024 – Helene on Sept. 26 and Milton on Oct. 9.

One church, Annunciation in Holmes Beach, was displaced by Helene and then suffered further damage from Milton, according to information from the diocese. Four churches that were damaged by Ian in 2022 filed FEMA claims again in 2024, stemming from either Helene or Milton. In all, seven churches were displaced from their buildings because of hurricane damage over the span of 25 months. A total of 43 churches applied for FEMA aid.

Milton also damaged the diocese’s Dayspring Camp and Conference Center in Parrish, as well as the Diocesan House, forcing staff out of their offices for four months.

Scharf, who grew up in the diocese, called the impact of three major hurricanes on local Episcopal congregations “unique and unprecedented” in scale. He said that Hurricane Charley in 2004 damaged three or four churches, and Hurricane Irma did about the same amount of damage in 2017. But what happened across the diocese in 2022 and 2024 was vastly different.

Another church badly damaged by Ian, St. Michael and All Angels in Sanibel, also made repairs to its parish hall a priority over its worship space to better serve its neighbors, Scharf said, just as St. Raphael’s had. St. Michael’s returned to its regular worship space for Christmas 2023.

To provide hurricane-affected churches with more resources to both rebuild and help serve their neighbors, the diocese waived their apportionment payments in 2022 and again in 2024. That saved churches about $400,000, but it also meant lost income for the diocese.

More than $800,000 in donations came into the diocesan office, as well as $350,000 in grants from Episcopal Relief & Development to help people around the diocese. Scharf called working with the agency “a really, really transformational partnership.” All of that money, and more, was used to help parishioners and others across the area,

The diocese twice asked for, and received, waivers of a part of its assessment paid to The Episcopal Church because of its high hurricane-related expenses. In 2023, Executive Council granted $100,000 in relief, and it provided a waiver of $150,000 in 2025.

Over the three years it took for St. Raphael’s to get back into its worship space – the last storm-damaged church in the diocese to do so – Rowe has seen a change in who calls the area home. For decades, it had been filled with people who lived there seasonally or were primarily working-class, full-time residents in smaller homes along the beach.

But Ian damaged some properties beyond restoration, and others were swept away entirely in the tidal surge, further reducing the number of homes available.

New structures must also comply with the increased costs of hurricane mitigation building codes. “Florida is very good at dealing with hurricanes,” Rowe said. “By and large, wind does not cause all that much damage. But it’s water surge… that damages most buildings. It destroys the interiors.”

Houses in the area now must be built with their living spaces 12-to-15 feet off the ground, with walls that collapse easily so floodwater can rush through the structure.

Together, all these factors mean that lots are now selling for upwards of a million dollars, he said. For many people who lost their homes entirely, the cost to rebuild often is more than they can absorb, so it’s now folks with money who are moving in, which he called “a noticeable shift we’re all seeing.”

For the diocese, Scharf said that despite the destruction wrought by the three hurricanes, efforts to aid parish recovery helped people see the church’s mission anew.

“It set a certain trajectory in terms of focus and unifying the diocese around partnership, and recognizing that common mission is what unites us, especially in times of crisis,” he said. “Our whole mission is ‘equipping’ and ‘empowering,’ and our vision is around ‘partnership’ and ‘oneness,’ and we actually got to live that out in some meaningful ways.”

— Melodie Woerman is an Episcopal News Service freelance reporter based in Kansas.