PUEBLO, Colo. — The Aspen Acres fire increased in size by 2,000 acres on Sunday, July 5, bringing the total to more than 89,000 blackened acres affecting three Southern Baptist churches near the San Isabel National Forest southwest of Pueblo, in Beulah, Rye and Colorado City. Evacuations affected about 11,000 area residents — 3,800 homes — before Sunday’s additional evacuations were announced for Coal Creek, Williamsburg and Rockvale.

“I’m thinking we’re going to make it, but yesterday it was a block away,” said Paul Okins, pastor of Greenhorn Valley Baptist Church in Rye. One of the church’s families living near the Aspen Acres campground (where the apparently human-caused fire started) lost their home, he added.

Sixty percent of the families attending Grand View Baptist Church in Beulah lost their homes, Pastor Issac Cowger said. Firefighters saved the church and parsonage, but two outbuildings — including a big barn — were destroyed.

“We were right in the line of fire on day one,” Cowger said about last Monday, June 29. “It came so fast. We were at breakfast, and 15 minutes after they told us we might have to evacuate, they told us to evacuate.”

Bill Burnett, pastor of Mountain View Family Church in Colorado City, didn’t speak of the losses any of the church’s members might have suffered — the church meets in a storefront in town — but instead asked for prayer.

“For those who want to pray for us, pray for us to have gospel conversations when we can return,” Burnett said. “Pray for us to be changed, to be more like Christ through this time of difficulty.”

Aspen Acres is the largest of five major fires burning Colorado over the last week that together “have scorched more than 190,000 acres, or 297 square miles. That’s nearly twice the size of Denver,” according to a Sunday (July 5) article in the Denver Post.

Dennis Belz, Colorado Baptists’ Disaster Relief director, plans to be in the affected area near Pueblo on Tuesday (July 7). Last week he was in Kittredge, Colo., as part of a team of 10 working on 11 houses flooded after a storm dumped 6 inches of rain in two hours.

“We’ve got our plans made. We’re staging equipment outside Beulah,” Belz said. “We’ll start by setting up a command center for the assessors and work with the county emergency manager to start cleanup.”

The needs are huge. Many people are left with just the clothes on their back. Many people have no homeowner’s insurance.

“This fire is just gigantic, absolutely devastating,” Nathan Anderson told Baptist Press. He’s a firefighter and a member of Grand View Beulah. “Half the houses in the valley are gone. Eighty percent of the ground in the valley is black.

“Aspen Acres actually is 12 miles over the ridge, so it wasn’t super close,” Anderson said about that first morning. “The first call — for agency assistance — came in about 6 a.m., and we sent two trucks. They obviously needed help because at 8 a.m. the station call came for all personnel.

“It was up on the mountain,” the firefighter continued. “We watched it come down super fast. Jumped across Signal Mountain.”

“All we did that day was structure protection,” said Anderson, speaking for the local firefighting unit of 23. “A lot of trying and not a lot of succeeding. Listening to all the propane tanks go off around you, 500- or 1,000-gallon tanks that look like a pill capsule. Most went off with a great big geyser of fire, but some were very old and just exploded.”

Bombarded all week with devastating fire news, the evacuees by week’s end were dulled by the emotions they’d been experiencing. Sunday helped.  

Other churches in Royal Gorge Baptist Association opened their doors yesterday (July 5) to members of the affected churches. 

“It was truly just a flat-out worship service,” said Lonnie Hartke, pastor of Lynn Gardens Baptist Church in Pueblo, which welcomed Grand View Baptist members. “We had about 70-80 people. A couple ladies led in worship. Their associate pastor Forrest Knaus shared words of encouragement. I shared a bit on where our hope is found, and our responsibility is to be the light and hope to those we’re coming in contact with.

“We spent the last 20 minutes in corporate prayer, with one person praying and then someone else from the congregation,” Hartke continued. “It was a really good time of prayer.”

Greenhorn Valley Baptist Church members yesterday visited The Avenue church in Pueblo. Steel City Fellowship in Pueblo has invited Greenhorn to use its building this Wednesday for a men’s fellowship, and Lynn Gardens has invited the church to stream from its building so evacuees scattered near and far will be able to tune in to their own church’s services.

The Grand View group followed church with lunch at Pizza Ranch, donated by a local business owner. The Mountainview group met at Steel City Church and shared a fellowship meal after with Steel City members.

“We’re trying to get some normalcy,” Okins said. “All the churches in the Colorado Baptist Convention have been supportive, and we know when you’re in crisis mode, the thing to do is get back in your routine.

“We took our youth group yesterday (Saturday) to the trampoline park. My kids were rambunctious and needing to get out of the house, so I made some calls to not just our church (families) but to anyone our churches know of who are displaced in the Pueblo area. The kids had fun, got rid of some energy, and I gave a short message: Trust God and see how it can go. We had 10 kids and parents.”

All three pastors spoke of the support they’ve been given by Royal Gorge Baptist Association, the 23 churches in the association and the Colorado Baptist General Convention, known informally as Colorado Baptists.

“It’s the church family at large, you know,” Okins said. “When something like this happens, people look to the church for answers. I couldn’t say enough good things about the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). It’s so encouraging to be part of it.”

Brett Lutz is a pastor at Aberdeen Baptist Church in Pueblo who went to the SBC pastors’ Facebook page to request prayer for the people affected by the Aspen Acres fire.

“There are 19,000 people displaced from their home, 200 structures,” Lutz said. “Most don’t have property insurance because of this very thing, the likelihood of fires and catastrophic loss. There will be so many families returning to nothing, people who don’t have any way of recovery because they don’t have a homeowner’s policy.

“No lives lost yet,” Lutz continued. “Only material possessions have been lost. We cry with them at the devastation still ongoing. A lot is being done apart from the gospel. Issac (Cowger) has a real burden for the people, and because he has a burden, I have a burden. I want the Bible-believing churches here to love on the hurting and lost and as a result see a revitalization of the gospel message in people’s lives.”

The affected churches, knowing their communities, all are working to help their neighbors now and when the evacuation orders are lifted but, “With the fire still so active, it’s hard to plan anything,” said Hartke.

Cowger said though the fire has been devastating, he trusts good can come from it.

“Our community is going to come back stronger,” he said. “There have been a lot more open hearts. They don’t have anywhere else to turn to but God. Right off the bat we distributed money to people, anybody we know of in our community.”

The church raised $6,000 in three days when other Southern Baptist churches in Colorado called to ask what they could do, the pastor said. When church deacons went to Walmart to buy gift cards, “Walmart gave us a deal on that,” Cowger said. The church has a QR code for donations, 100% of which will go to help area residents, the pastor said. For more information, the church’s website is grandviewbeulah.org.

“We’ve been trying to stay in touch with church members, let people in the community know what the resources are, provide for their needs and give them spiritual support,” said Deacon Jason Perry of Grand View Beulah. “We’ve just been working really hard as a group to meet needs, support our church and give people hope.

“People are sad, people are happy,” Perry continued. “There’s not one emotion I think describes what any one person is feeling. It’s a roller coaster of all emotions. What we’re trying to do is be a lighthouse on a hill for Beulah.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Karen L. Willoughby is a national correspondent for Baptist Press.)