Grief and Prayer at Texas Churches: ‘Lord, Turn Off the Floodgates’

Scott Warner’s phone beeped loudly with a flash flood warning just before 8 a.m. on Sunday, as storm clouds marched through the Texas Hill Country and began dropping torrents of rain.

The Hill Country is still reeling from catastrophic floods that began July 4, and the new alert made him flinch, he said. So does hearing words that once evoked nothing but joy, he said: Camp. River. Rain.

“We’re not the same as we were before the Fourth of July,” Mr. Warner, the senior minister at Kerrville Church of Christ, told the roughly 50 people gathered in its pews Sunday morning. “We’re hurting, we’re downtrodden, we’re suffering. We’re crushed in a lot of ways spiritually. We got anxiety, we got fear, we got sorrow.”

People in Central Texas trickled into churches on Sunday looking for solace after so much destruction battered their region. The floods that struck over the July 4 holiday weekend killed at least 129 people, including at least 36 children. Officials say that at least 170 more people are still unaccounted for.

Kerrville is the county seat and largest city of Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred. Thousands of searchers continued to look on Sunday for victims of the flood, when the fresh rain falling on the region allowed. But the chances of finding more of the missing were dimming as the search dragged into a 10th day.

The heartbreak has seemed ceaseless, local residents say — a feeling underscored by the thunderstorms that bore down again on Sunday, threatening further destruction and forcing many people to stay home from church services.