Grace prevails

Approximately one year ago this week the South Nassau Christian Church in Baldwin had no floors. The modest building, which serves about 100 worshippers each Sunday, also lost its stage, tiles, piano and all its furniture to Hurricane Sandy flooding. An army of fans and dehumidifiers blew through the building non-stop in an effort to combat mold, even as the church’s lead pastor, Scott Solimine, only five weeks into his tenure, struggled to help his neighbors.

Although Solimine’s own facilities were in a state of rampant disrepair, the young pastor, who came to Baldwin after stops in Pennsylvania, Indiana and Korea, set up a program called “Grace in Sandy” to help others. He and groups of volunteers from as far away as Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia provided whatever aid they could to storm-weary families around the area — pulling out soaked drywall and carpets, providing gift cards for home improvement stores and sometimes just lending a sympathetic ear.

The Grace in Sandy program is still in operation, and still helps out where it can, but last weekend marked a special occasion for the SNCC — the building was finally ready to reopen. Almost one year after Baldwin Harbor swelled up and gutted the humble church, Solimine and his congregants held a “Back from Sandy” celebration to present their restored and renovated facility to the community.

Fun, facepainting and food helped make the day special, and while the occasion was, by and large, a joyful one, it was also a time to look back at the last year. Solimine says the church’s relief efforts in the community are “far from over,” and he reflected on the last 360-odd days in the final sermon of his first eventful year with SNCC: “This last year has been an incredible opportunity to watch God do things that are well beyond our reach,” Solimine said. “We have been able to watch Him take our preconceived ideas of what we were to do in this last year and throw them away … I am humbled to know that He has allowed me to be here, in this position as the servant of God’s people at SNCC … We’ve been able to watch God move in such a way that no one could take the glory or the credit that our God deserves for what He has accomplished! Let us go forward as a church completely dependent on His power, His will, His leading, His Grace…nothing more.”