Daily Times

In 60 years of preaching, pastor Arza Brown had never led a service in his sandals. But he had no choice on Sunday, after the wildfire that destroyed a Hawaiian town left him with nothing more than his faith and the clothes he stood up in. “I have ministered in many disasters, many fires, many things,” Brown told believers huddled in a coffee shop. “And I tried to help people.

“But this is the first time that I’ve been one of them.” When a terrifying wildfire devoured Lahaina this week, it razed Brown’s home and Grace Baptist Church, where he has served for the last five decades. One member of his flock volunteered his cafe in Kahului as a makeshift church, where a shell-shocked congregation could gather as it tries to make sense of a blaze known to have killed almost 100 people — the deadliest wildfire in the United States for over a century. Thousands of people have been left homeless by an inferno that effectively wiped Lahaina off the map.