Felled-Tree-Crisis Moment Yields Unexpected Blessings

It was the perfect storm for Taylor Choate, pastor of Harvest Church of Daisetta, and his small, but growing Texas congregation, and the results of that “storm” seemed to be literally crushing.

One of the church’s next-door neighbors wanted to have a large tree removed from her yard, but as tree removal is very expensive, she asked a handyman to do it instead.

“I was in downtown Houston on Sept. 27 for a doctor’s appointment,” Choate says, “when the football coach from the high school called me and told me a tree fell onto the church.”

Choate, who is a bi-vocational minister, serves as a high school teacher on weekdays. He says the news came at the precisely the wrong time.

“Our insurer had just recently dropped us — along with a lot of other churches — and we hadn’t settled on a new insurer yet,” he explains. “And then I learned that the tree had not only damaged the church roof, but then landed on all four of our air conditioning units . . . and in Texas, even in September, you need AC.”

Choate says he was feeling the stress, questions racing through his mind about what this would mean for the church . . ., but then God spoke to him through his wife, Morgan.

“I called her and told her what was going on, and she told me exactly what I needed to hear,” Choate says. “She told me, ‘We have got to trust that this is God’s house and He’s going to take care of it.’ So, that’s what we did.”

. . . and that’s exactly what He did.

When Choate first became pastor of Harvest Church in January 2022, the congregation consisted of two widows. Within a year, the congregation had grown to roughly 25. Today, the church currently averages 50 to 55 on Sundays, however the community is poverty stricken.

“The initial estimate to fix the roof and replace the four AC units and install them was nearly $30,000,” Choate says. “We also learned that the neighbor didn’t have insurance and neither did the handyman.”

Yet since the Choates began to minister at Harvest Church, they’ve been intentional in connecting with community leaders and doing their best to meet the needs and invest in Daisetta, including helping solve a drinking water shortage.

“We didn’t have $30,000, but when I spoke to the repairman, his company volunteered to make all the repairs, buy the AC units, and install it all at cost, knocking the price down to $15,000,” Choate says. “Then I spoke to some families who I thought might be able to help – one family covered the cost of insurance on the church for a full year, another gave us an interest-free loan to repay as we could, and we also received gift checks from several churches, including generous checks from Evangel Temple in Springfield, Missouri, and Mercygate in Mont Belvieu, Texas.”

Within five or six days of the tree damaging the church roof and crushing three of the four AC units beyond repair, everything was restored. The church was able to meet in air-conditioned comfort that following Sunday, and they had the finances in place to cover all the costs.

The city was also buzzing about what had all taken place at Harvest Church as Choate kept the community updated on the blessings and progress through social media. Choate noticed that even people he didn’t know were sharing his posts with others.

What made the timing of this “crisis” even more remarkable is that the AC units were at the age that they were going to need to be replaced in the next year or two.

“We wouldn’t have had the money to replace them,” Choates says, “but God sent a tree to make it all possible.

“I think God showed people, both in the church and outside of the church, that He is doing something here,” Choate continues. “He is blessing this church and letting people know this church is a good place to sow into.”