Volunteers with Spokane's Second Harvest distribute relief supplies to the victims of the Spokane Complex wildfires. (Contributed Photo via FaVS News)
FāVS News | Aug. 19, 2026
With the worst of the wildfires in the rearview mirror, the relief work among the area churches continues unabated.
The Spokane Complex— the Old Trails, Autumn Lane, and Fairview fires—began Aug. 1 and burned roughly 10,000 acres and destroyed 900 structures.
Churches big and small have chipped in, with some working on their own and others working also with emergency management agencies, and offer clothes, food and shelter across city, county and state lines when needed.
In Spokane, the Summit Church is offering help online, asking people to fill out forms to capture the extent of the need, and how the church may help. They also offer a link to an online giving platform called Overflow.
The Spokane Valley Church of the Nazarene is coordinating relief efforts for regional wildfires, putting together donations, not just for Spokane fires, but for blazes in Chelan and Okanogan counties.
Faith Bible Church of Spokane shared a newsletter with a button where people could click and share the ways they could offer or get help. The Unitarian Universalist Church offered an email address, pastoralcare@inuuc.org, for the same purposes.
The list, and the help, goes on.
Richie Brower, director of community engagement with the Upper Columbia Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists, said that his denomination’s efforts will continue for many days to come.
Adventist Community Services have been working actively with Spokane County Emergency Management, with the latter asking the church to help at the Disaster Assistance Center at Shadle Park High School, and to open a warehouse and distribution center at the North Town Mall, Brower said.
The warehouse will remain open as long as the county emergency office feels it’s needed, Brower said.
“We have a lot of people coming through who have lost their homes and who are just looking for basic things,” said Brower, whose congregation has four members who lost homes in the wildfire.
Brower feels a special connection to the efforts, having grown up in Spokane County and having shopped at the warehouse back when it was a store in the mall.
“This is my city, this is my town, this is my neighborhood, my community,” Brower said, warning that when the wildfire stops catching headlines, the donations will begin to dwindle. The need will continue for a long while, so the community’s efforts must keep pace, he said.
“Don’t let the memory fade quickly on this,” he said. “The school year is about to start and our attention is about to shift to other things as life goes on. The need will still be there for some time. Stay tuned and continue to ask what needs to be done. The emergency may be over but the recovery process will be long.”
‘Devastating God’s creation’
As superintendent of two districts of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Methodist Church, Cody Natland has been hearing from several pastors around the area, finding out about their needs and their congregations.
He agreed with Brower’s prediction that the recovery may take a while. The communities are resilient, he added, and highlighted the role churches play in that.
“Churches show up for their communities and for one another, as well,” Natland said. A good example is the disaster response team, he said, which the conference opened in the wake of the wildfires and which have received help from Methodist churches from Oregon, Arizona, California and Washington.
“We are seeing people from throughout, reaching out,” Natland said, while also reminding that some of these areas are dealing with their own fires as well.
“Oregon has hundreds of thousands of acres burning right now,” Natland said.
In his conference’s newsletter, Streams and Steeples, Natland described the numerous wildfires across the Pacific Northwest as “continuing to devastate God’s creation.”
In the newsletter, Natland and the church’s disaster response co-coordinator encouraged people to “Answer the call,” listing ways to donate money via phone, or to donate toiletries, soot sponge kits and period packs. The newsletter also mentions emergency response trainings scheduled for Sept. 19 in Beaverton, Oregon.
As with Brower’s group, Natland’s office has been working with the disaster assistance center at Shadle Park High. Despite the community’s constant need, Natland remains optimistic.
“We know that God is good and accompanies us through seasons of crisis,” Natland wrote. “May God continue to give us strength and grace.”
The excitement of help
Timothy Cobb is the president of the Spokane Stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The stake is located just south of the hardest-hit areas, which puts Cobb and his congregation in what he terms “a unique position of support.”
“We have opened up our buildings as places for supplies to be channeled through, and as places for people to find shelter,” he said. At the same time, members of Cobb’s stake have been directly affected as well, having lost their homes, their property, or having to evacuate.
“With the amount of evacuation, with the amount of displacement, with the speed of the fire, we felt we were gonna have an overwhelming amount of people with nowhere to go,” Cobb said. “It has not been the case. But is there a need? Yes.”
Such is the need that Cobb himself said he was hosting people in his basement at the time of this interview.
The North Spokane stake, the hardest-hit one, had to cancel services the first week after the fires. Farther south and west, services continued, with online notices to inform people and inviting them to come. Not just members, Cobb said, everyone in the community is invited.
“We are definitely wanting to stay open for people who need to go and find a quiet place and a place where they can find some hope,” he said.
What gives Cobb the most hope, he said, was watching the work of organizations like Second Harvest, delivering bottled water by the truckload at Shadle Park High on Aug. 7, or a truckload of food on Aug. 11. In addition, the church has members volunteering at nonprofits, or helping with justserve.org, or donating to the church’s humanitarian aid fund.
“It’s important that, just like the Savior went one by one to individuals to help them in need, the greatest hope comes from watching individuals having a great desire to help,” Cobb said, “and watching them be patient to understand how best to help, and then showing up, handing out a bag of food, a bottle of water or finding clothes for folks who have none right now.”
With the calls for help coming from near and far, Cobb said he and his congregation will continue helping for months or years if necessary to help rebuild.
“We are just at the beginning of understanding what the actual need will be,” Cobb said, later adding, “Once the ashes have cooled off, we will still have a great amount of need that we will have to meet, and we are excited to be part of those efforts.”
Sebastian Moraga
Sebastian Moraga has joined the FāVS News team, as a bilingual freelance writer. A native of Chile, Sebastian comes to FāVS after 23 years in communications throughout Washington state, in journalism and public relations.
FāVS News uses professional journalists and thoughtful commentary to explore faith, values and ethics. Support journalism like this by making a tax-deductible donation. FāVS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. © FāVS News. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted only to authorized media partners or with written permission.