Alumnus Joey Tombrella serves Texas church, community after tragic flood

Two months after the severe flooding in the Texas Hill Country that led to more than 130 deaths and immense damage, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary alumnus Joey Tombrella and First Baptist Church of Kerrville, Texas, continue to help their community recover.

The Tombrella family’s 4^th of July plans were drastically changed this summer. They had been planning for a family vacation and dorm room shopping for the oldest child preparing to move to Fort Worth to attend the Texas Baptist College when severe storms with heavy rainfall hit their area and surrounding counties.

“I remember getting flood watches on my phone like everybody else got,” Tombrella, who completed his Master of Divinity at Southwestern in 2010 and his Doctor of Philosophy in 2017, described the night starting on July 3. “And we didn’t think anything of it. … We didn’t know what was really happening at the river or what was going on that night. We didn’t know what people were going through.”

Tombrella, who grew up in Santa Fe, Texas, before moving to Fort Worth to attend Southwestern, moved with his wife and three children to Kerrville in 2022 when he accepted a position as senior pastor at First Baptist Church Kerrville. He had previously served at churches in other Texas cities including Fort Worth, Nassau Bay, and Odessa in a variety of roles.

But less than three years into his first pastorate, Tombrella has found himself helping the church and the city through a tragedy as the heavy rains caused the Guadalupe River, which he said runs through the heart of the city, to rise almost 30 feet. The flooding led to more than 130 deaths in Kerr County and surrounding areas, including a member of Tombrella’s church and two others who had been attending as visitors.

“It was really weird in the sense that, for everyone, they would say if they were by the river, it was traumatic,” Tombrella said of that night. “If you weren’t by the river, it was a nice night of heavy rain that we were all rejoicing in, because we needed rain.”

But by the following morning, the tragedy was becoming fully evident. Tombrella said they first heard there were road closures, and then that there had been evacuations. But it wasn’t until he got a text from a church member who is an engineer for the county that they realized the extent of the event.

“He texted me and said ‘Joey, it’s bad. It’s really bad,’” Tombrella recalled that moment. His wife Michelle remembers making sure their own family was not in danger from the river and that they could make it to their church, located across and a few blocks away from the river. They had to wait a few hours for the water to go down before they could reach the church property, and in the meantime were reaching out to church members that they knew lived even closer to the river.

Tombrella reached out to the Southern Baptist of Texas Convention Disaster Relief team, which would make First Baptist Kerrville their base of operations for about a month, providing meals, showers, and other support to area responders.

The church also became an independent shelter for any members of the community that needed a place to stay in those first days. Tombrella and Michelle visited several reunification sites and funeral homes to offer prayer and aid to those looking for family and friends. They also let local emergency services know about the services available through the SBTC teams arriving at their church.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) also used First Baptist Kerrville as a base as Tombrella said they did what they could to support those providing aid to their community. Having FEMA onsite became an opportunity for their church as people from the county came to their location for relief.

Tombrella said they set up a prayer tent where they would meet and pray with visitors, distribute coffee and snacks, hand out Bibles, and share the Gospel. Michelle said sometimes they would have people who just wanted a hug as they struggled with the effects of the tragedy.

“It’s great to come to the church and be like, this is a place of hope,” Tombrella said, saying that was their vision when they opened their campus to outside organizations. “… That’s what the church is. It should be a place of hope and truth.”

The first Sunday morning following the flood, the church had a time of prayer instead of their normal Sunday School time, as some members were able to leave their home for the first time since the water rose. That was when they learned one church member was missing, and later that he was one of the deceased.

“Everyone was touched in some kind of way by knowing somebody who died,” Tombrella said, saying they knew others who evacuated, had family members who were caught in the flood, had property and businesses destroyed, or experienced the trauma of having victims discovered on their property.

More than a month later, Tombrella said mounds of debris are still piled up around the city where it had been deposited by the river, with overturned cars, displaced homes, and personal belongings found in trees around the area adjoining the river. Other places such as area parks, that were initially underwater, now seem as if a stampede had gone through it, knocking down large trees and structures, Tombrella said.

Church members have mobilized with SBTC disaster relief and Samaritan’s Purse into the community to help with clean up. Members of the youth group participated in cleaning at a camp in Hunt, Texas.

“Right now, we’re still just trying to find where we can help people rebuild,” Tombrella said, adding “… It’s really been a really cool thing to watch our church step up and minister to so many people, and other churches as well.”

But they were also looking for ways to build up people’s hope.

As the funerals began to be held in their community, Tombrella, recognizing a need in his church, reached out to Marc Brown, assistant professor of church music and worship, and asked if he could contact the Christian artists Shane & Shane’s Worship Initiative about leading a time of worship at their church.

“I was just super heavy-hearted,” Tombrella said of that somber time for his and other area churches. “And I was like, we need, not a barbecue, not a fundraiser—we just need to worship.”

Worship Initiative had partnered with Southwestern during the TBC Worship Camp, and Brown was able to help arrange for them to come to Kerrville. That free night of worship was held Aug. 19, and was open to the entire community. But it was especially a night for the churches to worship together.

Tombrella said it was “not an evangelistically, necessarily, driven outreach night. It’s because our churches are the ones that have really been spearheading it all.”

“People sang with all their hearts and are still talking about how meaningful it was,” Tombrella said of the night of worship, adding they hope to have more worship and prayer nights in the future. “It was encouraging for everyone to know how powerful congregational singing really is.”

Tombrella said their church has been blessed even in their exhaustion by notes and gifts that have arrived at their church from all over the world. Throughout the aftermath of the flood, Tombrella said they regularly had friends from their time at Southwestern reach out to them to check in and see how they could help. Current faculty also reached out, seeing how they could help as their daughter Cate was preparing to start at TBC.

Brown said he has been able to build a relationship with Tombrella over the past three years as his daughter participated in the TBC Worship Camp held each summer. When he heard about the flooding and realized that Tombrella’s church was one of those impacted, he reached out to them in an email during the first week following the event to check on them.

“He was just, ‘We’re just really, really tired,’” Brown said of Tombrella’s response in the immediate aftermath of the flooding. At that point, Tombrella asked if Brown could connect him with the Worship Initiative which Brown was able to do, pointing out he was just the middleman. “… It was just really God worked that out. And I think it’s because our baseline operation is that we care about Texas churches.”

“It’s the small things like that that just bring you to tears,” Tombrella said of that care shown by Southwestern such as through Brown. “It’s those small gestures.”

Nearly two months after the tragic event, Tombrella said his family, his church, and his city are still trying to find a sense of normalcy as well as how they can best serve their community, as people begin to make decisions on how to rebuild and move forward.

“We’re basically still trying to figure out the need,” Tombrella said. “But I think our need right now is just prayer. Our city is exhausted, and I think that the trauma is just now beginning to be processed with people and even with us.”

On the home page of First Baptist Kerrville’s website, there is a place for people to donate to the church’s disaster relief fund which will provide food, housing, and financial support to victims who are approved through the church’s application process.