A Church Built From Almost Nothing
A Corner of Haiti Where Things Begin
Emmanuel Baptist Church of Gerard sits in the communal section of Trouin, in the municipality of Léogâne, near the border with the Sud-Est department — a quiet corner of Haiti where the mountains begin and the coast falls away behind you. The road into Gerard is the kind that rewards patience. It winds upward through dry hillsides and scattered farms, past market women walking with baskets balanced overhead, past children in school uniforms who stop and watch strangers pass. If you do not know the community is there, you might not find it. But if you do know — if you have been waiting for what God might do in a forgotten place — Gerard is exactly the kind of place where things begin.
Léogâne and the Region
Léogâne itself carries a long and complex history. It is one of Haiti’s oldest cities, a municipality that traces its roots to the colonial era, and a region that has known both great suffering and quiet resilience. The southern reaches of the commune, where Gerard sits, were always somewhat removed from the center of things — close enough to the capital to be part of its orbit, but far enough that development arrived late, if it arrived at all. Schools were few. Stable employment was limited. The social fabric of the community was held together largely by its traditions — some of them beautiful, some of them deeply rooted in a spiritual worldview the church would eventually be called to gently but honestly address.
Six People
The church was officially founded in 1998, but when the actual senior pastor, Rev. Remy Porcenat, first arrived, the congregation had all but disappeared. He found six people. Six. Not six hundred, not sixty — six men and women who were still showing up, still holding on to something they believed was worth holding on to. In almost any accounting, that is not a foundation. It is a remnant. But Rev. Porcenat did not arrive looking for favorable conditions. He arrived because he believed the gospel was for this community, in this place, at this time — and that six was enough to start.
What he found in Gerard was not hostility to faith, exactly. It was something more complicated: a community with its own spiritual and cultural rhythms, deeply embedded in the life of the streets and the hills.
The Culture of the Streets
Gerard, at the time, was a community shaped by its street culture. What filled the air on weekends and feast days were gagè (cockfighting pits), rara (street processions with brass instruments, drums, and crowds that follow musicians through the roads during Lent), and chanpwèl bands (secretive folk ensembles tied to traditional Haitian spiritual practice). These bann rara were everywhere — and not always peaceful. Rival bands would sometimes clash in the streets, turning festival days into tense standoffs between groups of young men whose loyalty to their band was a matter of identity and honor.
To understand what the church was walking into is to understand what rara means to a community like Gerard. It is not merely entertainment. Rara is a cultural institution — tied to the Lenten season, yes, but also to a social world in which belonging to a band meant belonging somewhere. The musicians, the flags, the ritual objects carried at the front of the procession — these were not incidental. They were a whole way of organizing community, identity, and spiritual life. The chanpwèl bands operated differently, more quietly, more privately — but they too were part of a web of allegiances and practices that shaped who people were and what they trusted.
Into this world, Rev. Porcenat brought the gospel — not as a program, and not as an institution, but as a person proclaiming a living Christ. And something remarkable happened. Among the first people in the community to respond, to give their lives to Christ, were several of those very band leaders. Men who had been at the center of the rara and chanpwèl culture, whose social identity was wrapped up in it — they were among the first to step away from it. That quiet testimony would echo through the church’s history for years to come.
A Simple House, Then Open Ground
The church began in a simple house. Nothing ornate, nothing designed for the purpose — just a building repurposed for a congregation that was slowly, then steadily, beginning to grow. As word spread and lives began to change, more people came. The six became more than six. The house held them for a time.
Then January 12, 2010 happened.
The earthquake that struck Haiti that evening — a 7.0 magnitude event centered just 25 kilometers from Port-au-Prince — is difficult to describe in terms that match its scale. In the municipality of Léogâne, which sat almost directly above the epicenter, the destruction was among the worst in the country. Estimates suggest that nearly 80 to 90 percent of structures in Léogâne were damaged or destroyed. Buildings that had stood for decades simply ceased to exist. The landscape of communities across the region was permanently altered in the span of 35 seconds.
In Gerard, the church building fell like so much else. What remained was open ground — a cleared space where a house used to stand, and a congregation that had nowhere to meet.
And so they gathered under a tonnèl.
Under a Frame and a Tarpaulin
A tonnèl is an open-sided frame shelter — posts and a roof, nothing more. In Haiti, they are common structures for temporary gatherings: markets, parties, outdoor events. For Emmanuel Baptist Church of Gerard, the tonnèl became the sanctuary. Sunday after Sunday, the congregation gathered under it, exposed to the open sky, the surrounding hills, and whatever the weather chose to bring.
When the rains came, there was no service. That is not a metaphor. The congregation would simply not meet because there was no shelter that could hold them through a downpour. Eventually, a prela — a heavy-duty tarpaulin of the kind used at construction sites and in emergency shelters — was stretched around the sides of the tonnèl as a makeshift wall. It kept the wind out. It did not keep the noise out. It did not keep the heat out. But it allowed the church to meet in the rain.
That is where Emmanuel Baptist Church of Gerard worshipped for years. Under a frame and a tarpaulin. Without permanent walls, without proper seating, without any of the things we assume a church building requires. And yet the church grew. People kept coming. New families arrived. Children were raised in the faith under that prela, singing in a space that could not fully shelter them from the sky.
A Decision, and a Building
In 2011, the Society of Mission of Baptist Churches in Haiti (SMBEH) made a decision: this community deserved a real place to meet. The determination of a congregation that had lost its building, worshipped through years of hardship, and continued to grow — that was not something to be left in a provisional shelter indefinitely.
Construction began in 2013. It was not a simple project. Building in rural Haiti, in a mountainous communal section with limited road access and supply chain challenges, requires patience, resourcefulness, and a long timeline. The work proceeded in stages, requiring sustained commitment from SMBEH, from partners, and from the congregation itself, who contributed what they could to see it through.
Five years later, in 2018, the new building was inaugurated — a sanctuary with seating for at least 450 people, along with eight additional rooms that serve the varied needs of the congregation and the community. Sunday school rooms. Meeting spaces. Rooms for trainings, for counseling, for the administrative life of a church that had become far larger than six people.
And a water reservoir.
A Lifeline, Offered Freely
In a region where clean water becomes scarce in the dry season, the reservoir is not a detail. It is a lifeline. Haiti’s rural communities face chronic water insecurity — streams dry up, sources become contaminated, and the burden of water collection falls disproportionately on women and children who may walk significant distances to find it. The reservoir built as part of the church’s facility serves not just the congregation but the entire surrounding area. The church offers it freely to whoever needs it — neighbors, strangers, anyone who comes.
It is a small act. It is also an enormous one. Clean water, offered without condition, in a dry season — that is the gospel made material. It is what the church has chosen to be in Gerard: not a building people visit on Sundays, but a presence that meets people where their actual needs are.
The Community Center of a Generation
Today, Emmanuel Baptist Church of Gerard is far more than a place of worship. It has become the true community center of the area — the only space of its kind between Léogâne and the Sud-Est border.
Weddings are celebrated here. Funerals are held here. When families in Gerard mark the major transitions of life — the beginning of a marriage, the end of a life — they do it within these walls. Trainings, community meetings, and organizational gatherings happen here because there is simply nowhere else in the area that can hold them. NGOs, government programs, agricultural cooperatives, health campaigns — when they need a space in this part of the municipality, they come to the church.
The youth of Gerard have made it their gathering place — for fellowship, for programs, for the kind of community life that gives young people roots in a place and a purpose. In a context where young Haitian men and women face enormous pressure to leave their communities, to migrate to Port-au-Prince or further in search of opportunity, the church has offered something that migration cannot: belonging, investment, and a long-term stake in the place where they were born.
People Who Came Back
Many of those young people received full scholarships through the church to pursue their studies — scholarships made possible by donors and partners who believed that education in Gerard was worth funding. And more than a few of them came back.
Some are now teachers at the École Évangélique Emmanuel Wilner Maxy de Gerard, the evangelical school that operates alongside the church, investing in the very next generation the same way someone once invested in them. They know what it cost to get an education in this community. They know what it meant that someone believed it was worth the investment. And they have chosen to make that same investment in the children now sitting in those classrooms.
Others have gone on to professional careers — in fields that would have been genuinely unimaginable in this community a generation ago. Nursing. Education. Business. Public administration. Their presence in those fields is its own form of witness: not that the church produced successful people, but that Christ changed people in a place the world had largely written off, and those people turned around and poured their lives back into the community that shaped them.
The Clearest Testimony
Their lives — teachers, professionals, leaders — are the clearest testimony the church can offer. Not a program. Not a statistic. People. People whose lives Christ changed, starting in a community that once gathered around cockfighting pits and rara bands, and now gathers around something else entirely.
A church built from six people and a prela. A water reservoir open to strangers. Scholars who came home. A sanctuary in a corner of Haiti where the mountains begin.
That is Emmanuel Baptist Church of Gerard. And it is still being built.