Eglise Baptiste
Emmanuel de Gérard

A Church Built From Almost Nothing

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 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.

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 (rara bands) were everywhere — and not always peaceful. Rival bands would sometimes clash in the streets. Yet in what would become one of the church’s quiet testimonies, several of those very band leaders were among the first people in the community to give their lives to Christ.

The church began in a simple house. Then the earthquake of 2010 took it. What remained was open ground, and so the congregation gathered under a tonnèl (an open-sided frame shelter), exposed to the sky. When the rains came, there was no service. Eventually, a prela (a heavy-duty tarpaulin) was stretched around the sides as a makeshift wall — and that is where the church worshipped.

In 2011, the Society of Mission of Baptist Churches in Haiti (SMBEH) made a decision: this community deserved a real place to meet. Construction began in 2013. Five years later, in 2018, the new building was inaugurated — a sanctuary with seating for at least 450, along with eight additional rooms, and a water reservoir that serves the entire surrounding area. In a region where clean water becomes scarce in the dry season, that reservoir is not a detail. It is a lifeline, and the church offers it freely to whoever needs it.

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. Trainings, meetings, and community gatherings happen within its walls because there is simply nowhere else that can hold them. 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. Many of those young people received full scholarships through the church to pursue their studies, and more than a few of them came back. Some are now teachers at the École Évangélique Emmanuel Wilner Maxy de Gerard, investing in the very next generation the same way someone once invested in them. Others have gone on to professional careers in fields that would have been unimaginable in this community a generation ago. Their lives — teachers, professionals, leaders — are the clearest testimony the church can offer. Not a program or a statistic, but 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.