Before dawn on July 4, 2025, the Guadalupe River rose with a speed and force most residents had never seen. Water tore through homes, RV parks, campgrounds and youth camps across Kerr County. By the time the floodwaters receded, more than 130 people across the region had lost their lives, including dozens of children and counselors swept away overnight. Along the riverfront, whole stretches of land were stripped of trees and buildings. Bridges and cabins that had hosted generations of Texas families were gone.
A year later, rebuilding continues across the Texas Hill Country. This summer, a youth group from First Baptist Church in Quitman, led by youth pastor Bobby Strong, drove south to help.
The trip came through BOUNCE, a student missions ministry of Texas Baptists that sends teams of students and adult sponsors into communities recovering from natural disasters, as well as into church-planting efforts around the country. Nineteen people from First Baptist Quitman, 14 students and five adults, spent the week of June 22-27 in Kerrville sleeping on air mattresses in a Sunday school room at a local church. They had to wake up before six each morning, and spent several long days doing construction and rehabilitation work for families continuing to rebuild their homesteads.
Throughout the next six days they built fences, dug a 450-foot trench for water lines and hauled water in the Texas heat. Yet the physical labor wasn’t what most of the teens remembered. But that was only part of what happened during their mission. Strong said the participants came home talking a lot less about the physical work and more about the conversations and ministry moments they experienced.
Much of the week centered on a man named Ryan, a retired Special Forces veteran whose riverside property was untouched by the floodwaters, though his land showed the results of what happened a year ago, including the discovery of several bodies after the waters went down. The Quitman group spent a day and a half re-building a fence for him, and along the way, something beyond construction took hold. One student felt led to ask if he could pray over Ryan, and did, quietly, one-on-one, the way he’d learned to do in a men’s prayer group back home.
Another student, described by Strong as endlessly upbeat despite the heat and hard labor, became a source of encouragement to Ryan simply through her attitude. On their last day of work, the group presented him with a Bible and a photo of the team, along with handwritten Bible verses the students had chosen for him.
Students were also assigned ministry roles, including four chaplains who led daily devotions and an “evangelist” responsible for recording opportunities to pray with or share the gospel with others. During one bathroom stop at a Dollar General, the teens ended up praying with an employee and a customer who both asked to join in, an encounter Strong said really surprised the adult sponsor who was waiting outside for the kids.
“It’s convicting,” Strong said, reflecting on how easily adults let “busy-ness” crowd out those moments. “These students... they were there for it.”
Strong said the trip reminded him of Matthew 18:3, where Jesus calls believers to become “like little children.”
He said the teens showed that kind of faith by stopping to pray with strangers without worrying about how it might be received. Strong said one student, the son of a pastor, came away from the week convicted that ministry isn’t reserved for those with a title.
“We’re all as believers called to go out and share the love of Jesus Christ with everybody,” Strong said the student told him.
The group also worked alongside teams from First Baptist Plano and First Baptist Harlingen, sharing meals, worship and sleeping quarters, and finishing a fence line the Plano group hadn’t been able to complete on their own. On the final afternoon, everyone swam in a stretch of river where, they learned, a young woman had died in the flood the year before. Strong said the moment was sobering and deepened the mission’s meaning rather than diminishing it. Two student chaplains led a Bible study on the riverbank before they went in the water, praying for the families who had lost loved ones there.
Strong said the impact hasn’t faded. Students remain in a group text sharing how the trip changed them; one, away at a football camp, started an informal prayer time among fellow campers between practices.
Strong said the lasting impact on his students mattered more than the amount of work they actually completed in Kerrville.
First Baptist Quitman’s mission committee covered half the cost for each participant, and the church leaned on donations to cover the rest so that no student would be kept from going for financial reasons.
Strong said he hopes to make the trip a regular part of the church’s summer rhythm, alongside the youth camp the group heads to later this month.
BOUNCE is a Texas Baptists student missions program that sends teams to assist with disaster recovery, community rehabilitation and church-planting efforts across the country. To donate or find out more information about BOUNCE, visit the ministry section at texasbaptists.org.