Reach Global: ‘People over projects’ — and a daughter born in a baptistry at the peak of the flood

Brennan Adcock drove to Hunt on July 4, 2025, with a trailer and chainsaws. He was not a Reach Global missionary yet. He was a random volunteer who had seen videos from friends at Schreiner University and decided to come.

He pitched a tent near Flaming Arrow Road for several weeks until a local firefighter invited him inside. Through conversations with Reach Global coordinator Dan Holman, he made a decision: he would move his wife and six children to Hunt permanently. They arrived August 1. At the peak of operations, Adcock was coordinating up to 10 heavily damaged homes per day alongside construction coordinator Brady and team member Mike Madrey.

A former soldier, police officer, and construction worker who has responded to tornadoes in Missouri, hurricanes on the Texas coast, and the Maui wildfires, Adcock called the 2025 Hill Country disaster “probably the hardest hit disaster I’ve seen” — not because of its geographic scale but because of its concentrated intensity.

“You couldn’t figure out whose house was whose,” he said Monday on The Lead Live’s Nonprofit Week. “You couldn’t figure out who belonged where. And everybody was looking for direction of where do I go?”

Reach Global Crisis Response was founded by Mark Lewis during Hurricane Katrina after he observed something most disaster relief organizations miss: survivors often experience their deepest emotional trauma not during the disaster but after — when the crews leave, the house goes quiet, and the weight of what happened finally lands. The organization’s entire model is built to address that gap.

They call it “people over projects.”

“When you start doing too much, to where somebody can’t do it on their own and when you leave they say, ‘What do I do?’ — that’s not recovery,” Adcock said. “We involve the homeowners. We involve the community. We involve the churches. So when we do pull out, there is zero vacuum.”

Every Thursday night, Reach Global hosts a community dinner in Hunt. Volunteers are instructed to ask open-ended questions and then stop talking.

“If you have something that pops in your head like, ‘Oh, what color was the car?’ — leave that alone,” Adcock said. “Just let them talk.”

The missionaries are entirely self-funded. They do not draw from local disaster budgets, foundation grants, or organizational reserves. They solicit personal support from churches and individuals before arriving in a zone — and if the funding doesn’t come through, they work anyway.

“It’s the job,” Adcock said.

He appeared Monday alongside Paige Sumner, a Hunt cabin owner whose family has held property there since 1981. Sumner offered the view from the other side of the relationship — what Reach Global looks like when you are the one who needs help.

After the 2025 flood, she spent two weeks trying to clean up her flood-damaged cabin in brutal summer heat without electricity, making almost no progress. She walked into the Hunt Volunteer Fire Department with what she described as a “deer in the headlights” expression.

“At the end of it, Dan said, ‘So what’s your rebuilding plan?'” she recalled of her first encounter with Holman’s team. “And I was like, ‘Uh, well’ — and they had done more in one afternoon than we had done in two weeks. They were carrying out bathtubs and cabinets and all these things.”

Holman told her they would be staying for two years. They became family. A Reach Global missionary family with three children now lives in Sumner’s Hunt cabin while they work to restore it. When the July 16, 2026, flood hit Sumner’s town home, six Reach Global volunteers arrived immediately with shop vacs.

“They put everything aside,” she said. “We’re painting cabinets later. We’re going to go help these people who don’t have anywhere to go right now.”

Adcock hopes that when Reach Global eventually leaves, the departure is seamless.

“I know this is going to sound crazy,” he said, “but I hope people don’t realize that Reach Global was even here.”

Then he told the story of July 15.

His wife went into labor at 11:30 p.m. The midwife was blocked by rising water. His sister-in-law was blocked by rising water. By 1:30 a.m., the monitoring post he had driven into the ground beside the river had disappeared beneath the surface. He woke his five other children, loaded them into the family van, and told his wife to drive to Hunt Baptist Church. He followed 20 minutes behind.

The low-water crossing between their home and the church was running four feet deep. His wife had already gone through. He did not know if she had made it.

“My heart sunk,” he said. “I just powered through it, got to the other side.”

Providentially — his word — a municipal road grader had passed through the crossing just before his wife’s van arrived, clearing the road surface so she could make it through. At the church, the water lines were down. The birthing pool could not be filled.

They filled the baptistry instead.

Adcock spent the day managing volunteers, sending teams to patch roof leaks at nearby homes, and cooking breakfast. At 6 p.m., labor resumed. At 8 p.m., their daughter was born. Eleven pounds. Healthy.

“What brought me out here to Hunt in the first place was a late-term miscarriage,” Adcock said quietly. “The first flood, we lost something that meant so dear to us. And I came out here to work. And then the second flood came, and God brought us back another child.”

Their daughter is home. Reach Global is still here. The Thursday dinners continue.

Reach Global Crisis Response: reachglobal.org.