Katrina was apocalyptic, killing more than 1,800 people across the Gulf Coast and causing $135 billion in damage. Smoking for Jesus’s building, two miles from the compromised Industrial Canal levee, was waterlogged but still standing. Eighty-five percent of the congregation, however, lost their homes.

“New Orleans was totally destroyed — no schools, no groceries,” Monnet says. “You don't know if you have faith until it is tested. And it was.”

Three weeks after trying to settle 40 miles from Louisiana in southeast Texas, the arrival of Hurricane Rita forced a second diaspora....

By Thanksgiving of 2005 they had found stability in Marble Falls, a quaint tourist town in the Texas Hill Country an hour northwest of Austin. While staying at a nearby retreat, the church learned of a new apartment complex with 50 vacancies.