Dave Henderson, of Rocky Top, Tennessee, currently calls St. Charles Parish his second home 10 days a month for his selfless work with the local United Way chapter, repairing and rebuilding local St. Charles families’ homes damaged from Hurricane Ida.
A fascinating man having lived many lives, Henderson, 67, has helped numerous St. Charles Parish local homeowners repair their Ida-damaged homes. The list of residential Hurricane Ida repair projects he has or will eventually work on will soon grow to approximately 100 homes in St. Charles Parish alone, in addition to other local areas.
“What drives me is helping people, period,” Henderson said of the reason he dedicates so much of his life helping with natural disaster relief work. “Whenever I can take someone who has had their life literally ripped apart… by one of these natural disasters and see the devastation has been wreaked in their life, and I can bring them a ray of hope…that’s what drives me.”
Henderson is the current pastor of the Rocky Top United Methodist Church in Rocky Top, Tennessee, a small town located about 25 miles northwest of Knoxville. He splits his time between his Rocky Top church and Louisiana, traveling over 600 miles to St. Charles Parish and spending 10 days at a time each month to help manage the various renovation projects he oversees in the River Parish region.
Henderson and his crews have handled projects ranging from something as simple as repairing a storm damaged home with just one window and wall to repair, all the way to more complex jobs with homes that need entire roofs, ceilings, and multiple building systems repaired and replaced.
Many of the skilled building trade tasks including roofers, plumbers, electricians and heating and AC repair work are assigned to outside contractors with Henderson managing the overall projects, and his crews handling the rest.
“We don’t do roofs, but I have a roofer that works for me as the project manager,” Henderson explained. “We do all the dry wall, tape and floating work, paint, put down all the floors, insulation, lighting fixtures afterwards.”
Henderson spent 12 years serving in the United States Army, and afterwards has had a 27-year career serving as a United Methodist pastor after receiving his masters of Divinity from the Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky. He later moved to Tennessee to study for an additional master’s degree in religious studies and cultural anthropology from the University of Tennessee, which is how he came to settle in the Knoxville, Tennessee area. While studying at the University of Tennessee, he stayed busy in the school’s marching band as well as being active in two local churches.
“From age 45 to 49, I was carrying the tuba for the University of Tennessee while pastoring two churches and attending classes full time,” Henderson said proudly.
As a United Methodist pastor, Henderson first got a taste of natural disaster volunteer work following Hurricane Katrina, when he traveled to the town of Baldwin in St. Mary Parish for work in a relief warehouse, and later removing trees from local residents’ homes.
“I fell in love with the stuff,” Henderson said of natural disaster work. “I wanted to do disaster response work, got with the right connections and worked my way through to become an emergency response team leader.”
After running volunteer teams and working various flood, hurricane and related natural disaster projects all over the country, Henderson eventually found himself working as a construction consultant in disaster relief projects, recently settling on a project manager position for United Way of St. Charles Parish.
“If you really get down to the bottom line, for anybody involved in disaster response – whether it be in the relief phase or the recovery phase, or the long-term recovery phase – it’s about serving people,” Henderson said.
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