BLACK RIVER, Jamaica — In the capital of St Elizabeth, four congregations lost their churches in a single night. St John’s, the parish church whose first stone was laid in 1837, was among nine Anglican buildings the diocese counts as lost entirely. The stone walls of the Methodist church crumbled and its roof was torn away. The Seventh-day Adventist church was left roofless and flooded. At St Theresa’s, the Catholic church lost its roof, doors and windows, and parishioners kept the feast of the Epiphany in January under tarpaulins.
Almost a year after Hurricane Melissa came ashore as a Category 5 storm on 28 October 2025, many of those congregations are still worshipping in tents, halls and the shells of buildings. And the reckoning of what the island’s churches lost, gathered by Jamaica Homes from the figures the denominations themselves have reported, is larger than any single church has been able to say on its own.
Across just five church bodies, at least 44 church buildings were destroyed outright. Hundreds more were damaged. The government’s main help so far, a J$75 million grant programme, has been shared among roughly 420 churches, an average of under J$180,000 each, and the Prime Minister has said plainly that it is for clean-up, not rebuilding.
What the churches lost
No agency has published a complete count of damaged churches, and the official figures that exist point in different directions. The Minister of Local Government, Desmond McKenzie, said in March that about 6,000 churches across Jamaica had been affected. A Social Development Commission survey, reported by the Jamaica Observer in June, found more than 1,600 with major damage. The denominations’ own counts, mostly from the hardest-hit western parishes, give a clearer picture of how deep the losses go.
| Church | Destroyed | Damaged | Reported |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seventh-day Adventist | – | more than 150 churches significantly damaged | Jamaica Union, November 2025 |
| New Testament Church of God | about 20 | about 70 significantly damaged | Bishop Roy Notice, April 2026 |
| Anglican | 9 buildings | about 50 properties destroyed or badly damaged | Diocese and USPG |
| United Church | 8 | more than 50 badly damaged | UCJCI, March 2026 |
| Moravian | 6 of 37 congregations in the west | 19 with lost or severely damaged roofs; 8 manses | The Gleaner, April 2026 |
| Jehovah’s Witnesses | 1 Kingdom Hall | 7 with major damage | jw.org, November 2025 |
| Baptist | – | at least one in ten churches lost its roof | Jamaica Baptist Union |
Figures are as each church reported them, at the dates shown, and are not directly comparable: “damaged” counts may include buildings later found to be beyond repair. Sources are listed at the end of this article.
The damage fell hardest on churches that were already struggling. The Moravians, who in 1754 became the first Protestant mission to the enslaved, are concentrated in St Elizabeth and Manchester, directly in the storm’s path; six of their 37 western congregations were destroyed, among them Salem at Beeston Spring, dedicated in 1868, and Springfield, built in 1847, which the British Moravian magazine said had been “reduced to bare stone and debris”. In Duanvale, Trelawny, engineers advised that the 145-year-old Frazerville Methodist Church, left with three walls and no roof, be demolished and rebuilt, although church leaders had hoped to save it as heritage.
J$75 million, and a row over it
Prime Minister Andrew Holness announced the Community Church Clean-up and Restoration Initiative on 23 December 2025, run by the Social Development Commission. It pays for debris removal, roof sheeting, doors, windows, guttering and small repairs, after an inspection; structural work is excluded. The first cheques, about J$17.65 million for 101 churches in St Elizabeth, were handed over at the Middle Quarters New Testament Church of God on 17 April. Hanover’s 56 churches shared about J$8.5 million in June, and 84 churches in St James a combined J$16 million. Mr McKenzie has since announced J$50 million more for churches in Clarendon and St Ann.
| Parish | Churches | Total | Average per church |
|---|---|---|---|
| St Elizabeth (April 2026) | 101 | J$17.65 million | about J$175,000 |
| Hanover (June 2026) | 56 | about J$8.5 million | about J$152,000 |
| St James (June 2026) | 84 | J$16 million | about J$190,000 |
| Whole programme | about 420 | J$75 million | about J$179,000 |
Averages calculated by Jamaica Homes. Sources: The Gleaner, 20 April 2026; Jamaica Observer, 5 June 2026; IRIE FM, 25 March and 25 June 2026.
Even before a dollar was paid, the programme drew fire from inside the governing party. Everald Warmington, the Jamaica Labour Party MP for St Catherine South Western, told Television Jamaica that “there’s a separation of church and state”, that the money “can’t build back churches”, and that congregations with few worshippers should combine. Bishop Alvin Bailey, president of the Jamaica Evangelical Alliance, called the remarks “gross ignorance and insensitivity”. From the other direction, Dr Elaine McCarthy Nunes, a former chair of the Jamaica Umbrella Groups of Churches, called the sum “a drop in the bucket”, warning that the churches “are going to get a bare minimum”.
On 5 January Mr Holness settled the question of what the money was for. “This funding is not for reconstruction,” he wrote. The government has said it is working with church groups on affordable financing for rebuilding, including concessionary loans through the National Housing Trust, but Jamaica Homes could find no published terms for such a scheme.
Who is paying to rebuild
For now, much of the rebuilding money is coming from abroad, through the old missionary links that tie Jamaica’s historic churches to Britain and North America. Florida Baptist Disaster Relief sent more than 150 volunteers over 15 weeks and rebuilt or restored 24 properties, including 11 churches and four schools; Missouri Baptist teams re-roofed churches at Elderslie and Townhead. The United Reformed Church in Britain granted the United Church £44,610, British and Irish Methodists £24,000, and the Anglican Bishop of Toronto launched an appeal with a C$50,000 matching grant. In August a Florida Adventist congregation presented a cheque to the West Jamaica Conference to rebuild a church the storm destroyed.
The size of the task dwarfs those sums. William Knibb Memorial High School in Trelawny, which carries the name of the Baptist missionary, alone had a preliminary repair estimate of J$400 million, more than five times the national churches programme, and reopened in phases in January partly in tents.
Homes first
Many church leaders say the buildings can wait. The United Church’s leaders have said that rebuilding members’ homes and stabilising families must come before repairing chapels, and that recovery will take years. In March the Anglican Bishop of Kingston, Garth Minott, now president of the Jamaica Council of Churches, said his church was helping people who do not own the land they live on to put up temporary homes, because without title they cannot build permanent ones, a problem the Opposition leader has tied to the wider recovery (see Golding Ties Melissa Recovery Failures to a Land Titling Gap).
Churches also became the recovery’s infrastructure. Adventist conferences turned church buildings into food stores and set up solar-powered charging hubs; a church in Santa Cruz was still housing displaced people in April. The government has said it will discuss with the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management how church buildings can be built formally into the national shelter plan.
New leaders, old questions
The storm has coincided with a generational change at the top of several churches. In February the Adventists, Jamaica’s largest denomination, elected Pastor Glen Samuels, who led the West Jamaica Conference through the storm, as president of their Jamaica Union. In April the Anglican synod chose Canon Collin Reid as Bishop of Montego Bay; accepting, he said there was “no better time to go west”. The Catholic Diocese of Montego Bay has had no bishop since 2023.
The new leaders inherit choices that predate Melissa. Most of the historic churches have been losing worshippers for decades, as our analysis Jamaica, a Nation of Churches, Is Quietly Changing Its Faith sets out, and many of the buildings the storm broke were large nineteenth-century chapels serving smaller congregations. Some congregations plan to rebuild with concrete roofs. Others face the question Mr Warmington raised less gently: whether every damaged chapel should come back, or whether ministry should follow the people to where they now live.
What to watch
The first anniversary of the storm falls on 28 October, before the end of another hurricane season. The tests ahead are whether the promised rebuilding finance materialises, whether the grant programme reaches churches outside the five western parishes, and how many of the destroyed churches are rebuilt at all. Jamaica Homes will update its Christianity in Jamaica guide and the pages on each denomination as the churches report.
Sources: Jamaica Information Service, “Gov’t allocates $75m to support religious organisations” (24 December 2025); Social Development Commission, applications update (February 2026); The Gleaner, “Pastor rejects Warmington’s criticism” (30 December 2025), “$75m ‘a drop in the bucket'” (1 January 2026), “Holness: $75m for churches clean-up, not reconstruction” (6 January 2026), “Churches in St Elizabeth receive hurricane grants” (20 April 2026), Moravian Church damage (April 2026), New Testament Church of God damage (April 2026); Jamaica Observer, Hanover church grants (5 June 2026); IRIE FM (25 March and 25 June 2026); Christian Daily International (23 January 2026); Jamaica Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists and Adventist News Network (November 2025); USPG and the Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands; United Reformed Church (March 2026); Methodist Church in Britain (November 2025); jw.org (6 November 2025); Jamaica Baptist Union; Baptist Press. Further sources on each church are listed on its page in our Christianity in Jamaica guide.
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