Almost in the blinking of an eye, the walls of First Assembly of God Church in Troy came tumbling down.

Ferocious winds early Thursday morning played havoc all around the county, but the most destruction was at the construction site of the First Assembly of God Church on the Henderson Highway.

“We had all the walls up and the trusses for the roof were scheduled to come in this morning,” said Bill Maservey, a construction specialist with the Assemblies of God MAPS (Mission America Placement Series) program. “We’ll just have to start again.”

Maservey, a native on Maine, is one of several RV Volunteers who are constructing the First Assembly of God Church in Troy. The group came to Troy in October to set the hook-ups for their RVs and then were back Nov. 1 to begin construction.“We’ve been building churches for long time, but we’ve not seen anything like this,” said Roger Allen from Chiefland, Fla. “The wind was blowing so hard that the RVs were rocking. It was a scary thing. I thought that it might be a tornado, but it might just have been high winds.” Neither Maservey nor Allen seemed to be discouraged that their weeks of work were mired in sticky, red mud.

“We’re here to build a church, and we will build a church,” Maservey said. “Once the insurance claim is settled in three weeks we’ll be back to where we were before the winds knock the walls down.”

The RV volunteers assigned to the Troy project are from Maine, Florida, Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Texas. They are retired from various vocations and many of them volunteer fulltime with MAPS, going from job to job building churches, youth camps and Teen Challenge facilities. “People often ask me how I make a living and I tell them that I don’t,” Allen said. “God takes care of us and He does a real good job.”