His House has helped men recover for 44 years. How do they recover after fire?

Glenn Barkoot stands outside the Meeting Street Chapel in West Columbia and looks across the road at a bulldozer pushing together piles of burnt wood, cinder blocks and a mixture of other debris. The singed and soaked fringes of a white T-shirt stained red clings to the cement that used to be the foundation of His House thrift store.

“God sent me here,” Barkoot says about His House.

Despite a fire leveling the place where he's worked for 10 years, Barkoot believes that His House will keep providing for him.

Around 1 a.m. on Saturday, a woman who lives behind the store heard what she thought was someone breaking into her home, according to Barkoot. She realized the sound was the crackling of a fire in the back of His House.

Firefighters fought the blaze at 764 Meeting St. for nearly nine hours. Nearby homes that housed men in His House's recovery program were evacuated. The roof collapsed on a home attached to the thrift store where nine men lived, leaving the dwelling gutted. All nine men got out.

Barkoot was asleep when the fire was called in. He awoke as others in his house became aware of the fire.

“By the time we got up and got the lights on, the cops were knocking on the door saying ‘get out, get out,'" Barkoot recalls.

His House Ministries was founded in 1974 to provide housing and necessities for homeless men and to provide a space for men to recover from alcoholism. In exchange, the men are required to attend daily chapel services and complete daily work assignments. One of the places men worked was at the His House thrift store in West Columbia.

Roger Weaver is president of His House Ministries, though he prefers "reverend" in front of his name. Before taking the role as reverend at the Meeting Street Chapel and head of His House's mission, he worked as a street minister all over the country, he says. It was a "long journey" before he got to His House. Now he's been with His House for 28 years.

"I say I'm still doing street ministry because I'm dealing with people straight off the street," Weaver says. "It's been an awesome 28 years; and I've seen a lot of good men come through and, hopefully, a lot of lives changed."

The fire will have some effects. The West Columbia shop was the ministry's headquarters, containing records and office space. Some money will be lost, he said. But as he sits in the chapel's office, a bit tired looking following his sermon, he's thankful that no men were lost.

"Sure it's going to hurt, but we have three more (stores), and I believe God will supply," Weaver says. "People are more important than things anyway. As long as those men were OK, we think it's going to be fine."

A burnt-down building is nothing to rebuild compared to the lives of men that he's seen made whole again.

"As a Christ-centered program, we believe that the only way to freedom is with a relationship with God through Jesus Christ," Weaver says. "But my goal is for a man to change what, in his heart, he believes about himself so that he can have a different life."

Barkoot is one of those people who saw a different life for himself. Most of his life he struggled with alcoholism, he says. He came to His House and West Columbia 18 years ago.

“It took about 10 of those years to get it right," Barkoot says. "If you work the program the way it’s supposed to work, it’ll change your life. Alcoholics want to change their lives.”

He hasn't drank for almost a decade, he says, and that whole time, he worked at the store on Meeting Street and the ministry's other locations. Already, His House has gotten new housing set up for Barkoot and his housemates, as well as the man who was head of Barkoot's place, Jimmy Staggs.

Staggs was the go-to person at the house connected to the Meeting Street thrift store. The "senior man," he calls the position. The men staying at the home would come to Staggs with any issues they were dealing with, from problems stemming from former substance use to house issues. He came to the His House program around 2010. Soon after, he was a dispatcher, arranging for the pick up of items sold in their stores. Staggs has done this job for almost five years in total.

“They say I’m going to hold the record for having this job the longest," Staggs says.

But he lost the job about four years ago. Falling back into alcohol use, he was made to leave the job and home that His House provided. He came back, though, and started over.

"I had to work back to that position (as dispatcher),” Staggs says.

He knows loss and recovery. He thinks of the fire in the same vein.

“I lost some personal things," Staggs says. "I just thank God I didn’t lose my life."

He believes His House will give to him even through the fire.

“I’m homeless, but I'm not homeless," Staggs says. "As long as I have a bed at His House, I’m not homeless.”

This story was originally published June 27, 2018 at 8:41 AM.