This Miraculous Thing

Polish immigrants, phone chargers & surging church attendance.

Part 1: Ottawa Pastor's Wife: I Had More Volunteers Than I Knew What To Do With

The Ottawa-based Bikers Church - which ministered to the Freedom Convoy over a period of three weeks - was, in turn, supported by other parts of the community.

A chef of Polish descent arrived from Toronto with a team of people to help with the cooking. Melissa McKee, the wife of pastor Rob McKee, says: “The Polish community backed up a giant van with 300 loaves of bread. We’re still eating Polish sausage. Honestly, we’re still eating it [two months later].”

The Poles, she says, “astounded me. They gave, and gave. They were so generous. But they know. They know what they don’t want to go back to. So many of them” escaped Communism, and therefore know what it’s like to live in a society in which government rides roughshod over human rights.

For Melissa those three, labour-intensive weeks will always be memorable:

We actually knew that we were living this miraculous thing that was gonna end at some point, and we were lapping up every single minute of it. We knew that it was so special.

…People were sending food, and I was saying ‘we have no more room. I don’t have any more freezer space. We have no more fridge space.’

When police violently crushed the Freedom Convoy on the morning of Saturday February 19th, many truckers were arrested, handcuffed with zip ties, left to sit in paddy wagons for hours, and then driven to remote locations and released.

It was volunteers who located and collected them, who offered them rides to the church. In Melissa’s words:

Some of them didn’t have wallets. Some of them didn’t have a winter coat on them. It was minus-30. One guy didn’t have boots or a coat on. I mean, where else, where would people go?…Some of them didn’t have their phones and…didn’t even get them back for six, seven, eight days.

…One of our [volunteers] he just took it upon himself, he went out and he bought a whole bunch of phone chargers. ‘Cause the ones that did have their phones, they were losing power, and trying to get a hold of their families…

Since February, attendance at the Bikers Church has surged. When Melissa was interviewed in April, 400 people were showing up for Sunday service. We’re “busting at the seams,” she reported. In her view, the

pandemic and everything that’s happened in the last two years, has made people rearrange their priorities - and it has made them look at what’s really important.

And it’s kind of cracked their hearts open a little…