While a leadership committee of Amistad Presbyterian Church in southeast Fort Wayne met on the evening of Nov. 28 to celebrate another year of church ministry, an I&M smart meter silently measured the church’s energy use.

The next morning, the smart meter was credited for saving the church building.

Late in the night of Nov. 28, as temperatures dropped, the church’s main electrical panel melted down. The smart meter detected a partial outage, triggering an alert to I&M. Jon Schuck, an I&M line servicer, responded and found the panel was “glowing red and the lug nuts were melting.” He quickly disconnected service, preventing a fire.

Amistad is a collaborative, bi-lingual Presbyterian Church serving the Hispanic community in the Pettit-Rudisill neighborhood and is supported by First Presbyterian, North Christian Disciples of Christ and Plymouth Congregational churches in Fort Wayne.

Due to the necessary loss of power, worship services were displaced. Several other events were affected, including a coat-and-clothes distribution, yoga classes, immigration paperwork services and Toys for Tots.

With difficulties finding a contractor during the busy holiday season and another delay while waiting a county inspection, the church had to move services elsewhere for several weeks. I&M restored power following the successful inspection.

Despite the disruption, the congregation had much to be thankful for, said the Rev. Deb Stark Mitchell, clerk of the church’s steering committee. “That there is a church at all is due to I&M’s remote monitoring,” Stark Mitchell said.

Stark Mitchell’s father, Jack Stark, was a longtime I&M employee. She remembers him donning a hard hat and climbing a pole to help restore power after the 1965 Palm Sunday tornadoes. He served in various engineering and management positions until he retired as senior vice president in 1986. He passed away in 2001.

“He and his I&M friends did what they had to do to meet the needs of the people,” she said.

Decades later, in 2023, “I&M actually saved the church,” she said.  “A Christmas Miracle.”