By Karen L. Willoughby, Managing Editor
STATEWIDE – Time was, some say, when there was a disconnect between New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana.
Hurricane Katrina changed all that.
“Katrina has made our churches more aware of the culture and personality of south Louisiana,” said Barry Joyner, director of missions for Morehouse and Northeast Louisiana Baptist Associations. “It has drawn our people here together [with people from New Orleans] as far as helping them relate one to another on a better level.”
Virtually every church in every association in the Louisiana Baptist Convention responded in one way or another to the needs left after the desolation wrought in much of greater New Orleans. Each association contacted for this article said in one way or another, “What Satan meant for evil, God planned for good.” (Genesis 50:20.)
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More than 1,800 deaths were recorded as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Thousands upon thousands of people were displaced; in New Orleans, the U.S. Census Bureau reported a 53.9 percent drop in population between April 2000 and July 2006. (The city’s 485,000 population recorded by the Census Bureau in 2000 was estimated at 352,000 by the mayor’s office in mid-2009.) More than $81 billion in property damage makes Katrina the most costly ever of American disasters.
“Katrina created a sense of awareness of the scope of a disaster, how many people can be affected at the same time,” Joyner said. “I think responding to Katrina helped our churches to see that everybody can participate on some level of giving, helping, assisting – whatever – to help alleviate some of the needs.”
Before Katrina, there were no Disaster Relief units in the three associations where he’s director of missions, said Joe Baugh of Washington, William Wallace and Two Rivers Baptist Associations. Now there are four chain saw units.
“Katrina ignited us,” Baugh said. “We were already unified; we just didn’t have a mission [plan put together]. Now, everybody’s got a finger in the pudding.” This despite the fact that at least 14 of the 36 churches in Washington Baptist Association suffered major damage as a result of Katrina.
The associations now share the Acts 1:8 strategy of reaching out locally, regionally and globally. “We’re still in recovery mode, in some places,” Baugh said. “Doing missions and working together, that’s what’s going on. And all our churches do some kind of mission trip in the summertime.”
Lane Moore, associate director of missions in Northwest Louisiana Baptist Association, lived through Katrina assistance along with the 120 congregations in the association.
“There was no manual for this,” Moore said. “We didn’t have any book telling us what do we do on Day 3. … I think most everybody thought, ‘This will be a fun weekend,’ … and it did become somewhat of a grinding process into the third and fourth weeks.”
The final group to be moved from the association’s churches and camps didn’t happen until two months after the storm. That was a lot of meals, a lot of blankets, a lot of love poured out onto the many who found refuge in Northwest Louisiana Baptist Association’s churches.
What he found most amazing, Moore said, was the amount of assistance that found its way to the associational office. The owner of a chicken processing plant in Ohio called to say he was bringing down an 18-wheeler of frozen chickens. Dozens –if not hundreds – of people stopped by the association office with cash donations.
“Our city was not set up [for this level of disaster relief] and pushed people to the churches,” Moore explained. “We were regularly taking money to the churches. We didn’t have any committee meetings about it. There was no turnaround time to say, ‘What do we do with this money?’ We just gave it to the churches, who bought food, blankets, toiletries – whatever the people needed.”
Pre-Katrina, Northwest Louisiana church members reached out with a spiritual response to peoples’ needs, Moore said. “I think they saw for the first time that we’ve got to minister to the total person. These people literally had nothing but the clothes on their back.”
Deep friendships grew from what started as a housing and feeding ministry, and many of them continued for two or three years after Katrina, Moore said.
“Katrina I think opened a different perspective about loving people with God’s love,” Moore said. “This was something so different from what any of us had gone through before. When company comes, company goes. But this company came and never went home. I think folks were not prepared for that. It was the event that never ended … because we’d never been through this before.”
Katrina strengthened the work of Bienville and Webster-Claiborne Baptist Associations, said Director of Missions Randy Hales.
“It brought our churches together,” Hales said. “The churches looked to [the associations] and that really was the turning point for our associational finances and unified work. Our churches are supportive of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, but along with other groups like the Red Cross, etc., they perceived we were more accountable and they could see exactly where their money went. They trusted us with their finances. …
“It became a turning point for our area,” Hales continued. “It unified their financial gifts, their energy – they saw the association was an organization they could work through to make a big impact. It provided opportunities for churches to meet immediate needs close by and I think that energized churches to see they could be hands-on in missions.”
The churches in Bienville and Webster-Claiborne associations responded generously to the needs in New Orleans. They helped rebuild Lakeview Baptist Church in Metairie and had money left over, so they walked beside and helped with the finances of a New Orleans church plant for three years – the former Sojourn, which recently was renamed Harbor.
They also have through the Unlimited Partnerships at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary supported three students a year serving as secondary staff members in New Orleans’ area churches, at an annual cost of $15,000/student.
“I hate to say it but Katrina, Katrina was an opportunity for us to unite on a local level and our folks really got behind that,” Hales said. “They knew they could trust the association to administer their gifts in the proper way. … And they wanted to be a continuing part of helping rebuild New Orleans. That’s what we’re doing with Unlimited Partnerships – helping strengthen three churches there each year.”
The churches in the five association that comprise District 8 – where Lee Dickson is director of missions – were some of the very first people sitting on parking lot at First Baptist Church of Covington. This includes DeSoto, Natchitoches, North Sabine, Red River and Sabine Baptist Associations.
“I had 28 people there within 48 hours and I’m grateful for that,” Dickson said. “We helped clear streets so the ERVs [Red Cross emergency response vehicles] could get food to people. …
“Katrina made our people much more sensitive to disaster needs not only down there but we were in Sabine, Beauregard and Vernon parishes after Rita,” the director of missions continued. “I think we’ve become extremely sensitive to the needs of people wherever there are disasters. I took 700 pounds of food to Eagle Pass, Texas, two weeks ago, after Hurricane Alex.”
The money for the food came from District 8’s Acts 1:8 budget and additional contributions by a half-dozen churches that added to it.
“We also took $2,500, doing what we could,” Dickson said. “Our people still see a need to be ready to go and act quickly and that’s the reason we have an Acts 1:8 account. We’re in the red in that account right now, and that’s a good thing.”
Each of the 43 associations and all the nearly 1,600 churches in the Louisiana Baptist Convention have their “Katrina stories,” which sometimes meld into their “Rita stories” and since then, with Hurricanes Ike and Gustav. We wish we had space to tell them all.
The three North Shore Baptist associations – St. Tammany, Chappapeela and LaTangi – responded immediately to Katrina-related needs in New Orleans, even though they suffered major damage themselves, said Director of Missions Lonnie Wascom. They came to work together so seamlessly that this year the three are praying about the possibility of becoming one Northshore Baptist Association.
Wascom’s first-person account of the first few days after Katrina – available in its entire 1,860 emotional words on www.baptistmessage.com – brings home the reason Louisiana Baptists unflinchingly opened their hearts and their lives to the people devastated by a storm. An excerpt follows:
“We were set up with incident commands in Hammond, Covington, and Pearl River,” Wascom wrote. “I was operating out of a hyper ‘task’ mode. I arrived during the middle of the day at FBC Covington with a task to perform: I needed some time with Pastor Waylon Bailey to discuss an additional ministry effort we wanted to locate at their facility.
“I spotted Dr. Bailey crossing the campus toward the feeding unit. He had been working that morning as a “pile it” on their chainsaw team. The “pile it” guys are the ones who take the product of the skilled labor folks (chainsaw operators) and “pile it” here or there or wherever the blue hat instructs.
“We hooked up and headed toward the feeding unit to discuss the matter I needed a decision regarding. A compact car with a young woman driving with a small child in a child restraint in the back seat pulled alongside us. She asked for certain kinds of help. She was obviously frazzled, stressed, and afraid. I immediately went deeper into my ‘task’ frame of mind with a list forming in my head of places she could go to get the specific help she needed. But not Pastor Bailey.
“He asked if she had anything to eat and when she and her little girl had been fed. She admitted it had been awhile. He urged her to park her car, get her little girl, and join us for lunch. While we were eating he probed deeper into her need. She acknowledged her fear. And this great pastor took her by the hand, looked into her eyes, and said, “I am afraid also. And I don’t know all that’s going to happen. But you are here and the things you need are going to be gotten and you are loved more than you can imagine.”
“We were all weeping and I realized once again, though Disaster Relief and Recovery is primarily task-driven, the task it is driven toward is meeting the needs of people in the name of Jesus. Then Jeremiah 29:11 crossed my mind at that moment, especially as it is rendered in the New American Standard translation, ‘For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope.’
“And that is why the North Shore Baptist Associations churches have invested in a feeding unit, shower unit, laundry unit, and several recovery units (chain saw units, one of which includes some heavy equipment), so that we can be used by God to meet human need in the Name of Jesus. In the calamity that was Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath, the Gospel of Hope that assures us of a God-promised future was the most important product that we delivered as North Shore and Louisiana and Southern Baptists cooperating together.”