Dine trees and peace are the most attractive commodities of Washington Parish. With only two cities, Franklinton and Bogalusa, and a handful of towns, the parish remains a rural outpost, offering visitors a chance to tube, fish, hunt, or just enjoy the outdoors.
FRANKLINTON – Pine trees and peace are the most attractive commodities of Washington Parish. With only two cities, Franklinton and Bogalusa, and a handful of towns, the parish remains a rural outpost, offering visitors a chance to tube, fish, hunt, or just enjoy the outdoors. A new state park is in the building phase and a recreational reservoir is in the planning stage.
With a population of just under 44,000, according to the 2000 census, the population density is only 66 people per mile. Using the parish phone directory as a guide, there are at least 140 churches in the parish; 36 of those are Southern Baptist, making a church of some description for every 314 people.
Director of Missions Joe Baugh said there are only about seven growing Southern Baptist churches in the parish, using the criteria that an increasing Sunday school equals a growing church. Most of the others are plateaued, with a handful in decline.
“It’s not necessarily bad for a church to be plateaued,” Baugh said, “especially when you look at population. There are some healthy churches not gaining in number because the population is declining.”
Baugh said Sunday school attendance has declined by 13 percent over the last 10 years. Some churches are holding their own, while a few “look like they’re declining,” he said.
“They’ve had more people die than come in. There are no young people in the community to replace the ones who die,” he explained.
To help churches find creative ways to combat stagnation and decline in Sunday school, Baugh in the last year, with the assistance of Associational Sunday School Director Daryl Dunigan and LifeWay Christian Resources led interested churches to participate in a ‘smaller Sunday school growth campaign.’
Limited space is another reason some churches in the association are plateaued.
“If you have a coffee cup that’ll contain 8 ounces, you can only pour in 8 ounces,” Baugh said. “The size of your auditorium will determine the size of the congregation.”
Country churches are reluctant to break up the family atmosphere by going to two services, despite Baugh’s urging, the DOM said. The funds are not usually there to build.
To help churches adopt a stronger growth mentality, Baugh has five churches in Washington Parish that are piloting “EKG-Louisiana, Empowering Kingdom Growth in 2007.” This emphasis, modeled after the Purpose Driven Life, is based on Ken Hemphill’s book,
EKG: the Heartbeat of God. Hemphill spoke at this year’s state Evangelism Conference, which was built around energizing plateaued and declining churches, and which introduced the EKG concept.
“We have small and large churches involved,” Baugh said. “When we go statewide next year, we’ll have churches who have tweaked the problems and can help other churches go through it.”
Baugh has a vision that all of the churches in the parish can grow. He is always available for individual church consultations.
“This helps them put on another set of glasses and find new ways to penetrate the community,” he said.
A unique ministry in Washington Parish involves the parish fair. Holding the nation’s largest free fair is the parish’s one claim to fame. One airline’s magazine even touts the Washington Parish Free Fair as “an important Louisiana tourist attraction. Every October, the fair brings visitors to the parish during the third week in October, where the population swells daily to more than three times its normal count. Franklinton’s only traffic jams occur during fair week, especially in the evenings when free entertainment attracts thousands to the open-air stage.
The fair remains free because of the number of volunteers who give their time to serve on committees that plan the annual extravaganza. Many of those volunteers are Southern Baptists. While some are on fair committees, many more give an hour or two in the Washington Baptist Association’s three ministry locations inside the fairgrounds.
Baptist women give out free ice water and evangelical tracts in the Commercial Building. Baptist men offer a similar service, only with coffee as the liquid of choice, in a booth next to the Half Moon Bluff Baptist Church in the Miles Branch Settlement, a historical site where old parish homes and buildings are preserved for posterity. Inside the replica of what is claimed as the oldest Baptist church in the state, volunteers sing hymns while visitors stop for spiritual refreshment in the midst of the fair.
The largest ministry opportunity in the parish, though, is not the fair. With 25 percent of the population living below the poverty line, the greatest need is to provide for those who cannot make a living that will support a family. Thirty-two percent of those under age 18, and 20 percent of those over age 65, live in poverty.
The needs of those living in abject poverty were starkly visible following Katrina, when many of the homes of families living in poverty were destroyed by the storm. Cheap rental houses and homes weakened by years of neglect could not withstand 10 hours of 100+mph winds.
“The hurricane allowed us to focus on people who would have been ignored otherwise,” said Pastor Marcus Rosa of Westside Emmanuel Baptist Church of Bogalusa. [See related article on Triangle of Hope Ministries]
One ministry, though, was sidelined by Katrina. The Christian Women’s Job Corps, a ministry from a coalition of churches, struggled to continue. With only two clients left – the others were displaced – and important recruiting contacts severed, ministry director Jo Purvis said she has almost given up.
“It’s like a lot of things in Washington Parish,” Purvis said. “The structures that work well elsewhere don’t necessarily work well here.”
The program was a mentoring ministry for jobless single women. The board included resource people like a banker, businesswoman, educator, and an attorney. With some of those key people scattered and the companion clothes closet destroyed during the storm, Purvis currently concedes defeat; although, a faithful remnant continues to work with the two remaining clients. For the time being, though, recruiting has ceased, even though Purvis knows the need still exists.
A disaster response team is a direct outgrowth of the Katrina experience. The parish churches were the recipients of disaster relief from across the nation. Important aid came from the chain saw teams in the parish with enough trees down to rebuild New Orleans.
In the aftermath of the storm, the association developed and trained its own chain saw team. About 30 men and women are now certified “yellow cap” chain saw operators. Baugh said his aim is to have a parish chain saw team with it’s own blue cap leader (a first level supervision person) ready by the start of the hurricane season. The plan is to have two men attend blue cap training in April so they can fill the position of team leader when they’re called into service. The yellow caps in the parish have already responded to the ice storm, sending participants to Illinois and Arkansas.
Baugh is encouraged by the growth he sees in mission-mindedness. Wednesday night activities are increasing. Organizations for children are quite active. While they may not always be the traditional organizations of Southern Baptists, they are reaching children who may not come into a church otherwise.
“It’s a club mentality,” Baugh said. “Some parents are open to any activity that is a club.”
Women’s ministries are growing, although not always the traditional WMU model. Most do local missions and find a place in their structure for teaching about Southern Baptist mission efforts.
Katrina gratitude has also led to churches reaching out to areas hit even harder by the storm of the century. Numerous churches in the parish have developed relationships with congregations along the Gulf Coast. “Katrina really brought that out,” Baugh said. “that we have a mission when people are in need.”
The parish lost many pine trees to Katrina, but the second parish commodity, peace, has grown, at least in the hearts of Southern Baptists across the parish. They know the Author of the peace that passes all understanding. They take that peace with them as they do missions in other areas suffering from disaster.