Week of September 19, 2005
The Southern Baptist North American Mission Board officials announced
the agency is providing a daily brief Web-cast highlighting disaster
relief operations. The briefing will be posted weekdays at
www.namb.net/dr. The Web site will include statistics and downloadable
materials to inform Southern Baptists of relief efforts and needs.
McKinnley Pittman lost all his phone numbers in the floodwaters of
Hurricane Katrina, and for eight days he did not know if he also had
lost his wife. Pittman took his wife, Geraldine, to a niece’s house
outside of New Orleans on Aug. 28, to shelter her from the hurricane.
Then, he went back to New Orleans to ride out the storm. Five days
after the storm – but without his family phone numbers. Pittman was
rescued from a rooftop. He eventually was taken to a shelter at
Churchill Baptist Church in San Antonio, Texas. He mentioned his plight
to John Nelson, a member of Churchill Baptist who was working as a
volunteer. Nelson began an Internet search and soon located Pittman’s
wife. “Hey, woman! Where have you been hiding?” Pittman asked when he
finally talked with his wife by telephone, grinning and weeping at the
same time. After hanging up, he kept repeating, “Thank you, Lord; thank
you, Jesus.” Nelson resaid he did not locate Pittman’s wife and neither
did the Internet. “God did it,” he said. “We’re just doing what we
should be doing to help these people.”
Even while the scenes of lawlessness and crime in post-Katrina New
Orleans continued to pour from televisions across the country, the
campus of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary was secure. A group
of Oregon National Guardsmen stationed in the Gentilly neighborhood
where the seminary is located made the seminary their command post. The
front of campus had escaped flooding. This small island in the midst of
a city under water provided a perfect staging area for troops and
equipment. New Orleans Seminary professor and military chaplain Endel
Lee worked with school officials and the Guard commander to make the
arrangement possible. Lee returned from a deployment with the Marines
in Iraq in August and was deployed as a chaplain with the Coast Guard
shortly after Katrina struck.
Even in the midst of Hurricane Katrina, Baptist students at Louisiana
State University in Baton Rouge were able to minister, reported Steve
Masters, director of the campus ministry. Masters and his family, along
with several students, decided to seek refuge from Hurricane Katrina at
the Baptist Collegiate Ministries center on the LSU campus. “On Sunday
night, one of our … students … came by and said they needed some
help setting up an evacuation center in the LSU Fieldhouse (where the
track team practices),” Masters said. “Twelve or so of our students
went over and helped for several hours. After the hurricane, a decision
was made to set up the hospital. I helped those 12 students to round up
50 to 60 more Baptist Collegiate Ministry students, and they set up the
hospital on Monday night. This was the beginning group of the
2,000-plus volunteers at LSU that helped for a week.”
A steady flow of very personal responses to New Orleans Baptist
Theological Seminary’s displaced students is pouring into the school’s
temporary offices in Decatur, Ga. For instance, Donna Ware’s third
grade Sunday School class at Ridgecrest Baptist Church in Birmingham,
Ala., collected $10 for seminary students affected by Hurricane
Katrina. Along with the money given by her young students, Ware sent
six handmade bookmarks. Each bookmark made by a third-grader was
printed with the text of Joshua 1:9 and adorned the gifts with personal
drawings.
Several friends of the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board
took a full-page advertisement out in the Sept. 12 issue USA Today
newspaper, the largest circulation daily newspaper in the country. The
ad appeared in the first section of the paper and depicted a Southern
Baptist Disaster Relief volunteer ministering to a hurricane survivor.
The ad provided basic information about the scope of Southern Baptists’
disaster network and Katrina response and encouraged USA Today’s 2
million readers to make a donation to relief efforts.
Estimates indicate an estimated 925 Southern Baptist churches in three
states – Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama – were severely damaged or
destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
The Southern Baptist Convention is offering a free online service to
aid those displaced by Hurricane Katrina to reconnect with their family
and friends. The Survivor Information Database, at www.SBC.net is
available for those searching for persons displaced by the hurricane
and for those who were displaced to alert family and friends as to
their condition and location. Officials estimate that more than 1
million residents of the Gulf Coast will be unable for months to return
to the homes they evacuated because of the hurricane. About half of
those displaced are from New Orleans. Southern Baptists compose a
considerable portion of the populations in states most impacted by the
devastation, making up about 34 percent, 33 percent and 18 percent of
the residents in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, respectively.
Stella Lewis of Mobile, Ala., responded to Hurricane Katrina with a
desire to help. Feeling blessed that she and her family were safe, she
stopped by Moffett Road Baptist Church, a staging area for Alabama
Baptist disaster relief work, and asked what she could do. While
unloading supplies from a truck, Alabama Baptist volunteer Richard
Smith noticed Lewis. Smith asked if she was a Christian. “I told him I
was not,” Lewis said. “I was brought up in the church but through time
had gotten away.” Smith and Lewis went to the church’s chapel, where he
shared the plan of salvation and she found faith in Christ. “I told her
we walk by faith, and we’re not perfect, but the bottom line is I want
to see her in heaven,” Smith said. Lewis spent several days
volunteering her time on the feeding line, and now has a new motivation
for serving. “When I look back at this tragedy, I’ll also see and
remember that out of this tragedy for me came an admission to myself
that I had been putting off coming back to Christ,” she said. “Out of
this disaster, now I feel like my life is whole.”
Leonard and Annette fled from New Orleans and sought shelter at
Greenwell Springs Baptist Church in Greenwell Springs. The couple had
been living together for some time, but after attending services at
Greenwell Springs, they told pastor Dennis Terry they wanted to “make
things right” and get married. There were no silver wedding bells on
the impromptu wedding cake, but the creation of this new home is one
silver lining in the Gulf Coast tragedy, Terry said. Another is that
Leonard and Annette were the first African American couple ever married
in the church’s 50 year history.
The World Bank defines “absolute poverty” as living on less than $1 per
day. That encompasses 1.3 billion people – or about 22 percent of the
world’s population. Upwards of 60 percent of the poor are women and
children.