Katrina-land no-brainers
- Sep 3, 2008 - comment
NEW ORLEANS – In the days following Hurricane Katrina’s devastation to our part of the world, I began calling on pastors and churches to see who was still in business and who needed our immediate help. At the First Baptist Church of Luling, Pastor Todd Hallman gave a brief tour of his fellowship hall which they had turned into a distribution center, supplying necessities for storm victims. Volunteers were everywhere and a constant stream of people flowed in and out of the buildings, entering empty-handed and leaving heavily laden.
Todd said, “One of our leaders returned from evacuation and saw all this and became indignant. He wanted to know who gave me the authority to turn the church into a distribution center.”
He smiled. “I told him it was a no-brainer.”
That’s as good an answer as any, and probably all the man needed. Some things do not need explaining, discussing, or being voted on. You just do it.
Over the past three years since the August 29, 2005, hurricane, we have found ourselves confronted by a number of no-brainers.
Among them are these…
1) This city and its businesses need strong visionary leadership if we are to make a comeback.
Some sectors of the city have been led capably; others not at all. For the most part, what we have received from our elected leadership has been promises, pronouncements, controversy, and blame, but very little in the way of courageous leadership.
2) We need outside help in extreme measures to recover from an emergency of this size.
The best thing that has happened to the rebuilding of this city, however, has been the volunteer groups from all over the nation. Our own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, has seen perhaps 50,000 to 75,000 volunteers come to New Orleans to assist in rebuilding and ministering to our people.
3) Few things will be the way they were before Katrina. That’s a no-brainer.
Baptist Seminary President Chuck Kelley refers to the “New Normal” that will eventually characterize the city.
4) Walls separating races and classes had to come down if we were to work together.
In the hundred or so Southern Baptist churches throughout metro New Orleans, our Anglo pastors for the first time began to learn the names of their colleagues who lead the Korean, Chinese, African-American, Spanish, Haitian, and Vietnamese SBC churches in the area, as we met for three hours weekly over the next two years. Volunteer teams from white churches across America worked on church buildings serving predominantly African-American or other ethnic congregations.
5) We’re three years into the rebuilding process; we have a decade or more to go. I wish I could say this is disputable, but it’s clearly a no-brainer.
One more…
Our pastors down here, the Baptist ones that is, will never again doubt the power of their denomination to make a lasting difference. So many of our ministers are still functioning in this area because the SBC (through its various agencies, including the Louisiana Baptist Convention) stepped up immediately and put cash in their billfolds so they could feed their families, put teams on the ground to gut and reconstruct their buildings and put their congregation back in the pews of beautiful new church buildings. We are forever indebted to God’s people across this land.
A few weeks ago, I sat in a church outside our area and heard a pastor from another state tell how his small church has been assigned an unreached people group in a South American country. His people are making several missions annually to that country and pouring their lives into this people who have never heard the gospel or worshiped in an evangelical church. An hour later, as we were chatting over pizza, that pastor said something that touched a nerve with me.
“Joe, don’t you think the time of the association is over? Do you believe there is a future for the association?”
I said, “My friend, there will always be an association of Baptist churches. Because the association is nothing in the world except your church and the church down the street and that one across town. It is not the little brick building out on the highway or the director of missions who works there; he’s not the association.”
“Now, what the churches in an area do together is up to them,” I said. “You will always have an association of churches because it’s the churches.”
Then, he said something that raised my hackles even more.
“And don’t you think the Southern Baptist Convention has had it? I mean, the day of denominationalism is over, isn’t it?”
I let out a deep breath and tried to speak calmly. “Did you hear what you said to the church tonight? You told how your church in Florida is working with the International Mission Board to bring the gospel to that unreached people group. Well, my friend, the IMB is the Southern Baptist Convention.”
“And,” I continued, “We along the Gulf Coast have been the target of millions of dollars from the North American Mission Board. The NAMB is the Southern Baptist Convention.”
“The Southern Baptist Convention is not a building in Nashville and it’s not even a week in June,” I said. It’s your church and the church across town and churches in the next state just like them. It’s all of us serving Christ and working together.”
Some things are no-brainers and this is one of them. (Okay, six, actually.)
This article is reprinted from the August 28, 2008, issue of the Baptist Message, the newsjournal of the Louisiana Baptist Convention.
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