The Southern Baptist Convention voted in San Antonio today to meet in New Orleans in June of 2012. The last time they gathered here was the year 2000, and before that it was 1996. I have vivid memories of both times, since I chaired the Local Arrangements Committee, charged with hosting the event.
Jay Adkins, the young pastor of FBC Westwego went to the microphone in San Antonio and urged them to come earlier. “We need you now,” he said. A young pastor from Oxford, Mississippi, echoed his point and emphasized repeatedly, “Let’s take this city for Christ.”
Vice-President for Convention Affairs (or some such imposing title) Jack Wilkerson addressed the convention and made the following points. 1) Normally, we meet in the Super Dome, but since the Hyatt next door has not reopened, that’s out. 2) We want to meet in the Morial Convention Center and the Hilton next door is operating. 3) It takes a good 5 years to secure accommodations for this meeting in order to reserve the second week of June. (Jack said we always try to hold it prior to Father’s Day.) 4) We have financial commitments with the cities where we are now scheduled to go, and if we cancel one to move to New Orleans, we will a) lose a lot of money and b) lose faith with those cities.
So, the messengers voted to come here five years from now. I’ll be long off the scene, and a rusty age 72. I told Jack Wilkerson recently that he would, too. He said, “Maybe so.” Ha. I guarantee it. He and I will sit in the senior citizens section. If they have one.
Immediately after that vote, SBC President Frank Page told the thousands of messengers in the arena, “You don’t have to wait until 2012 to go to New Orleans. My church (FBC Taylors, SC) has been down there 9 times, working to rebuild the city and bear a witness for Christ. Hear the call of the Lord, friends. They need our help in New Orleans and all across the Gulf Coast, areas still coming back after the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina. Hear the Lord’s call!”
Steve Mooneyham, my counterpart for the Gulf Coast Baptist Association in Gulfport, Mississippi, went to the microphone today during the convention to express thanks to Baptists for their faithfulness in helping our people, our churches, and our area. It was a good word, Steve, and I’m so glad you did it. The only thing I wish is that I had thought of doing it.
There are several reasons I didn’t do that, the most important being that I’m home in New Orleans. I’ve been on the road so much lately, I decided to stay home from this meeting, and watched today’s proceedings on the webcast. Go to www.sbcannualmeeting.net. Click on the “live telecast of the SBC” somewhere on the screen. I was delighted to see “No Other Name,” my favorite Nashville contemporary gospel group, singing just before Morris Chapman’s Executive Committee report. I was distracted by something across the office when they began singing. Then I heard “that voice.” No one sounds like Laura Allen, the “girl singer” with the group. They have a website, too—www.noothername.com, I think, and you can listen to some of their music. Later this afternoon at the SBC, it was “Wings of Morning,” from FBC Woodstock, GA, a group of talented young adults I spent a week with in Lebanon, Missouri, last November.
I’m knocking out a few cartoons on the proceedings to send along to the Baptist Press, for Laura (yep–Laura of No Other Name) to post on www.bpnews.net.
And elsewhere….
I love it when a letter to the editor knocks one out of the park. This morning it was Tommye Myrick of New Orleans. She was responding to the gripes of French Quarter residents about the huge garbage cans the city is requiring them to use. They are ugly, too big, cumbersome, etc. Tommye writes, “As one of hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians who lost our entire life holdings to Hurricane Katrina, including cars, homes, jobs, neighbors and our very sense of security, I am taken by those more fortunate who complain constantly of having to drag their garbage through their homes.”
She continues, “Question: How would you like to switch places with those of us who have had to drag our homes to the garbage? Count your blessings. In the scheme of things, this is quite trivial.”
They’re saying Congressman William Jefferson is pulling together such a powerful legal team to defend himself against charges of corruption that the bill for the lawyers is going to run into the millions, and the trial will last months.
Some guy at the Southern Baptist Convention today made a motion that our denominational bookstore (Lifeway Christian Resources) be instructed to cease carrying books that are allegories, such as the Chronicles of Narnia, as the Bible expressly forbids them. Anyone who pleases can make a motion–on anything–and if he gets a second, he files the written motion with an official, and at a later time, the Order of Business Committee will either announce a time to deal with that motion or report what they did with it (such as rule it out of order because it’s the dumbest thing they’ve ever heard of!). I wonder what planet that good brother, the motion-maker, lives on. And has he never read the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15, which is an allegory if there ever was one.
People from other denominations are sometimes stunned to watch our annual meetings. Crowd up to 20,000 or more into an arena and then set up microphones all over the house and have a business meeting not unlike what any one of our 45,000 churches have. Everyone has a voice and everyone has a vote. Who was it–Thomas Jefferson, I think–who said that a Baptist church is the purest democracy on earth.
Which brings to mind Winston Churchill’s comment about democracy. Something to the effect that “it is the worst form of government on earth–with the exception of all those other kinds!”
A number of our colleges are being hammered by the American Association of University Professors for terminating staffers and bypassing tenure-agreements in the weeks and months following Katrina. Tulane, the University of New Orleans, Loyola, and Southern all moved fairly quickly after their leaders returned from evacuation to deal with the loss of the school year, the absence of students, and the complete disappearance of income from tuition. In dismissing personnel and reorganizing departments, the schools fired more staff than the situation required, the report says. The colleges ignored the AAUP’s standards for notifying those who would lose their jobs and offering to help them find other work, as well as giving insufficient consideration to tenured faculty.
The colleges respond that somebody doesn’t get it that we had this major catastrophe down here, and that the schools are in an ongoing crisis situation. The president of Loyola said, “It is astonishing that the AAUP would censure universities forced to operate under the urgent and enormous pressures they faced and continue to face in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.”
Southern University, a traditionally Black college, expressed in a statement that it was “deeply disappointed by the association’s lack of understanding.” Nearly two years after the hurricane, Southern is the only New Orleans university yet to return to its original campus. The school is operating in 45 modular trailers, and “due to numerous bureaucratic procedures” it still does not have a “definitive timeline for rebuilding the main campus.”
I have some strong opinions about the nerve of the AAUP, but think I’ll keep them to myself. I might feel differently if it was my job that was cut. But on the surface, it appears that the AAUP leadership has a lot in common with French Quarter residents who complain about dragging their garbage through the house. Maybe Tommye Myrick will pen them an epistle.
One more thing. The headline on page B-2 reads: “Baptists commit to build 300 houses.” Here’s the complete article.
“In a partnership with the Habitat for Humanity, First Baptist Church of New Orleans launched an initiative Monday to build 300 homes in the celebrated Musicians’ Village and elsewhere in the 9th Ward.”
“The church established the Baptist Crossroads Project to make home ownership a reality for low-income people. Crossroads has pledged to construct 60 houses each year for five years.”
“Since Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity has orchestrated the construction of at least eight homes in eastern New Orleans, one in Hollygrove, 38 single-family homes and a duplex for the elderly in the Musicians’ Village and at least 20 more in other parts of the 9th Ward.”
“In a news conference in the 9th Ward, Habitat officials applauded the Baptist Crossroads Project.”
“‘It’s the single most significant commitment that we’ve gotten to date,’ said Jim Pate, director of the New Orleans affiliate of Habitat for Humanity, which has another 81 single-family homes and four duplexes for the elderly under construction in the village as well as the $5.5 million Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.”
“The village, not exclusively for musicians, is an Upper 9th Ward area within Montegut Street and North Claiborne, Poland and Florida avenues.”
“David Crosby, pastor of First Baptist Church of New Orleans, gave birth to the Crossroads Project. He couldn’t attend the ceremony Monday because he’s in San Antonio at the Southern Baptist Convention, but he sent a written statement explaining that the Crossroads Project ‘is a response to the challenge of Jesus Christ to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.'”
“‘The strategy is simple,’ he continued. ‘Address substandard housing and poverty in our community by helping hardworking people move from renting into homeownership.'”
Will someone who reads this blog please–PLEASE!–make the contrast between this faithful pastor’s leadership and the poor example of our indicted congressman who was a slumlord and took advantage of his own people in order to make himself wealthy.
David Rhymes (NAMB evangelism strategist assigned to our associational office) was with a group of volunteers today doing a block party and Bible study in a rebuilding part of town, when he was accosted by a woman. “What are you all doing here?” she demanded. “We’re praying,” he answered. David is a soft-spoken sweet-natured man who would be almost impossible to offend. “We don’t need prayer,” she hurled at him, “We need action.”
David gently chatted with her, explaining the nature of the group’s ministry in that neighborhood. One of the men with him was ready to explode all over the woman, particularly when they learned that her purpose in being there was to get church groups to improve blighted properties which she would then buy and sell at a profit. Does anyone smell a rat here? (Note to critics of churches: so often when someone is harping on what the churches are or are not doing, they have their own angle going and are only angry the church is not dancing to their tune.)
David said to his friend later, “We’re not going to give that woman the opportunity to say she met a bunch of angry Christians. What we were doing was bearing a witness to her.”
We have all kinds down here.
Just like where you live, I betcha.