In the Lakeview section of the city, two church schools are up and running, flourishing even, while the public school lies in ruins. Neighborhood people say St. Dominic’s Catholic and St. Paul’s Episcopal schools–both pre-K to grade 7–became leaders of the comeback of Lakeview. Edward Hynes Elementary however has lain untouched since the hurricane and is due to be demolished. Therein lies the controversy.

In the first place, city agencies have more hoops to jump through than private schools, we’re told, more red tape and more complex financing issues to deal with. A school board member said, “We lumber like a mastodon.”

After the storm when people were re-entering Lakeview, the very-active parents organization mobilized volunteers who arrived at Hynes Elementary ready to gut out and clean their school. They were turned down by the Orleans Parish School Board, due to liability issues and the need for FEMA to get in and assess damages.

So, while the two church schools welcomed volunteers and contributions from encouragers across America and got on with the rebuilding, Hynes Elementary lay there, just as it does today, untouched. Like a bad time capsule. The chief financial officer for the school board explains that dealing with heavily damaged properties like Hynes is not as high a priority as reopening schools with greater potential. When the weeds at Hynes became scary, parents and neighbors convinced the board to have the lawn cut. One small victory.

The school board has put Hynes on the list for demolition and total replacement. This puzzles the community. Even though FEMA declared the building as more than 51 percent damaged–thus qualifying it for replacement–some local construction companies have toured the building and found it solid.

The principal, on the other hand, admits the building was decaying even before the storm. She says FEMA found greater damage than can be seen by a walk-through. This appears to be a great opportunity to get a new building and who can blame her. The fact that the school will not be in operation until the 2009 year matters some but not a great deal since the community is still sparsely re-settled.

The Essence festival in New Orleans this week has welcomed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as major speakers. Both candidates for the Democratic nomination for President promise that the rebuilding of this city will be a large feature in their administrations.

We Baptists should not be pointing the finger of shame at other religious groups. A “volunteer associate pastor” (whatever that means) of a Baptist church in Slidell church has been arrested on two counts of aggravated sex crimes and for possession of child pornography. The Times-Picayune of Friday reports that this man had previously voluntarily resigned from another Southern Baptist church in that same city when he was found to have what the pastor called “sexually graphic” material on his computer.

From time to time, voices in our denomination are raised to insist that we need some kind of database for keeping track of people found to be unfit morally for positions of trust in our churches. With our loose denominational structure, a person can float from church to church creating problems and hurting people for a long time before he is found out and stopped.

For the non-Southern Baptists among us, a word of explanation. Every Southern Baptist church is self-governing and autonomous. At three levels–association, state, nation–the churches choose to cooperate at whatever depth they please. Some are members of the Southern Baptist Convention in name only, with leaders never attending any function, the church rarely contributing a dime, and the members never participating in events. Others are more active, and some extremely so.

The executives of this denomination–and this would include directors of missions for the association (my job in New Orleans), executive-director for the state convention, and a whole “slew” of leaders on the national level and their staffs–are all employees of the convention and not bishops. We exercise no authority over the churches or pastors. Whatever influence we weild with pastors and churches is a blend of our own moral authority and the willingness of the churches to follow us.

Which is to say: we move slowly on such matters as building databases to monitor sexual offenders and require a consensus from our people in order to make this work. The time for this, however, seems to have arrived.

Former mayor Marc Morial was in town this week, addressing the Essence festival on the slow pace of recovery in New Orleans. Now the president of the National Urban League and a figure of importance, particularly in the black community, Morial calls the plight of New Orleans “this generation’s Birmingham.”

“In 1962, Bull Connor’s dogs and the firehoses of the Birmingham Police Department turned on peaceful demonstrators shocked the conscience of the nation,” Morial told a small but supportive audience in the massive auditorium of the convention center named for his father, this city’s first black mayor.

“New Orleans is this generation’s Birmingham: a reminder that there’s too much poverty, a reminder that the government at every level dropped the ball, a reminder that, not withstanding the success of some, there is still suffering for too many.”

We were living in Birmingham during those shameful days, and will never forget the horrible events and lasting images. I’m not sure I would agree that the situation here is in any way parallel to that.

The paper says following the speech, Morial refused to comment on the ongoing investigations into contracts awarded by his mayoral administration that has resulted in more than a dozen guilty pleas and a recent jail sentence for a former top aide.

To date, Morial himself has not been implicated in the crimes. My observation is the one we made in the waning days of the Nixon administration when he was facing impeachment for the Watergate crimes: “If he knew, he’s a crook, and if he didn’t know all the bad things his aides were doing, then he’s incompetent. Either way, we’re better off without him.”

Marc Morial told the festival-goers, “I urge you not to stay downtown. I want you to take a trek down to the 9th Ward. I urge you to take a trek out to New Orleans east. I urge you to take a trek down to St. Bernard Parish. I ask you to do this because your eyes must see in person what the television tried to convey.”

He’s exactly right.

One of our pastors said this week, “When we have church volunteer teams that come to help us, the first thing we do is shock them. We take them into the devastated areas of the city and let them see first-hand what we’re facing down here. Thereafter, their witness to everyone they meet takes on a greater urgency.”