It’s hot in New Orleans. Summer, which officially arrived last Thursday, did what she normally does–arrived in mid-May and threw a blanket over New Orleans and made herself at home like she owned it.

A group of youth and sponsors from Faith Baptist Church of Texarkana, Arkansas, are doing the summer camp at Highland Baptist Church this week. While spending Tuesday morning drawing all the kids, I said to one of them, “Good thing you’re Southerners. You know about hot weather.” He said, “Yeah…but this is something else.”

Yes, it is. It’s called the humidity.

When we moved to this city to attend seminary over 40 years ago, one of the first things Margaret and I did was buy an air-conditioner. We’d managed in Birmingham, Alabama, with only a window fan, but it was “something else” down here.

The Wednesday pastors meeting welcomed 25 today, about normal for the summer months. Thuong Le of the Vietnamese Baptist Church just returned from 2 months in his home country, teaching preachers, and brought with him a minister who is going to establish a work in New Orleans East where so many Vietnamese live. Pastor Le said, “After his initial 3 months are up, we hope to have found the finances to support him so he can continue the work.”

(As always, for a complete account of the pastors meeting, go to www.bagnola.org where administrative assistant Lynn Gehrmann posts her notes.)

“Since we’ve been taking visiting church groups into New Orleans and the lower parishes,” Rudy and Rose French reported, “we have felt that we need to be knocking on doors in our own neighborhood of Norco.” Rose told us, “The problem was what to use to get people to open their doors and talk to us.” She thought of the baskets of toiletries and household items they’ve been distributing in St. Bernard Parish–and that’s where Rudy was today–and said, “The people of Norco did not have a lot of hurricane damage, so they don’t need that. They needed something else.” So she asked the Lord.

Continue reading →

Billy and Ruth Bell Graham. Clifford Stine. Brad Bradford. Jimmy Draper. And Mama Rose.

The Billy Graham organization sends out a prayer card with the famous evangelist’s photo and dates of telecasts so we can pray. I post it on the fridge with a magnet and almost daily pray for him. I have told here of the time Dr. Graham spent an hour or more in my office, just before the funeral of his beloved friend Dr. Grady Wilson. As we chatted, I asked myself, “Do you pray for this man?” Realizing I didn’t, I asked why not. My answer was the weakest thing: “He’s a world-wide evangelist. And I’m only one person.” Instantly, something inside me said, “And do you know anyone who is two?”

Ever since, I’ve prayed for Billy Graham. Even if–and perhaps because–he is a world-famous Christian leader, he needs the prayers of God’s people. Particularly, in these days since the homegoing of his wife Ruth, I’ve lifted him up.

Monday night, I decided to type in the name “Clifford Stine” to a movie-star search engine and see what came up. Sometime in the early 1970s when I was on staff at the First Baptist Church of Jackson, Mississippi, I met this gentleman. He and his wife joined our church, and if memory serves me correctly, I baptized them. They were retiring from the motion picture industry in Hollywood, his wife had relatives in Jackson, and so they moved there. I picked his brain somewhat about what movies he had worked on and still recall the answers.

He was not an actor, but a director of photography and sometimes director of special effects, spending his whole career with Universal. The first movie he worked on was King Kong. Really. And in the 1950s when Universal was turning out all those scary sci-fi movies, Stine directed special effects on them. “The way we did the ‘Incredible Shrinking Man,'” he said, “was by making larger and larger furniture.” Low-tech by modern standards, but hey, it worked.

So, last night, his name came up and I learned that, yes, he worked on King Kong in 1933 as “the second assistant camera.” He was 27 at the time. He worked on Gunga Din, Spartacus, Patton, The Hindenburg, two Abbott and Costello movies (“Meet the Mummy” and “Go to Mars”), and Doris Day’s Pillow Talk. And about fifty others.

Continue reading →

The other morning, a TV news show featured the author of a book about transitioning from college life to the workaday world of a career person. The woman said, “One thing you should do is clean up your internet image.” That was a new thought for me. She continued, “You want people to think of you as a professional person now, not the carefree kid of messy dorm rooms and frat parties.”

I thought of one of our pastors. His e-mail address begins “tennizbum.” On the other hand, another of our pastors has an address that begins with “Godsman.” Knowing nothing of the two except their internet handles, which would you choose as your spiritual leader? (Tennizbum is a good guy. Just making a point.)

Sometimes these little details are clues to who we are in greater ways. I keep thinking about a staff member I used to know who was extremely lazy. One of his former pastors said to me, “I should have picked up on that quality about him from the beginning. The first time he walked into our church offices, he spotted a couch near the receptionist’s desk and said, ‘Oh boy–a couch! This is my kind of church!'”

Robert Cerasoli is a name we expect to hear more in the future. He’s the new inspector general for the City of New Orleans. We’ve never had one of those before, but the office was created in 1995 when voters approved a number of revisions to the City Charter. An ethics board was called for, one that would hire an inspector general to study the workings of city government and root out corruption. Only recently did we get the ethics board and they’ve just now hired Cerasoli as the IG from a list of 21 applicants.

The assignment doesn’t begin until August, but Cerasoli, a Massachusetts native, has been in town this week–at his own expense, he said on the radio; he’s serious about this–meeting with officials and trying to get a handle on the exact powers, directions, and limitations of his job.

The newspaper says his salary is $150,718 and the budget for his office is $250,000 for the rest of this year, which doesn’t sound like a lot. When you consider that U. S. Attorney Jim Letten’s office has netted 28 convictions, guilty pleas, or indictments in an ongoing probe into city government just in the last year or so, it’s obvious the inspector general has his work cut out for him.

Continue reading →

“I’m calling from USA Today newspaper. Jim Burton of the North American Mission Board in Atlanta said you might be able to help me.”

If I can, I’ll be happy to.

“I’m writing about the spiritual state of the people in your area, how they are adjusting to their post-Katrina lives–dealing with the problems of the devastation, the slowness of governments to help, the few neighbors returning, the difficulties in rebuilding, and so on.”

I told her people are more open to talking about God and receiving the spiritual assistance of others than we’ve ever known them to be. Our people who take baskets of household items door-to-door in the troubled areas are finding everyone hospitable. No one refuses to open the door and no one slams it in their faces. They appreciate any help offered and are glad to listen to someone with a witness.

But out in Jefferson Parish–the cities of Metairie and Kenner, primarily–there’s an anomaly. (I didn’t use that word. It only shows up in my writing, not my talking.) Every one of our churches, even the ones which appear to have received no hurricane damage, has lost members, some as many as 40 percent. And yet this parish’s population is around the same as before the storm. This would indicate that while thousands are moving out, those moving in have not been attending church, or at least not in this parish.

Down the street from our associational offices on Lakeshore Drive in New Orleans sits the regional offices for the Lutheran denomination. Monday, one of their leaders sat at our break table and told a similar story. All their churches have lost members and their schools are all suffering. The people with faith seem to have grown in faith, but the churches have not grown numerically. A ‘for sale’ sign sits in front of their headquarters building. They’re asking $1.3 million, and would love to relocate to the Northshore area.

Continue reading →

Our governor is in the nation’s capitol today, asking lawmakers to come up with another $5 billion for the Road Home Program. The headline in Wednesday’s paper announces this is going to be a “hard sell.”

Congress doesn’t trust our leaders. No wonder, when you consider the shenanigans of many of them.

Across the top of today’s front page, we read that an ex-school board member has admitted to taking bribes from the brother of embattled Congressman William Jefferson to influence board policy. Mose Jefferson himself has been prominent in the news as the partner of his little brother William in all kinds of business deals, some of which now appear to have the potential of sending them both up the river.

Ellenese Brooks-Simms had presented herself as a foe of corruption in running for the Orleans Parish School Board in 2000. She was outspoken in her criticism of Superintendent Al Davis, particularly when it came out that Davis’ elderly father, a custodian at Carver High School, had racked up enough overtime to bring his annual income to $70,000. Brooks-Simms was relentless in her outcries against cronyism and corruption, so Davis was terminated and Anthony Amato was hired. Within a year, Brooks-Simms and some of her pals on the school board were trying to oust Amato when the citizenry decided they had had enough of such shenanigans. In the 2004 election, she was voted out along with a number of other board members, and a council of responsible, more proven leaders was chosen.

Now, this prophet of righteousness, this thorn in the side of all who would try to cheat the public, this voice for goodness, Ellenese Brooks-Simms will be going to jail. She admits that she took $100,000 from Mose Jefferson in order to support a program for the schools called “I CAN Learn.” The newspaper makes it clear the educational program as such is highly respectable and popular. The owner of the company says he hired Mose Jefferson as a consultant in order to introduce him to movers and shakers in the local educational community. “You can’t just cold-call a superintendent,” he said. The contract gave Jefferson $500,000 and stipulated that the agreement was immediately canceled by any “untoward activity.”

“Untoward”–an adverb meaning adverse or vexatious. Yes, I’d say we have had–and perhaps still have–plenty of vexatious political leaders down here. Not all, thank the Lord. But we keep getting these revelations about the wheeling and dealing that has gone on behind the curtain, and pretty soon you decide not to trust any of them.

That’s what congressional leaders in Washington are no doubt concluding.

Continue reading →