BEFORE THE GAME

New Orleans and surrounding parts are all agog today. The Saints are playing the Philadelphia Eagles tonight for the NFL division championship. The winner goes to the NFC championship next weekend, and the winner of that to the Super Bowl in Miami on February 4.

You’d think we’ve never been here before.

We haven’t. Well, we’ve played in post-season playoff games. Four of them, to be exact, in 40 years of Saints football. And we’ve won exactly one. But this year figures to be different.

It feels different. The other times in previous years, honestly, we felt like impostors. Maybe the ball will bounce our way, anything can happen, we might luck up. This time, Saints fans feel like the team is honestly good enough to go all the way.

Today’s Times-Picayune splashed a headline across the front page: “All Saints Day!” It is indeed. Everywhere you look–and I put in 65 miles around this town today–people are wearing their Saints regalia. Even the doormen at swanky hotels. My son Neil took his three children to Academy Sports and let them buy Saints jerseys. Two opted for quarterback Drew Brees and the other for Reggie Bush’s shirts.

The paper ran a feature about Jackson, Mississippi, today, how the citizens are rooting for the Saints and buying up all the team’s caps and shirts they can find, a direct result of the team holding their training camp at Millsaps College last summer. Couple of funny stories….

Con Maloney owns an appliance store in Jackson. Last summer he ran a promotion to sell HDTV sets, and promised that if the Saints win the Super Bowl, he will refund the price of the set minus the sales tax. He sold a million dollars worth. At the time, of course, no one gave the Saints even a slim chance. They’re still a long way out, but it has become a distinct possibility.

Maloney confesses he has bought a half-million dollars of insurance in case he has to fork out those big bucks. He says the publicity will be worth the other $500,000 if it does indeed come to pass.

A bar owner in Jackson decided to buy a couple of season tickets for 2007-08 and run a promotional contest. The Saints ticket office said they’d have to put him on a waiting list. He’s number 2,600.

This has been a big day for us.

At 10 o’clock this morning, Global Maritime Ministries on Tchoupitoulas held their annual “board and friends” meeting, followed by a dedication of the new port ministry center at 1:30 pm. This big building is incredibly beautiful and well-furnished. As we gathered, you could see a number of foreign-looking men sitting before computers. “They’re off the Carnival cruise ship ‘Fantasy,'” Philip Vandercook told us. “Normally, they’ll have 25 crew members to drop by the center when they’re in town.”

Freddie Arnold chaired the building committee for Global Maritime, so had to be present at the afternoon dedication, while I drove to Chalmette for the 2 pm ground-breaking service for the “new” First Baptist Church. I would estimate 150-200 people gathered inside the gutted out sanctuary, many of them coming an hour early, just to dream about re-establishing their beloved church. Pastor John Jeffries has done a masterful job working with architects, Builders for Christ, and the Louisiana Baptist Builders.

By the time the nearly 2 hour service ended, Freddie Arnold had arrived and was able to address the crowd. Among the guests were several St. Bernard Parish leaders, Missouri Baptist leaders, and Dr. David Hankins, the executive director of Louisiana Baptists.

At one point, when they ran a video showing photos of the flooded sanctuary with its mildewed pews and ruined walls, as well as the destroyed educational building, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Someone might be tempted to say this were just so much lumber and material, but don’t tell them that. This was their church and it was precious to them.

Some of the members drove in a long way to be present. The hymn leader said, “This is my first time back.”

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The last time I saw signs yelling “Enough!” was in the mid-1980s just below Charlotte, North Carolina. We had moved there to pastor a church and were taking our first tour of Heritage Village, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s personal Neverland. Everywhere you looked, signs and bumper stickers announced “Enough is enough,” a reference to the barrage of criticism they were taking from the media and other outsiders who suspected things were not as they should be in PTL-land. We know now who was right.

Thursday, at the downtown New Orleans march to protest the city’s alarming murder rate, “Enough” blared at you from many a sign and poster. People are tired of being shocked by the morning news that more murders occurred overnight. One sign read, “Silence is Violence.”

The official estimate is that 3,000 people of all colors and races were marching. They came from several directions and met in front of City Hall for a rally. The funny thing about it–we’ll say it’s funny but I doubt Mr. Nagin thought so–is that many of the speakers were railing at the mayor, wondering where he is, calling for his resignation, evidently without a clue that he was standing right behind them.

Pastor John Raphael, Jr., gets my vote for our next preacher-leader. He was the instigator of this march and has been rallying the city from the pulpit of his New Hope Baptist Church (presumably a National Baptist church). In fact, a dozen years ago signs popped up all over certain sections of the city calling out “Thou shalt not kill.” A large billboard with that message was erected at Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard and South Claiborne Avenue. They were Pastor Raphael’s idea and paid for by New Hope Church.

These days, that same billboard has one word: “Enough!”

At the rally, Mr. Raphael, whom I do not know, said, “We have come to declare that a city that could not be drowned in waters of a storm will not be drowned in the blood of its citizens.” Great line. An important declaration.

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Sojourn, the new start-up church directed toward post-moderns, holds its first worship service on Magazine Street this Sunday at 5 pm. James and Amy Welch came down from Louisville, Kentucky, some months ago to begin this ministry which is being sponsored by First Baptist of Kenner.

Saturday morning at 10 am, the board of Global Maritime Ministries on Tchoupitoulas Street is holding its annual meeting. That afternoon at 1:30, they’ll be dedicating their new Port Ministry Center. Everyone is invited. Check out their website.

And also that afternoon, at 2 pm, the First Baptist Church of Chalmette (St. Bernard Parish), will be holding ground-breaking and dedication services for its new buildings. Freddie Arnold will be at Global Maritime and I’ll be at Chalmette. Two grand occasions, long-awaited.

Steve Gahagan reports that since Operation NOAH Rebuild (the North American Mission Board’s presence in our city) has been in operation, they have hosted 5,997 church volunteers from across America. They have 1,293 homes on their list still to be worked on. The volunteers have reported 123 professions of faith.

On a similar note, our Arkansas Baptist friends working out of Gentilly Baptist Church headquarters report having completed 52 houses with 1420 volunteers, who report 82 professions of faith.

Those figures–123 and 82 professions of faith–are wonderful, each one precious to the Lord and to us, but only a small fraction of the total number. Several of our churches have had extensive evangelistic outreaches over the 16 months since Katrina, with many hundreds of people indicating they prayed to receive Christ.

The total number as always is: God knows. And rest assured, He does. He alone knows.

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Sportscaster Jim Henderson says one thing people have always loved about New Orleans is that it appealed to all your senses. You enjoyed the sights–the grand homes, the historical buildings, the river; you loved the sounds–the music; you could taste the city–its cuisine; and you can even smell it–sometimes the smell of coffee roasting at a nearby plant and at other times, less appetizing aromas.

Life in this city these days is a matter of “Ds.” It’s always been daring. Since Katrina, it has been difficult. And now, it’s downright dangerous. The crime rate is soaring off the charts. And that’s not just in Orleans Parish proper. Last year, Jefferson Parish, always thought of as a safer alternative to the city, registered 78 murders. That is more than double the previous year.

Tuesday, Mayor Nagin and other local officials held a news conference to announce plans to combat the increase in violence. They’ll be asking the NOPD to speed up investigations, assigning sheriff’s deputies to routine police duties in order to free up police officers for serious crime work, and increase drug and alcohol traffic checks between 2 and 6 am. So far, they’ve not announced a curfew but it’s being discussed.

In the letters section of the paper, Fred Cargo of New Orleans thinks a curfew is a bad idea. All you have to do, he says, is chart the times of all the murders in 2007 so far. Two occurred after 11 pm; the others took place at 1:30 pm, 5:30 pm, 7 pm, 8 pm, 8:45 pm, 10:15 pm, 3:30 pm, 3:45 pm, 7 pm, 5:30 am, and 7:24 am. Good point, Fred.

One of the mayor’s suggested crime-fighting techniques is a “clergy family intervention” program, in which “priests would visit victims’ families.” Priests? Good idea. We may assume that was meant to cover all us non-priests–pastors, rabbis, and such.

Last Sunday’s Times-Picayune devoted several pages to showing how home values have changed since Katrina. Turns out it’s a great time to buy a big house in New Orleans. If you don’t mind its being a fixer-upper and living in a neighborhood of high weeds and big rats.

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I’m sorry for the people who were hurt in this, but I love a bizarre story, and this ranks among the strangest of the new year.

In Clarence, New York, not far from Buffalo, 47-year-old Tom Montgomery worked in a tool factory. He and his wife have two teenage sons, and I suppose old Tom was bored. That’s when he went online and pretended to be someone he wasn’t.

On the internet, he told the 18-year-old West Virginia beauty he was a Marine just back from Iraq. Mister Macho man. Good looking, muscular, tough, all that.

Tom went to the young lady’s website and found she was everything he hoped: beautiful, smart, and interested in him. Well, she was interested in him the way he described himself.

They began chatting back and forth as people do these days. The middle-aged man romancing the teenager through cyberspace. As I got the story, the young woman was unnamed for reasons that will appear below.

At work, Tom would brag to his co-workers about this sweet young thing he was stringing along. One of the men who heard his tales was Brian Barrett, a part-time factory worker and full-time student at Buffalo State College where he hoped to become a teacher. Nice guy, everyone says. Give you the shirt off his back.

One day, Tom’s wife found an e-mail from the sweet young West Virginia thing and figured out what her man was doing. She blew the whistle and sent a note to the teen informing her that Tom was most definitely not a Marine, not just back from Iraq, and not anything at all like he was presenting himself.

At some point along the line, Tom had told the West Virginia girl about his co-worker Brian Barrett. For reasons not clear, she managed to go online and track Brian down and introduce herself. They began emailing each other also.

Gradually Brian and Tom became rivals for the affections of the young lady. The bizarre thing about that is that neither of them had met her and neither even had plans to drive to West Virginia and meet her. But a rivalry grew up between them.

Last September 15, Brian got off work and was sitting in his car in the plant parking lot when someone drove by and pumped his body full of lead using a 30 caliber gun.

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There’s something about the football mentality of Americans, particularly men, that makes us apply lessons learned on the gridiron to the rest of life, areas that do not compare in any manner whatsoever. The church, for instance.

“If we could just get us a pastor like Bill Parcells.” Bear Bryant. Vince Lombardi. Joe Gibbs. Fill in the blank.

“Well, all I know is that Tommy Bowden came into Tulane–always a doormat in college football–and within two years, had led them to an undefeated season and a bowl game and national ranking. Don’t tell me it’s not about the coach. And if you can do it in football, you can do it in the church. All we need is to find the right pastor.”

Take Sean Payton. First year coach of the New Orleans Saints. First year as an NFL coach, period. And now named “Coach of the Year” in professional football by the Associated Press. He received 44 votes, with the second-place coach, the Jets’ Eric Mangini receiving only 3. Pretty convincing. He is most definitely a leader, a general, a motivator of men, a winner.

But he’s not a pastor.

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If you were to get down a map of the city of New Orleans, you could locate the Ninth Ward as a section of town just under Gentilly, behind the French Quarter, bounded on the South by the Mississippi River, and on the East by St. Bernard Parish. The infamous “lower” Ninth is the portion between the Industrial Canal and the St. Bernard Parish line and is where the levee by the Industrial Canal blew and did so much jawdropping damage.

The portion of the Ninth Ward on this side (i.e., the downtown side) is the Upper Ninth, and that’s where the Baptist Crossroads Project was focusing in the year 2004. It’s a spotted area, in the way much of New Orleans is, nice homes adjacent to slums, good neighborhoods a block from high crime areas. Originally, the Baptist Crossroads plan was to buy up forty blighted lots–vacant lots or condemned buildings–by paying the back taxes, then clean off a space and, under the direction of Habitat for Humanity, build forty new homes. Help forty families turn their lives around.

It all started with one statement from our mayor, an instance where he said something right.

David Crosby and I were among a large group of pastors invited to breakfast with Mayor C. Ray Nagin at the Fairmont Hotel one morning early in 2004. At one point in the middle of his message, Hizzoner said, “Studies have proven that home ownership is the most important factor in lifting a family out of poverty.” He said that and went on with his talk. David never heard another word. He was caught, snagged, hooked, as surely as if the Holy Spirit had thrown him a line with a lure and jerked it, setting the barb, and was reeling him in.

When we walked outside the hotel, David said, “Joe, we ought to build some houses.” I said, “What?” (No one ever accused me of quickly picking up on subtle nuances from the Holy Spirit.)

That was the inception. Out of that idea, the Baptist Crossroads Project was born. At first, David simply shared the dream with various friends and church members. And then Byron Harrell called.

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Nothing points up how out of touch I am with current culture in this country like reading a list of the top-selling CDs of the last year. Or the top ten movies. Or the best-selling novels. I don’t recognize any of them. And this current crop of popular singers–who are they? I hear their music on the radio and it all sounds alike. And the gospel music sounds like the rock stuff.

I’m trying hard not to be an old fogey about these things. I buy CDs of Alison Krauss and Union Station, the best blue-grass band ever, and they’re not ancient. I love Neil Young, but he is. My favorite is the songsters of the big band era; “old” goes without saying.

Now, I’m not against going to a movie occasionally, if it’s the right kind. Lately, there have been some good ones out there. Late Thursday afternoon, I bought a ticket to see “The Good Shepherd,” a story of the old OSS and the beginnings of the CIA. After an hour of this movie, I found myself puzzled to the point that I left.

I wondered who, for instance, decided that the best way to tell a cinematic story is to cut it up in bits and pieces and disorient the viewer? In that movie, a scene from 1961 is followed by one from 1939, then we cut to 1945. Back and forth. None of it made sense. Do these people not know you tell a story by starting at the beginning and going forward to a conclusion? Or would that be too simple, too juvenile? Did Kurt Vonnegut create this fractured-storytelling business with “Slaughterhouse 5”? At least his made sense, eventually.

I wonder what is the process movie-makers employ when they decide, “Let’s make the hero a sad, silent, miserable type. And let’s give him an unhappy home life. Let’s have his child be emotionally abandoned and overwhelmed by sadness. Oh, and let’s make the United States as unscrupulous and murderous as its enemies.”

Perhaps the biggest questions of all are: why do movie critics rate these shows so highly? and why am I paying good money for this?

“I don’t need this,” I rationalized, and walked out and went home to supper.

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Ask any director of missions and he will tell you one of his biggest challenges is strengthening the connection between his pastors and other ministers. Even after the incredible post-Katrina blessings we’ve enjoyed, we still have to work at building the fellowship.

Wednesday, as our weekly pastors meeting resumed following the holidays, as the pastors entered the room, they sat alone or with the person they came with, usually at a table by themselves. But we encouraged them to move together, then played a little game we used to open Lay Evangelism Schools with.

“Where did you live at the age of 4 and how did you heat your home? Start with the person with the shortest hair and answer that question.” In two minutes, each table was finished. Second question.

“At what point in your life did Jesus become more than just a word to you?” That took longer and some began opening up. Third question.

“What is your biggest prayer request for the pastors and churches of New Orleans?” After they answered, we prayed, table by table, taking all the time anyone wished.

“My prayer,” I told them, “is that our ministers will be in this city because God put you here, not because you feel you have no other choice.”

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Here is the picture from the ‘Old Friends‘ post you read about:

And my somewhat enhanced version:

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