In peaceful suburban Kenner, the violence is rising, just as throughout metro New Orleans. Four murders in 2005 and nine in ’06. Aggravated assault climbed from 162 to 231. Auto theft is way up, although some crimes decreased in number. Law enforcement people say part of the crime was bad guys preying on migrant workers, unthinkably cruel, if you ask me. Police chief Carraway says the spike in aggravated assaults is attributable to large numbers of people living in cramped quarters such as FEMA trailers and overcrowded apartments. Yep, that would do it.

Locals are griping about the president’s failure to even mention New Orleans and the Gulf Coast rebuilding last night in his State of the Union message. I don’t live in a trailer and my house wasn’t flooded, so I’m not typical on this and might be a lot more upset if I did, but personally, I don’t see a lot of value in having your cause given honorable mention in that annual laundry list of American problems. Possibly more importantly, the new congress seems to have the rebuilding of this part of the world on its agenda.

We had a small convention in town this past week, and as the 2,600 members of the Meeting Planners International–who knew they had an organization of people who plan meetings? and what did they do in our city? plan meetings?–said good things about the city as they departed. The hospitality was “flawless,” said a spokeswoman for the group. “I have heard only amazing comments from our attendees.”

Many attending that convention said they were surprised they found nothing to complain about. “It seems normal,” said one.

Bear in mind they are talking about a) the Morial Convention Center, b) the restaurants and attractions and the French Quarter, and c) the downtown shops. All of that is back to speed, and if you stay in the downtown area, you’ll see nothing out of place. Even street cars are running up and down Canal Street. Not the long St. Charles Avenue line, however, not for a long time.

But we’re glad they found the city ready to host visitors and we hope other conventions, particularly those that canceled after Katrina, will be heading back. This economy was built around the concept of us having lots of company. Last summer, the Southern Baptist Convention opted out of the possibility of our hosting that annual meeting for 2008, out of fear the city could not handle that many visitors at once (anywhere from 10,000 up). However, the American Librarians Association met here 18,000 strong last summer and we pulled that off.

We’re ready for company. Y’all come.

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One of those weekends. The funeral on Saturday, two blogs early Sunday morning, Sunday morning worship at First Baptist Church, New Orleans, Sunday afternoon parked in front of the television cheering the Saints on, Sunday night moderating a church business meeting, trying to help them over a particularly bumpy time, and late that night, picking up one of our guests flying in to speak at the Louisiana Baptist evangelism conference going on Monday and Tuesday at FBC-NO.

Missed my Sunday afternoon nap. My team lost. Two good excuses for being a little grouchy.

Margaret used to laugh at me when my team would lose. Years ago, it would be Alabama in one of their rare losses, and in recent years, it’s LSU. This year, the Saints–it’s always been the Saints except this year they decided to start a winning tradition after the biblical 40 years in the wilderness.

What she would laugh at is how I became philosophical after a loss. “Well, it was good for the other team to win this one. Our guys were getting too full of themselves. A loss can teach you more than a win. In the long run, this loss may be meaningless.”

But I will confess flat out that the game Sunday for the NFC championship in Chicago meant more to me personally than all the other times I’ve cheered on “my” teams. I wanted this one so bad. What the Saints would have done in Miami for the Super Bowl really would not have mattered. Just getting there would have been the achievement we’ve all hoped for, for so long.

Monday morning’s front page headline: “Thank you, boys.” That’s a play on “Bless you, boys,” a sign on thousands of posters you see on game day. Probably originated from a nun who roots for this team. We have plenty of them. I won’t bore you with it here, but Sunday morning’s paper chronicled stories of priests and nuns who make no apology for their complete absorption in this team and who pray in church for it to win, wear Saints logos on their vestments, etc. I’ve not gone that far. Yesterday morning, walking on the levee and praying, the most I could do was pray for the well-being for everyone and for the Lord to be glorified by the outcome.

Forgive the repetition, but Yogi Berra said it for me. When a batter stepped up to the plate and squared off toward the pitcher and made the sign of the cross, Yogi, squatting in the catcher’s position, said, “Hey buddy–why don’t we just let the Almighty enjoy the game.”

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Bruce Nolan is the religion writer (editor maybe) for the Times-Picayune and a friend to all our churches. In Sunday’s paper, he focuses on the churches of St. Bernard Parish and the First Baptist Church of Chalmette in particular. Here’s the article.

The excavator’s heavy mechanical bucket pulled down a huge chunk of wall in what was once First Baptist Church of Chalmette’s educational building. A shower of broken drywall, bricks an flailing electrical wiring tumbled to the ground as the church’s pastor, the Rev. John Dee Jeffries, looked on from across the street. Soon a new church complex will rise on the same lot.

“So, is this a good sight or a sad sight?” someone asked him recently.

Jeffries, 58, considered for a moment. “Bittersweet,” he said. “Bittersweet. Now, months ago, when they had to chain saw the pews into pieces to haul them out of the church. That was bad.”

He paused again. “I’d prayed over those pews. Before services on that Sunday, before the people came, I’d put my hand on one and pray to God to bless the people who were coming and who’d be sitting there.”

“So, yeah, that was bad.”

But now it appears that Jeffries and his current flock, down to 75 from 350, have turned a corner in a long, rugged road.

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“About five years ago, when I was still pastoring this church, I was up here preaching about something, I forget the exact point I was making. Maybe it was about not judging people by the clothes they wear. Anyway, I looked down at the tie I was wearing, a bright purple. I said, ‘Now, take this tie. This is one ugly tie. I hate this tie.’ At that very second, as my eyes scanned the congregation, they landed on Marshall and Barbara Sehorn and I had one of those moments. I stood there in quiet shock, then said to the congregation, ‘I just remembered who gave me this tie.'”

“The people fell in the floor laughing. When the laughter died down, I stood there for a bit, then said, ‘I love this tie.'”

The redeeming thing about that incident for me the preacher, the culprit, the loudmouth who speaks before engaging brain, is that no one was laughing harder than Marshall and Barbara.

I told that at the beginning of our memorial service for Marshall Estus Sehorn Saturday afternoon at 2 pm in the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church of Kenner. At the end of the little story, I said to Barbara on the front row, “I looked for that tie to wear today, but couldn’t find it. I must have given it away.” They all laughed again, she harder than any of them.

It takes a big man to get two funeral services. If you want to call them that. We cremated Marshall–well, Lake Lawn Funeral people did–over a month ago, following his December 6 death. Marshall had a bad respiratory problem all his life that escalated and worsened in the last few years. He suffered something horribly and was able to speak only with great difficulty. But today, he’s doing just fine, thank you.

The earlier service was December 30 in his hometown of Concord, North Carolina. Half his ashes are being interred there, the other half at a cemetery in Metairie.

Stephanie Screen played her violin before and during the service Saturday. She’s about to get her master’s from Loyola and grew up in our church. The last few years, she would drive over to the Sehorns and play for them. For him, mostly, and Barbara understands. It was about Marshall and everyone’s special love for this precious man.

Ken Gabrielse, our minister of music since 1992, led us in “Amazing Grace” with Allen Toussaint on the piano, and what a special thing that was. Then Ken sang “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” Later, Ken said, “I can go on to Heaven now. I’ve sung Amazing Grace with Allen Toussaint!”

Marshall Sehorn and Barbara Darcey married in the late 1960’s. “She was the love of his life,” said Allen Toussaint, the Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Famer. “You ought to have seen him when they fell in love. He was something.”

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Recently on these pages I wrote of how coaches and pastors are different animals. My concern was for shallow-thinking church members who want to trade pastors–always upgrading of course–in their endless search for the genius who can turn their church into winners. They’ve bought into the sports analogy for churches and have long since forgotten the blueprint the Lord Jesus Christ–the only Head Coach of this team–laid out.

There’s another aspect to this story. The people in the pews are vastly different from the fans in the stadium.

I grant that sometimes they’re the same people. Church members attend football games, too. They’ve even been known to wear their team’s jerseys to church. Pastors love to drop sports stories into their sermons. And of course, on high attendance day at church, a sports hero giving his testimony packs them in. Some of the biggest football fans in America are Christians.

So it’s easy to get the two entities confused and start thinking of the church the way we think of our team.

As I write this, the New Orleans Saints are preparing to play the Chicago Bears for the NFC championship tomorrow afternoon. The local paper is saturated with stories of fans–a word derived from fanatics–who have rooted for the Saints over 40 frustrating years and who are now giddy with excitement over this season and this playoff time, many of them die-hards who go into debt to buy expensive tickets in order to sit in frozen Soldier Field and cheer the team on. One family carried deceased Dad’s cremated ashes to the playoff game with Philadelphia last weekend. (There’s no indication they bought him a ticket.) The son said, “Our dad persevered through all those losing seasons, never giving up hope. We thought he would love to see this game.”

People are decorating their houses and cars and yards with Saints paraphernalia. I expect they’re doing the same up in Chicagoland.

It’s fun being a fan. When you’re winning.

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Tuesday, several of us had lunch at the wonderful Praline Connection on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans, one of my favorite spots. It’s a small restaurant, maybe a dozen tables, and their menu is all about “Creole Soul Food.” We ate chicken livers and breaded pork chops and baked chicken. On the side, crowder peas and limas and greens–collards, mustard, etc. Dessert is usually a slice of sweet potato pie with praline sauce.

After that meal, you’re good for a week.

Off to the side of the dining area, I noticed a stack of magazines I’d never seen before. The editors seem to have entered the market to boost the local economy and pride-in-the-city, and we’re not against that. Flipping through the issue, I noticed a half-page ad supporting a local citizen with the unlikely name of Pampy Barre’. This man and several colleagues are regularly being featured on the front page of our daily paper as the objects of an investigation by the U.S.attorney in connection with corruption during the days when Marc Morial was mayor. C. Ray Nagin succeeded Morial who moved off to New York City to head up a civil rights organization. Morial was every bit as smooth as Nagin, and as one local columnist says, was as hands-on as Nagin is detached.

The investigation deals with a massive contract the city fathers signed just days before Morial left office, with a company called Johnson Controls. It was supposedly an energy-saving contract. For $81 million. That’s a lot of energy. A number of politically connected big shots around town–and that’s the only way to describe them–got their finger in that pie, refusing to let Johnson Controls get the contract unless they received kickbacks. Pampy Barre’ was in that number.

So, this priest at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church–also Mayor Nagin’s home parish–writes a big article in the local tableau defending Barre’. What a great guy he is. How generous he is to everyone who knows him. All he’s done for the community.

I never met the man. The priest may be right.

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The editorial writer of our paper says the Saints are not our Savior, but are a lovely distraction.

Exactly 40 years ago this fall, just as the Saints were fielding their first team, I finished seminary and was soon called to pastor a church in Greenville, Mississippi. The first few games, we were still living in Louisiana and I would rush home after church each Sunday to listen on the radio. In those days, it was a rare game that was televised. We moved to the Mississippi Delta around the first of November and thereafter, it was almost impossible to hear the games. I would sit in my car and listen to WWL through the static and decipher what I could until the strain became too much and I gave it up in desperation.

At night I would sometimes sit in the car and tune in WWL and listen to the sportscasters interview coaches and talk about the team. I could not get to New Orleans and even if I were there, as a pastor I was tied up on Sundays and unable to attend the games, so I did what I could to soak up a little of this city’s love for this team.

Eventually, rooting for the Saints became an endurance trial. They would fall behind early and lose big, or pull out in front and then find a way to lose toward the end. The hapless Chicago Cubs have nothing on the New Orleans Saints.

This week, the city is higher than a kite, basking in the glow of beating the Eagles last Sunday and playing the Bears this Sunday for the NFC championship and a ticket to the Super Bowl. The very idea of playing in the Super Bowl is mind-boggling.

I believe the “who dat” business originated at Mississippi’s Alcorn A & M University years ago. It was something of a chant in dialect: “Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say they gonna beat them Braves? Who dat? Who dat?” Somehow or other it floated downriver to New Orleans, “Braves” morphed into “Saints,” and the chant caught on during the Jim Mora days when we actually began winning some games.

Recently they revived the “Who dat” business and it’s all you hear now. Then somebody started calling this the “Who Dat Nation.” WWL-Radio picked up on it and now bills itself as “The flagship station of the Who Dat Nation!”

Today a judge announced that a particular criminal trial slated to begin Monday will be postponed until Wednesday. His reasoning was that if the Saints win Sunday’s game in Chicago, he would not be able to get enough jurors together for a trial.

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I had forgotten this, but Richard Pearl of New Orleans did not. He writes in Tuesday morning’s newspaper that at some point following Katrina, Mayor Nagin said he wanted all the citizens back including the criminals. “Well,” writes Pearl, “He has his wish. The criminals are back. Soon that is all that will be left.”

The other thing the mayor wanted–against the best counsel of every planning commission and study committee–was to allow any citizen to rebuild anywhere in the city he wishes. Advisors kept warning him the result would be a jack-o-lantern effect, with a couple of lights on this block, no one living on that one, a few people on the next block. And that is precisely what we have.

I hope you like it, Mayor. This is your legacy, sir.

The displaced residents of the Saint Bernard Housing Development have been quiet for the past few months but they are back with a vengeance. Yesterday, Monday, they marched up and down in front of the locked-down projects, vowing their determination not to leave until they got inside. “This is our home,” they insisted.

There is no point in trying to reason with them that those are government-owned buildings, that you were living there either as a gift from the federal and state governments or receiving a substantial subsidy and those are not entitlements, and that no one should have to live in such sub-standard housing. They reason correctly that they have a right to go inside and salvage whatever they can, and that the upper apartments took no floodwaters and should still be intact.

There was not a lot of logic but plenty of rhetoric. They wanted inside.

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I’ve never told you the full story about Global Maritime Ministries. Our friends who read this blog live literally all over the world and I think you will find this fascinating.

Forty-five years ago John Vandercook saw a need in New Orleans no one was addressing. Here we had one of the busiest ports in America, with hundreds of ships a year arriving from all over the world, bringing thousands of foreign workers who would spend a few hours in this country and leave without ever knowing the first thing about us. What an opportunity if someone were to meet them, befriend them, show them some hospitality, and if possible, tell them about the Savior. Many seafarers live in countries hostile to the Christian faith, nations that not only bar Christian missionaries but forbid their own people from converting to Christianity.

This could be an opportunity staring us in the faith, John thought.* If someone had the faith–and gumption–to begin the process. First, he would have to find out how to board the ships. He would have to be credentialed as a chaplain. Figure out a means to bridge the language gap. Secure a vehicle for driving the crewmembers into town or to a church service. Line up volunteers to help. Find the time for this. And the energy. And of course, the finances. (*That really was a typo. I meant to say “staring us in the face.” But “staring us in the faith” really says it, doesn’t it?)

The sheer scope of beginning such a ministry would have frightened away many a lesser person. But in 1963, Rev. John Vandercook organized the New Orleans Baptist Seamen’s Service in the downstairs of his home and began visiting ships’ crews on a regular basis. One year later, John went full-time in this ministry, a tremendous step of faith for a one-armed preacher with a wife and a full set of children.

When I arrived on campus at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in 1964 I heard stories of this man and his ministry. You’d have thought the work had been around for years. Seminary students spoke of driving church buses to pick up seamen at the docks and take to their worship services. Churches would welcome them and provide lunch. At times, the student volunteers would drive the visitors to a a mall or a grocery store just so they could see how blessed Americans are. As far as they were available, they gave Christian literature and sometimes Bibles in the person’s language. Occasionally, they engaged them in conversations about Jesus and even led some of the seafarers to know Jesus Christ.

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I noticed something Sunday evening at Sojourn, the new startup church on Magazine Street in the Uptown area of New Orleans. The building which James Welch selected and rented for his new arts center/worship site was formerly a store and is situated in a block of stores, cafes, and banks. The front of each one is mainly huge glass windows. Turn the lights on inside, fill it with 40 young adults sitting around on folding chairs with soft drinks in their hands, stand some people down front strumming guitars and stroking the violin, and everyone passing down the narrow street will see what you’re doing.

A number of pedestrians stopped in front of the windows and gazed inside. No sign or lettering on the window indicates anything about what’s inside. The people on the sidewalk were just seeing people having fun and enjoying music. At least three opened the door and came inside without an invitation. A couple of them turned out to be druggie-types who talked too loud and seemed not to know what planet they were on, but the third stayed.

When was the last time people going past your church were sufficiently intrigued to stop and come inside without an invitation?

Churches are notorious for putting on great shows, having wonderful music, the members enjoying each other–but hiding their activities inside closed buildings, away from the eyes and ears of the community. The result is that no one has a clue what goes on inside and no one would dare walk up and push open a door just to see.

And yet, ask the church members and they would tell you outsiders are welcome and in fact, much of what they’re doing inside their buildings is directed toward the benefit of these very outsiders.

What’s wrong with this picture?

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