“I’m on vacation.” I say that to myself twelve times a day. Margaret overhears and says, “Why do you keep saying that? Are you trying to convince yourself?”

I tell her, “I’m trying to shut down my inner stress.” I recall for her how in 1971 when we moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and I joined the staff of the First Baptist Church, our first year was one of the hardest of my ministry, and yet the stress was all self-induced. “I felt bad all the time, like I should have been accomplishing more than I was.” No one was criticizing or pressuring me. The voice driving and accusing and stressing me was my own.

If you have been to New Orleans and seen the effect of Katrina and her floodwaters on our city, if you have driven the mile-after-mile of shut-down neighborhoods with their overgrown yards and boarded up strip malls, if you have grieved over the closed churches and their thousands of dispersed members, then you understand how frustrating it can be to be looked upon as a leader when you accomplish so little.

“Everyone brags on me,” I tell her, “and says I’m doing a good job. So it’s not other people. It’s me.”

That’s why I decided to take this week–the one prior to Christmas–as a vacation. There’s not a lot going on anywhere around here this week or next, and it’s a good time to vegetate without the sense that I’m letting someone down. Then, next week, the time between Christmas and New Year’s, our offices are closed anyway, a custom my predecessors started a long time ago and which I’m not about to change.

I suggest to pastors they never take the last week of December as official vacation. There’s practically nothing going on in any church then, the phone doesn’t ring and no one drops by, and it’s a great time to catch up on your reading.

So, I’m trying to shut down. It’s two weeks in a row of telling myself, “I’m on vacation.”

“What exactly does that mean?” Margaret asked.

Continue reading →

For years, nobody gave a thought to my birthday. I was never given to a lot of hoopla, so that was fine with me. I’m not against celebrating special events or observing religious festivals, but well, you don’t see people throwing birthday parties in Scripture, so I got along just fine without one.

Then one day my sister got into the act. Carolyn loves making people feel special and she had this bright idea.

“It’ll just be a little dinner for your birthday,” she said. “Just the immediate family.”

She wanted to do it so badly, I agreed to it. And, sure enough, it worked out. About 10 of us gathered at my house, Carolyn brought the cake and our other sister Patricia made dinner, and it was a nice evening.

That was the first year.

The next year, Carolyn started planning the birthday dinner several weeks in advance. She was not satisfied with the intimate gathering we had enjoyed last year. She had enjoyed it, she said, but she felt badly that more family wasn’t included. This year the whole clan would be invited.

I suppose everybody showed up, because our house was crowded and some had to eat out on the front porch. We had a big time, laughing, singing songs, eating. I bet I got my neck hugged a hundred times. I blew out the candles and we ate cake. To my surprise, a few people brought presents. That was nice, but unnecessary.

The third year, Carolyn realized she was on to something.

Continue reading →

The annual Christmas dinner for the ministers and spouses of the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans was held at the Ormond Plantation on Tuesday night, December 12, 2006. We had told the hostess for this wonderful ancient facility we anticipated having 150 present. On Friday before the big event, we called to ask them to increase that figure to 200. In post-Katrina New Orleans, our ministers and their families are hungry for fellowship with each other and for an excuse to get out of their homes–in many cases, a FEMA trailer–and celebrate.

As the director of missions for the association and responsible for the evening, I arrived early to make certain everything was in order. Even though I have driven River Road in Destrehan hundreds of times over the last 16 years, I was not certain precisely where Ormond Plantation was and ended up driving past the entrance and having to turn around and go back. Darkness had come early to our part of the Deep South and the heavy fog was complicating matters.

Since this plantation and several others in the area faces the Mississippi River, separated from that body of water only by River Road and the levee, fog is always a problem in the winter. Tuesday night, it was as bad as I’ve ever seen it.

A large sign announcing “Ormond Plantation” sits perpendicular to the two-lane highway and in the daytime can be read easily. However the darkness, the fog, and the lack of any kind of night-time illumination meant most of the invited guests would drive right past their destination.

I pulled into the parking lot, got out my flashlight, and walked through the heavy mist to the sign by the road. Then I had a decision to make.

Continue reading →

At our weekly Wednesday meeting of the Baptist pastors of New Orleans, Oscar Williams (Good News Baptist Church) shared their plans for next Saturday’s neighborhood ministry. They’ll be going door to door in the Destrehan area where their displaced church is meeting these days, looking for anyone needing groceries. They have 300 food baskets to give away. And that’s not all.

They’ll be asking for information on the children in these homes–how many, what ages, boy or girl. Then, they will have a drawing. Lots of drawings, in fact. Seventy drawings for seventy bicycles. Bikes of all sizes, brand new, a gift from Wal-Mart.

Oscar missed our Ministers’ Christmas dinner Tuesday night because his brother-in-law called at the last minute to say the truck with the bicycles had arrived and they needed a place to store them. “We’ve got them all over my house, throughout the First Baptist Church of Destrehan (where Good News is worshiping temporarily), and in my brother-in-law’s home.”

We all wanted to know, “How did you get Wal-Mart to give you seventy bicycles?” “We asked them,” Oscar said. “What a novel concept,” some wit remarked.

Wal-Mart remembers New Orleans.

Continue reading →

At the end of our Tuesday night Christmas dinner for all our ministers and their spouses, I drove home through the heavy fog giving thanks to God.

Thanks for the 200 or more who attended. In the old days (pre-Katrina), we might have a hundred show up, and we had to create gimmicks to get them to mix and meet. Tuesday night, the decibel level was off the scale as they visited and laughed and hugged. The dinner had ended and it was time to begin the program, but I hated to call a halt to the fellowship. The joy in that place was palpable.

Thanks for the gifts of God’s people that paid the tab. Get 200 people into a plantation house for a Christmas dinner and the tab easily runs into the thousands of dollars. One of our churches provided child care, but we paid for the workers. Jim Chester–evangelist, funnyman, storyteller, and magician–provided a fascinating program and kept us laughing. God’s people gave us the money to pay him a nice honorarium.

Thanks for our special guests. Gibbie McMillan represented the Louisiana Baptist Convention so well, reminding everyone of the special feature of our denomination called the Cooperative Program by which a person gives his offering into his church and touches the entire world. Pastor Keith Manuel promoted the Louisiana Baptist Evangelism Conference coming up January 22-23 at the First Baptist Church of New Orleans. Our wonderful servant leaders from Operation NOAH Rebuild and Global Maritime Ministries were present and blessed us, as always.

Thankful for the joy. I don’t know how else to say it. Recently, on this page, I left the Sam Shoemaker story of the man who knocked at his door late one night and said, “I just feel I need to thank Someone.” I know the feeling. I’m grateful for the pastors of the big churches who came to the Christmas dinner because their presence sets a good example and encourages everyone else. I’m grateful for the Spanish pastors who attended, because they actually did their own dinner a week ago in downtown New Orleans and could have chosen to skip this one. And I’m particularly grateful for the pastors of the bivocational churches who came at great inconvenience, because they have to rise early and be at work while some of us are just stirring.

Thank you, Father. What an honor to be Yours and to be used by Thee.

Continue reading →

My wife’s favorite television channel is the USA Network. Their slogan is: “Characters Welcome.”

Someone ought to erect signs with those words at every entrance to New Orleans. If there ever was a city of characters in America, this is the one.

In 1990, when we told my parents we were moving to New Orleans from North Carolina, my dad said, “Well good. It’ll be good to get you back down South.” I said, “Dad, there’s something you need to know. The people of North Carolina are just exactly like the people of Alabama and Mississippi. But the people of New Orleans are strange.” Or I might have said “weird.” And I did not mean it as a putdown.

Over these years, I’ve moderated in my views of the folks down here. Most are normal in every way, just exactly like your neighbors in any city in America, even if they do have unusual and foreign-sounding last names like Bourgeois (pronounced boor-zwha) and Melancon (pronounced muh-lah-sah with a nasal ring). They’re great folks.

But characters, that’s what we have down here. And honestly, it may be the best thing about living in New Orleans. Now, I pastored the First Baptist Church of Kenner, which ain’t New Orleans exactly (or at all), but it’s part of the city and people who run New Orleans live all over Kenner and Metairie and it may as well be.

All of this is leading up to saying that we lost a real character last week. Marshall Sehorn died. We had a little service at the Lake Lawn Crematorium early Saturday morning. His ashes will be divided, half taken to Concord, North Carolina, where he grew up, and the other half buried here in Metairie. We’ll be having a real memorial service sometime after the first of the year.

Continue reading →

Sometimes I wonder if I’m being too hard on our mayor and his team. Then I read something like the following, which appeared in Saturday’s “Money” section of the local newspaper….

Under the headline, “Developers Castigate City Hall,” writer Greg Thomas reports on a 3 day tour of Katrina-land by a group of investors and developers brought together by the Urban Land Institute. They finished their excursion at the 17th Street Canal, the dividing line separating Jefferson and Orleans Parishes, and then had lunch in the Quarter at the Monteleone Hotel. Afterward, they met with reporters.

Rufus Lusk, a realtor from Baltimore, expressed amazement that the City Planning Commission had so few planners and that it has just recently been approved to hire more. “There are planners from cities that would volunteer to come and help,” he insisted. The American Planners Association would be the place to start to find such helpers. Lusk says the last thing a developer needs to hear when he’s looking at making an investment here is that it will take months to have development plans reviewed and placed on an agenda to be approved or modified.

“Who’s in charge?” Lusk asked. Who indeed.

Continue reading →

How not to take a poll.

The East Jefferson neighborhood section of Thursday’s Times-Picayune posts a question each week and gives out a phone number to register your answer. Last week, the question was whether Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee’s proposal to install surveillance cameras in high crime areas is a good idea. Only 7 callers said ‘no,’ and 363 said ‘yes.’

The question Thursday was based on something we reported here last week, that a University of New Orleans survey found that one-third of the residents say they are “likely” or “somewhat likely” to move away from this area in the next couple of years. So the question is: “What is the likelihood of your leaving?” The phone number is listed, and then these instructions: “Likely–Press 1.” “Somewhat likely–Press 2.” And that’s it.

There is no way for one to register that you have no desire to leave. The assumption is that you are planning to leave, and the only question is how eager you are to vamoose. Not a good way to take a poll, unless one figures into his computations that every resident who does not phone that number is planning to stay. In that case, you might end up with numbers such as: “Likely: 263,” “Somewhat Likely: 472,” and “Planning to stay: 134,547.”

Whatever numbers their little poll produces will be meaningless.

The ubiquitous FEMA trailers…240 life-saving square feet of cramped misery…must leave Jefferson Parish before April 1, according to the Parish Council. They will allow appeals for exemptions to this ordinance, but otherwise homeowners must have them gone by the last of March.

From the beginning, my understanding is that FEMA has said the 60,000 or more trailers in the metro area were meant to stay for 18 months and no longer. If they insist on holding to that deadline, expect howls and protests like nothing you’ve ever heard. Sunday while driving through St. Bernard Parish on the way downriver to Poydras, I found myself in the world’s largest trailer park. Block after block, trailers in every driveway. Lots of activity, as people were working on houses and in yards and hauling building materials up and down streets. But there is no way Orleans, St. Bernard, and Plaquemine parishes will be finished with FEMA trailers for another five years.

Dr. Edward Blakely, the city’s new recovery chief, is confident New Orleans can emerge from this crisis as a transformed city. “It’s my business,” he said. “It’s what cities around the world pay me to do.” Fine, professor. That’s what we want. Tell us what to do.

Continue reading →

Last week, an editor with Rick Warren’s internet magazine for pastors asked me to write an article for them. He had seen something I wrote perhaps 3 years ago about how I had started taking care of my body, lost some weight, and got serious about exercise. “Tell us what you are doing and let’s encourage pastors to do the same,” was the general thrust of the assignment.

Well, somewhere in the body of that article I commented on the benefits of my program. Years ago, I used to have colds a couple of weeks every winter and from time to time experienced lower back pain. “I no longer have colds and it’s been years since my lower back has given me trouble,” I said. That was last Friday.

Monday morning I woke up with lower back pain. Spent the day on a heating pad and taking muscle relaxers. Tuesday was a little better; Wednesday a lot better.

I know what did it. Sunday afternoon, I had slouched on my recliner and watched the Saints’ football game, then spent a couple of hours at the computer typing the day’s blog. The computer chair is canvas, which means absolutely no back support at all. Tuesday, I threw it out and bought a real chair at Office Depot.

Nothing like a dose of humility to get the week started off right.

Wednesday morning, we began our weekly pastors meeting with a brief “associational executive committee” meeting. This group is made up of the pastor of each church and one elected layperson. Instead of meeting quarterly as formerly, we’ve decided to meet the first Wednesday of each month in order to stay on top of developments.

The administrative committee reported that although our associational receipts (the monthly gifts from our churches) are running about 70 percent of normal, we are spending much less than normal also, so we’re doing fine. They announced we are signing a contract with PayCheck to handle our payroll, primarily for the security they offer against errors in handling taxes. One of our churches ran into such problems not long ago and they are learning the hard way how difficult the IRS can be in these situations.

Continue reading →

“As you know, this has been a difficult year for our city,” the letter began. “We have all had to make sacrifices we never thought we would be faced with, which has brought me to this difficult decision my family and I have had to make.”

The letter from our family doctor continues, “I regrettably have to inform you that as of December 29, 2006 I will be leaving my practice and moving to Houston, Texas.”

Dr. Irma Pfister is an excellent young doctor who was recommended to us by our E-N-T doctor and has treated both Margaret and me for the past couple of years. My other internist–I’m at the age where we have lots of medical people in our lives–Dr. Kathleen Wilson, moved to Florida earlier this year. Same kind of letter, same reasons.

It’s like an epidemic around here, doctors moving out. Perhaps they have lost so many clients and with a smaller population base, they are unable to earn the kind of income they need. Just as likely, it’s a matter of not wanting to live in such a depressing environment, particularly when a partnership is available in a modern, clean, progressive city where the issues facing New Orleans are all left behind.

We understand, but it truly hurts.

I bumped into a seminary classmate today on the campus of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary where he and I sat through three years of classes together in the mid-1960s. We exchanged pleasantries and chatted about the challenge we’re facing in this city, with the rebuilding of our neighborhoods and churches. My friend is president of one of our Southern Baptist seminaries and as prominent a personage as our denomination has. As we parted, he said, “I almost envy you.”

Almost. Not quite, I imagine.

Continue reading →