Wherever I go, I hear people saying they’re praying for us in New Orleans. I thank them and then gently suggest how they pray. “Pray big,” I say, and sometimes hand them a little business card we’ve printed up with a suggested prayer: “Father, you love this city. Jesus died for this city. You have many people here. Satan has held it too long, Lord. Take it back. Do a new thing in New Orleans, Lord. A God thing. A big thing.”

Routine praying for this troubled city is not going to do the job. Case in point.

“Five teenagers shot dead in Central City” was the headline on Sunday morning’s front page. Subtitle: “Violence is almost beyond explaining.” Three 19-year-old boys, one 16, and one 17 were gunned down Saturday around 4 a.m. No clues, no suspects. The sheer carnage makes police believe it was drug-related.

A few paragraphs from the story:

“Up and down nearby streets, where most houses still bear the telltale spray-painted X’s left by rescue workers after the Aug. 29 storm, neighbors gathered on porches and discussed the gruesome crime and the recklessness of adults who, they said, should have been minding the victims.”

“‘How could you let a 16-year-old go out at that time of the morning?’ said James Williams, 26. ‘And for (the perpetrators) to do something like this to the children is a shame.'”

“Sitting on a stoop across Danneel Street from the spot where the SUVslid to a halt, Clarence Joseph peered at a patch of bloodstained asphalt and evoked religious prophecy to describe the early-morning carnage.”

“‘The Bible said that if you don’t teach them at home, the world is going to get them,’ he said. ‘And that’s what happening.'”

“Even Bryson, an officer with 26 years at the New Orleans Police Department, choked back emotion as he detailed the crime for reporters at a late morning news conference. ‘I’m a father, and I couldn’t imagine getting this news today, the day before Father’s Day,’ Bryson said.”

Friday, a sheriff’s deputy was killed in nearby LaPlace, and several police officers have been shot in the surrounding communities in recent days.

What we have here is a full-fledged crime wave. All the violence from only half the population.

I wonder. Did we think the devil would go quietly? That he would turn loose his iron grip on this city without a murmur? That he would give up so easily what he won over so many years? We know differently now. Bible students will recall that sometimes when God’s man ordered the demon to leave its victim, it obeyed, but only with loud screaming and resistance.

I hope you will take this as our personal request for more prayer, deeper prayer, more intense prayer–for this city and its leaders, for the people and their protectors, for the churches and their ministers, and for the rebuilders and the volunteers who are always here in large numbers.

My wife suggested I share with you something on prayer I posted on our website a couple of years ago. It was the gist of a summertime of Wednesday night prayer lessons I did at the First Baptist Church of Kenner. Please feel free to pass it along or reprint it or to use in any Christ-honoring way.

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Okay, while I was out. Attending the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Greensboro, NC this week. More about that below. But first, catching up on the local New Orleans happenings.

Out in the eastern section of New Orleans, the area almost totally underwater in the days following Katrina, 13 percent of our local electrical company’s customers now have power. Some 4,500 sites in that portion of our city are back in their well-lit, fully-powered homes. Businesses make up 140 of those 4500 customers. Not much, but 100% better than it was; it’s a good start.

A drought continues locally. That, plus the stifling heat, makes life miserable for residents, employees, and volunteers who are gutting out and restoring houses and businesses. One leader of a church team of volunteers told me they get to work as early in the morning as possible, and knock off shortly after noon and call it a day. The heat gets worse as the day wears on. While New Orleans was suffering temps of 95 or so this week, Greensboro’s highs were in the 70’s if you can believe it, due mainly to the rain. Beautiful, wet, lovely, refreshing rain. I used an umbrella most of the time but my spirit was buoyed by everything about this falling water and even enjoyed the couple of times I was drenched running from the parking lot into the hotel.

Tax collections in Jefferson Parish–the Metairie/Kenner/Marrero/Gretna portion of metro New Orleans–are soaring above the same time period in pre-Katrina 2005. These days, Jefferson Parish basically has a monopoly on retail sales in the area since so many businesses in N.O. proper are still closed down.

In Congress, the Democrats voted Thursday to strip our congressman William Jefferson of his seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee. Friday, the full House in a voice vote, ratified that action. Jefferson vows he will prove his innocence of the charges against him and maintains there is no precedent and no House rule for the action being taken against him. He was staying on in this key position, he declared, because New Orleans needs his influence and his vote on that influential committee. Nevertheless, most of the voices I hear around here, including the editor of the Times-Picayune, have called for him to step down. I am not his judge and do not presume to condemn him, but the evidence against him is certainly overwhelming and if he beats these charges, you will know you have seen a modern-day miracle. The one thing New Orleans does not need is one more corrupt politician. We’ve had enough of those to last the next millennium. Mr. Jefferson announces he is a candidate for re-election this November.

Skip this part if you are familiar with the charges against Jefferson. Briefly, the government says it video-taped him receiving a briefcase with $100,000 in $100 bills. On audio tapes recorded with a cooperating witness, Jefferson allegedly said the money was to bribe the vice-president of the African nation they were trying to do business with. Later, he said in a phone call he had given all the money to that official. However, when the FBI raided his house the next day, they found $90,000 of the money–the bills were marked, so this is not guesswork–inside a freezer in convenient foil-wrapped packages. Two of Jefferson’s aids have pleaded guilty to crimes associated with this venture, and they testify that the congressman’s family controls businesses which received more than $400,000 and stock certificates in return for his help in the African ventures.

The Louisiana Recovery Authority has released a survey which indicates that 57% of the displaced New Orleanians would like to return home but are skeptical or ignorant of the plans and programs available to make it possible. Those living inside the state were more likely to plan to return, the percentage being sixty-three. Only 39% living outside the area think they are likely to return.

Almost every day this week, the national news has announced charges of massive fraud connected with FEMA’s distribution of Katrina money. Anyone who knows anything about human nature is not surprised by this, but Louisianians especially groan over such abuses. A number of people who did not live in the area at all or who used to live here but had moved away, claimed hurricane damage and received their $2,000 checks. Prisoners in various penitentiaries across the country pulled the same stunt. One newscast said an address on one application for funds turned out to be a cemetery plot. It’s wrong, it’s to be expected, and it must be dealt with, but unfortunately it also reinforces what some people think about the corruption in Louisiana. As though we had a monopoly on sin.

This week the secretary of HUD, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, announced his plan for the public housing projects the department oversees in our city. HUD intends to have 1,000 units open for tenants by summer’s end. However, the heart of the federal plan is the demolition of several housing developments, including the notorious St. Bernard development in Gentilly, C.J.Peete in Central City, B. W. Cooper off Earhart Boulevard, and Lafitte near the Faubourg Treme. The plan is to turn these areas into mixed-income communities. This, I might add, is what some of our people who live in or near these developments have longed to hear. Others, however, are decrying the plan and wanting to return to the projects just as they left them. HUD has a three-year timetable, which newspaper columnist Lolis Eric Elie says guarantees that many of our former residents will never return.

Here’s a bit of trivia: what individual grave in the United States draws the most people to its site each year, second only to Elvis Presley? Answer: the burial place of voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. Marie who? This patron saint of local voodooism was buried in 1881–some say on June 15–in St. Louis Cemetery No.1 on Basin Street. So on that day each year people flock to her tomb and offer up their prayers. One has to wonder what possible benefit worshipers expect to derive from praying to a dead person. Christians rejoice that Jesus Christ is their “living hope” (I Peter 1:3). A dead hope is surely an oxymoron.

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Susan Howell is a professor at the University of New Orleans and a pollster often seen on television sounding forth on local politics. Throughout March and April, she and her staff made 470 telephone interviews of residents of our area and this week released their findings. Discovery: people down here have trouble sleeping. More than 2/3 say they are worried about what might happen in the next five years, and some 40% say they have trouble sleeping at night. One-fifth said they feel tired, irritable, and sad, that everything is an effort, and that they have difficulty concentrating.

Howell says 70% of the residents in Jefferson Parish (Metairie, Kenner, my neighbors) are satisfied with life in general, whereas the percentage drops to 48 in Orleans Parish. The same percent in each parish worry about the future. Both groups are frustrated with the mail service, getting homes repaired, buying groceries, and inadequate medical care.

You see the problem with this poll already, I’ll wager. They “telephoned” the respondents, using land lines. What about the thousands of FEMA trailer dwellers who have no phones or cell phones. Surely the numbers for New Orleans would have been far worse if these people had been factored in.

Brings to mind the presidential preference polls of 1936 which showed Republican Alf Landon besting FDR handily, and then being swamped by Roosevelt in the November election. It turns out the pollsters were telephoning voters and using that to inform them on the probable outcome of the election. In 1936–the Depression was in full force–the poor people, who tended to vote Democratic, had no phones. Most of the people who did tended to be Republicans.

At the risk of sounding like a teacher here (I am), it’s always helpful to get details on how polls were conducted before being swayed in one way or the other by their findings.

A pastor called me one day this week about church business. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked, “How are you doing personally?” Long pause. Then, “I can’t sleep. And I’m irritable. Short of patience.” I said, “Have you read this morning’s paper?” No. “You might want to. They just took a poll that shows most of the people down here have the same problem. You have lots of company.” I didn’t tell him I’m not sleeping at night either.

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Lionel Roberts pastors the mission across the street from the locked-down and ruined St. Bernard Housing Development. With the assistance of several adoptive churches, his church has been restored and Lionel began holding worship services there on Easter Sunday. Problem is, he never knows who’s going to be in church. Attendance ranges from 20 to 50. Last Sunday, when church time came, eight people sat in the sanctuary and most of them were the pastor’s family. They waited a few minutes, then got underway anyway. That’s when something happened outside.

I’ve told here about the unhappy, ousted residents of St. Bernard who threatened to break through the fence last Saturday in order to return to their homes, and decided instead to set up tents across the street and remain there until the city relents and opens the gates. Sunday morning, as Lionel’s worship service began, the loudspeakers which he erected some time ago on the corner of his building in order to reach the project began to sound out the praises of the Lord. The next time Lionel looked around, his little sanctuary was filling up. The tent-dwellers were coming down the street and filing into his church. All told, he ended up with 60 or 70 present. “Our little building is crowded with a hundred,” the pastor says, “so we know how to estimate pretty closely.”

Bob Adams of Youth on Mission attended our Wednesday pastors meeting at Oak Park Baptist Church with Chris and Katie, a young married couple who are students at our seminary, who will be working with YOM this summer, overseeing the hundreds of youth coming to work and witness in New Orleans. “Where are they staying?” I asked. Bob said, “We’ve taken over the Landmark Hotel in Metairie.”

Craig Ratliff, former student minister at FBC Arabi, soon to be the pastor of a start-up church on the site of the Arabi church which has been demolished, told of an unusual blessing this week. A terrific group of adults and youth from Philippi Baptist Church in Union, SC, arrived on the northshore Monday, ready to go to work. Their host, a minister in that area, had had to be hospitalized for some reason, so he called Craig to see if he could direct the group. Craig brought them to the site of his former church and they set up their cooking equipment to prepare a meal for the neighborhood. While the adults were setting up, the youth blanketed the neighborhood to invite residents to come for supper and enjoy the choir program. Within two hours, they had led three residents to Christ. Craig said, “This is the strongest group of evangelistic teens I’ve ever seen.” He said, “These young people are really something. They are smart, they are confident, they are fun. They engage older people in conversation, and get them laughing, and having a great time, and so naturally they begin witnessing to them.

That evening, they had 25 neighbors to come to the church site for the cookout and stay for the singers’ program. Craig interjected, “And most were Catholic. Before Katrina, we’d have to pay a Catholic to get them to come to our church and even then, they wouldn’t get past the parking lot!”

Next day, Tuesday, they were looking for FEMA trailers to hold a similar program. They found a site near the Chalmette Middle School, so Craig went in to ask for permission. The board deliberated for 10 minutes, then voted unanimously to grant them the use of the space. They even said if you want to use it longer, return and sign an insurance release. That night, they had 40 or 50 present, and one saved. Several attending wanted more information. One of them asked, “Is this (the gospel message) in writing somewhere?” They gave him a Bible.

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The question about the new City Hall and jazz park complex downtown is whether post-Katrina New Orleans can find the funding. The Times-Picayune raised that issue on the front page of Sunday’s issue, pointing out that 40% or $303 million has been committed by the owner of the Hyatt Hotel. Private money would be needed for 34% or $260 million, leaving $68 million for taxpayers, the cost for demolishing and rebuilding two local and two state office buildings. That money would come from several sources, including FEMA, local bonding issues, and court fees.

The paper published a listing of the various ideas and plans and schemes for turning the downtown of New Orleans into some kind of jazz park or museum or celebration over the years, none of which ever came to fruition. Alongside that was a similar listing of the plans mayors and developers have had to tear down City Hall and do something exciting with that property. The point being, apparently, this new plan may work out but don’t hold your breath. And don’t bet the farm.

In Baton Rouge Monday, a legislative committee finally sent to the floor a plan to let the voters of the state decide on consolidating the seven New Orleans tax assessors into one, since it would require a constitutional amendment. Relatives of the gang of seven who refuse to go quietly, that is to say, several representatives who put their family’s interests before the public’s, attached an amendment to the bill which would bring the matter up for a vote not this fall, but in the fall of 2008. Stay tuned.

With all the talk of rebuilding New Orleans’ levees, Monday’s paper identified a vulnerable area where the rebuilt levee will not be ready to protect citizens at any time during this hurricane system. Travelers on the West Bank Expressway, the elevated highway which splits the suburbs of Westwego, Marrero, Harvey, and Gretna on its way into New Orleans, have to climb a highrise across the Harvey Canal, or drive through a tunnel underneath. The Harvey Canal, lying in Jefferson Parish and not in New Orleans, needs a new floodgate across it and a four-mile levee southeast of the gate, both of which have yet to be built. The Corps of Engineers promises the floodgate will be ready by August, but the land for the levee has not been acquired yet, meaning the levee cannot be ready until a year from this fall. Residents of the Harvey area feel like someone has drawn a bulls-eye across their backs. We can be confident we know how those folks are praying.

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Saturday night, late, the saddest phone call in a long time.

For over 30 years, Buford Easley pastored the wonderful Williams Boulevard Baptist Church at the intersection of Interstate 10 and Williams in Kenner. After a lengthy fight with cancer and other ailments, he died about four years ago. In some respects, it seems like ten. The last couple of years of his life, Buford called me his pastor, an honor like few I’ve ever received. Toward the end, he held on to see the birth of his youngest daughter’s first child, a little girl he called “Tweety Bird.” Tweety Bird–her name was Haley–was four when she died Saturday.

Her mom had her and the baby in a swimming pool, and when she left to change the baby, asked the adults to watch the little girl. When she returned, the child was on the bottom of the pool. Every parent’s nightmare. Grandma Easley–Bonnie–is beside herself with grief as any of us would be. My heart breaks for them.

Sonya and her husband, her mother Bonnie, the whole family, need our prayers.

Early Sunday morning, the men of the First Baptist Church of Kenner held their monthly breakfast meeting. Missions committee chairman David Rhymes (a NAMB missionary presently assigned to the Brantley Homeless Shelter in downtown New Orleans) spoke of the group finding new goals and purposes. I recall some years ago when several of the men approached me (I was the pastor) about starting such a men’s group. I said, “No, if all you’re going to do is meet and eat.” They promised the organization would be about ministry, and they’ve lived up to that over the years. Lately, however, with Katrina shutting down the church’s trailer park ministry and some key leaders being relocated to other cities as an indirect result of the hurricane, it’s time to ask the Father, “What now?” David joked that the group should now go “Beyond Breakfast.” We laughed and someone said, “Going where no one has ever dined before!”

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In Saturday morning’s Times-Picayune, a tiny article comments on the way God was invoked in Thursday’s mayoral inauguration. Some of the participants picked up on the coincidence of that day, June 1, being also the start of hurricane season, and saw something other-worldly going on.

Governor Blanco, speaking at the early morning prayer service at St. Louis Cathedral, said one reason she decided to participate in the inauguration was “to beg the Lord our God to spare us from the ravages of this hurricane season.” Later, in his formal address, Mr. Nagin hinted that his victory over Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu might have been the work of God. “This is much bigger than all of us,” he said. “I’m not that smart. God has his hand in this.” He pointed heavenward and added, “Now, we were clever, but I’m not that smart.” No one asked Mr. Landrieu what he thought of that.

Marc Morial, the mayor just preceding Nagin, runs the National Urban League from his Manhattan offices and was interviewed this week on the same television network where his wife Michelle Miller works as a correspondent. He was asked about his uncle Glenn Haydel pleading guilty to bilking the local transit authority out of a half-million dollars. “I knew nothing,” he insisted. Which reminds me of the way Richard Nixon kept protesting in 1973 that he knew nothing about the Watergate breakin and the cover-up which followed. I remember thinking, “If he did know, he’s guilty of a crime. If he did not know, he’s guilty of malfeasance. Either way, he has betrayed the American people who voted for him.” Which I did, twice.

One of the finest museums anywhere is the National D-Day Museum just off St. Charles in downtown New Orleans, built, we are told, either on or near the original site of the offices of the Higgins Company which built the famous landing craft used throughout the war, and which made such a difference on June 6, 1944. Conceived by the wonderful Stephen Ambrose, this memorial to the “greatest generation” has grown and expanded to the point they changed its name. Friday, at a ceremony attended by various dignitaries, it became the National World War II Museum. Congress has voted it that designation, and the board is proceeding with a quarter of a billion dollars in extensions and additions. My annual dues as a charter member of this museum is one of the proudest checks I write each year.

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State Farm Insurance is being hammered in the press, particularly along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Thursday, Newsweek magazine picked up the theme and rhapsodized on it.

In an article headlined “The Check’s in the Mail,” reporter Joseph Contreras writes about John Hadden of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, who had been a responsible homeowner and overinsured his home. For a home worth $600,000, he bought $700,000 worth of insurance with State Farm Insurance. After the storm, he spray-painted a message on one of the remaining pilings: “All is well. Thank God and State Farm.” The Newsweek photo shows him posing beside that column, but the name of his insurer has been painted out. He is not very happy with State Farm.

It’s all a matter of whether the home was destroyed by floodwaters or by winds, the company says. And anyone can read in the policy what they cover and will replace. The policy? Want to hear how it reads? You’re going to love this.

“We do not insure any coverage for the loss which would not have occurred in the absence of one or more of the following excluded events. We do not insure for such loss regardless of: (a) the cause of the excluded event; or (b) other causes of the loss; or (c) whether other causes acted concurrently or in any sequence with the excluded event to produce the loss; or (d) whether the event occurs suddenly or gradually, involves isolated or widespread damage, arising from natural or external forces, or occurs as a result of any combination of these….”

In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion about government-speak, the bureaucratic way of expressing ideas and policies so as to be incomprehensible to anyone but other bureaucrats. But the federal government holds no patent on the practice. I defy anyone to explain to me, a fairly well-educated adult, what that jumble of words above means. Newsweek calls this “jargon only a lawyer could love.”

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We have internet in our associational offices, for the first time since Katrina. We are finally “in touch”. Connected with the rest of the world. At last.

Strange to think that for most of my forty-plus years in the ministry, we were computerless and had no internet at all and now it’s hard to live without them. In fact, if you wanna hear a horror story…

When I graduated from college and started working in an office–a production office of a large company–our electronics consisted of a telephone at each desk with two incoming lines, and a teletypewriter. That is it. No copier. No fax. Computers were giant mysterious machines occupying entire blocks of large distant cities, as far as we knew, and certainly nothing our company would ever own, nothing we would have at each desk and in our homes. Cell phones were only a daydream of some mystic somewhere. We’re talking primitive. And that was only in the early 1960’s, not exactly the 1800s. Later, same decade, when I began pastoring churches, our offices would have only one incoming phone line, no intercom, and nothing else except a mimeograph machine. And we thought we were uptown.

One more. In the early 1970s, when I served as minister of evangelism (some pronounced it ‘vandalism’) at the First Baptist Church of Jackson, Mississippi, largest church in the state, we had a copier in the work room. Oh yeah. Cutting edge technology. It made one copy at a time, which you peeled off the back of a “set” and threw the rest away. In 1973, when I was preparing my doctoral paper for the seminary, good friend Mary Hill Glass volunteered to type that monster for me. She worked for IBM and had what was known as a “mag card” typewriter. As she typed a page, the machine would cut an IBM card appropriately, making any corrections she inserted. Then, she would place the card in the machine and it would automatically type that page error-free. We had to submit six copies of our paper. Through the years, students had turned in several carbon copies of their papers because it was either that or type six entire papers by hand. I genuinely believe mine was the first the seminary faculty had ever seen that was all originals, no copies. High tech for the times; horse and buggy now.

Bob Vickers, at Wednesday’s pastoral seminar, asked, “Does anyone here own a typewriter?” Not one hand went up.

We have a new mayor. Sort of. C. Ray Nagin took the oath of office to begin his second term today. When the judge asked him to raise his right hand, Nagin raised his left with his right hand on the Bible being held by his small daughter. Perhaps the judge said, “Your other right hand,” (or perhaps not) because he caught himself and raised the correct hand. Then the judge said, “Repeat after me: ‘I, Clarence Ray Nagin, Junior…'” The mayor said, “I, Clarence Ray Nagin, Junior, otherwise known as C. Ray Nagin do solemnly swear….”

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Of course, it’s not like the storms are lining up in the eastern Caribbean waiting for midnight so they can start their westward trek. It’s only a date on the calendar, yet June 1 has loomed large in the minds of New Orleanians for nine months now, ever since Katrina sashayed through and left us on our knees.

This week so far has been spent in meetings. Monday was Memorial Day. Tuesday, Freddie Arnold and I had separate meetings with the summer intern with the Baptist Message, our state paper, followed by an all day session with several leaders from our North American Mission Board and the state convention, plotting ways and means of doing evangelism in this hurting city. Wednesday, our pastors and church leaders–some 90 of them–spent the day at Oak Park Baptist Church hearing Bob Vickers and Donna Long explain the processes of writing grant proposals to be submitted to big charitable foundations around the country. The afternoon was primarily given to helping the pastors apply for their share of the $20 million available for churches from the Bush-Clinton-Katrina Fund. Bob and Donna–and their families–are in our city for several of these lengthy seminars. Their organization goes by the dual titles of Artful Askers and National Bridge Alliance.

“You’re only going to get 35 thousand dollars at the most,” they kept telling our leaders, “and that isn’t much.” We had asked them to spend the bulk of their time helping our guys complete the Bush-Clinton applications, which they did, but they kept insisting there is a lot more money, bigger money, out there to help the churches if one knows where to go and how to ask.

I did not sense a lot of enthusiasm in our pastors about applying with other charitable foundations for grants to fund their programs, but if two or three churches benefit, it will have been worth the effort and investment. We were the guests of the Louisiana Baptist Convention today. And of the wonderful people of Oak Park Baptist Church, as usual. Running the sanctuary air conditioning the entire day is not cheap, and today was a hot one. In fact, when I was driving across the river shortly after 9 am, the thermometer was almost hitting 90. And it’s only May. A good group of volunteers at Oak Park turns out every Wednesday to prepare and serve lunch for our pastors and other leaders. At the same time, a church group from outside our area had arrived this week to do work at Oak Park. They’re staying in the bunk beds the church has built on the third floor of their ed building just for this purpose.

The front page of Wednesday’s Times-Picayune shows an exciting concept that is being presented to the city, a plan to revamp much of the heart of the business district. People who have attended events at the Superdome know how the Hyatt Hotel is connected to the dome by a short walkway, and the hotel is part of an upscale shopping facility known as the New Orleans Centre. Neither the hotel nor the shopping center have reopened since Katrina, and today we found out why.

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