“Well, I see life is returning to normal,” said one of my sons Friday. We were driving down Rampart Street at the edge of downtown New Orleans and he had spotted a lady-of-the-street sashaying down a sidewalk. A few residents have moved back into that neighborhood, but the city is being repopulated by construction workers from all fifty states, and I suppose she’s trying to befriend this group.

The Sav-A-Center grocery store, the successor of the old A & P, has reopened at Franklin Avenue and Leon Simon, not far from the University of New Orleans campus. Since very few people in that area have power (our associational office still doesn’t), I wondered why. My sons and I checked it out Friday. Construction trucks were literally everywhere–filling the parking lots, medians, etc.–and the store’s clients were almost exclusively these out-of-town workers. With nothing else open in that part of the world, we ended up having lunch alongside them in the store’s deli.

Outside, someone handed a flyer to my son Neil, advertising “Rooms Available–$28.” “Bunk beds-showers-fresh linens-cable-internet” it said, adding, “Must prepay for one week stay. Location: Downtown New Orleans on Canal.”

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“Preacher, I have some good news for you.” “Good. I could stand some good news. What do you have?”

“I have a truckload of clothing, men and women’s clothing, boys and girls, babies. Really good stuff, almost new. Where do I send it?”

“Friend, I sincerely thank you. I know you went to a lot of trouble to assemble these gifts from wonderful people. That means so much to us. However….”

“We don’t need clothing. The people who need clothing are those who have lost their homes and all their contents. We have lots of homes like that, but the people are not here. There’s no place for them to live here, so they’re still wherever they evacuated.”

Long silence. “You can’t take them?” “No, sir. I’m sorry, because I know you need to get them out of your truck and get back home. I’m sure there are people needing the clothes, but they just aren’t here.”

I have that conversation by phone at least twice a week. Thursday morning, it was face to face. The nice man met me coming out of one of our churches. “Where do I unload all this clothing?” He was bright-eyed and friendly, and I hated like anything to tell him we can’t use it.

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My wife says if there is money on the street anywhere, I will find it. Once I found a ten dollar bill and twice five dollar bills in my early morning walking. Last Sunday morning, walking on the paved track atop our levee that parallels the river, I spotted two quarters lying together. Then, today, Wednesday morning, a quarter of a mile away, I found two more quarters lying there just waiting for me. Too, too strange.

It pays to walk early in the mornings.

I told our pastors, “It pays to attend these Wednesday meetings.” We handed out lots of money today.

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Tuesday morning I dropped in on a church staff meeting already in progress. When the pastor asked for my prayer requests, I said, “Pray that churches wanting to help us will be willing to do whatever the situation requires. Many have their own agenda. They want to do what they want to do, and usually that means the kind of dramatic, save-the-city efforts that gives them a good feeling when they leave. But it’s not always what we need.” The others in the room shook their heads; they’re seeing it, too.

Now, I understand the problem. You go to a great deal of trouble in north Alabama or Tennessee or Kentucky to assemble a team of volunteers, the congregation raises money to send them, and you travel 500 miles. When you arrive, the host pastor says, “I need you to grind those stumps.” “Cut that grass.” “Clean this building.” “Fill in for the cooks from 3 to 7 am.” “Put on a block party for our neighborhood.” And you’re frustrated.

“I thought the city was in trouble,” you think to yourself. “I thought they needed us to clean out sheetrock and insulation, to rewire churches, and replace roofs. We went to a lot of trouble to help them, and they’ve got us pushing brooms and going down the street to asking the neighbors if they need our help.”

Make no mistake, this city is in desperate trouble. It has endless needs. More and more, we will be able to use outside volunteers to bring the city back. But it’s not so simple. To work in the worst affected areas, workers need training and equipment. To rewire a church or home, one needs permits and approvals from city offices, a time-consuming process that is causing many people to tear their hair out.

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Monday night, I attended a church council for one of our congregations hurt by the storm. “We’ve lost one-third of our members,” said the leader. They’re pastorless at present, so he had asked me to sit in on their meeting. “If we get off base, call us back,” he invited.

After welcoming a dozen members into the home and calling for the opening prayer, the lay leader turned to his legal pad and began a lengthy liturgy of the needs of the congregation now that so many members were scattered elsewhere. Half the committees were in disarray, most of the Sunday School teachers might not be returning, and several leaders had not reappeared since Katrina. The worship leader’s school position was terminated for the balance of this school year, so she accepted a friend’s invitation to visit Paris, and is there now. (Now, that’s my idea of a great evacuation!) The meeting was called to decide what action to take.

They did the only thing they could do. They decided to wait until after the first of the year to see how everything shakes out. “Some will be back,” someone ventured. “Marie and Elsie say they’ll be home after the first of the year,” said another. “Let’s wait.”

Sometime in January, this little congregation’s leadership will assemble to reinvent their church. Now that our church is smaller, what committees, what programs, and what leadership do we need? No one is going to enjoy what they will be forced to do.

This same process is going on in 90% of the churches in this area, regardless of the denominational labels.

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Sunday morning at Metairie Baptist Church, some members of Lakeview Church–inundated by high levels of polluted floodwater following Katrina–told me they are at work cleaning out the bottom floor of their sanctuary and expect to bring the church building back to normal. “That is a well-built church structure,” one said.

Paul Gregoire, longtime pastor of St. Bernard Baptist Church in Chalmette says the same thing about his church. “We’ll be back,” he told me, even though as Director of Admissions, Paul has had to relocate temporarily to Atlanta with the seminary administration. Meanwhile, Pastor John Galey of Poydras Church and Pastor John Jeffries of First Baptist Chalmette have teams working on rescuing their buildings. The Missouri Baptist Convention has adopted St. Bernard Parish’s Baptist churches, for which we are more grateful than I can ever find words to express.

Pastor John Faull gave me time in the morning worship service of Williams Boulevard Baptist Church in Kenner to thank the congregation for their great service. To my knowledge, this was the first church of any denomination in the immediate area to be up and running, ministering and serving. Hundreds of state troopers from all over America converged on New Orleans to restore law and order. They worked out of the Troop B headquarters, next door to Williams Boulevard, and hundreds slept and ate in the church’s gymnasium. Even now, WBBC continues to serve hundreds of meals a day to law enforcement officers still on the job.

Brother John read several letters he has received recently, some from family members of troopers thanking the church for “taking care of my daddy.” One letter came from some children in Taiwan who held a bake sale in their yard and raised twenty dollars for hurricane relief, then sent the money along with drawings they had done.

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Several texts keep coming up in our post-hurricane conversations around the New Orleans area. I made a list the other day and was pleasantly surprised to find seven texts, that being the biblical number for completion.

JUDGES 5:2 After her great victory, Deborah sang, “That the leaders led in Israel and that the people volunteered, O bless the Lord.” Pretty good arrangement, when the leaders are doing their job and the people are doing theirs. Let either group quit and nothing gets done.

DEUTERONOMY 28:13 “And the Lord will make you the head and not the tail.” God promises that His children who are obedient will be leaders wherever they go, not the reactors and definitely not just followers. Leaders do not ask anyone to elect them, they step up and lead. Leaders do not take polls to see what the people want; Godly leaders are more interested in what God wants, and they go forth to do it. A pastor friend told me this week he knew Rick Warren as a seminary student. He said, “I have copies of his notes from those years, notes which became the ‘Purpose-Driven Life’ best-selling book. Rick has worked on that all these years.” He was saying this leader was not compiling other people’s thoughts into a book which he would market, but spent all these years perfecting the insights God had given him. God makes us the head. Not the mayor, not an election. To the best of my knowledge, no one ever elected Billy Graham as the nation’s pastor.

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I was nearly–but not quite–offended when a friend from another state, a place that has received a lot of our residents, said, “Of course, our people do not have the tolerance for corruption Louisiana residents have.” I started to argue that we don’t tolerate it; in fact we put the crooks in jail–a half dozen judges from the New Orleans area in the past couple of years. And we must have some honest leaders, otherwise they would never have been exposed. But I kept quiet. And with good reason, it turns out.

We truly have some weird, weird politicians down here. Take this instance….

Friday’s Times-Picayune, front page, the chief of the New Orleans Harbor Police, Robert Hecker, is in trouble because he did his job. As the storm was raging, waters rising, Chief Hecker and his people were saving stranded citizens from rooftops, bringing them to shelter, doing the kind of heroic work every law enforcement officer trains for and lives for. Suddenly, Hecker gets an order from his boss, Director of Port Safety and Security Cynthia Swain, telling his to close up shop and get his people out of town for their own safety. Hecker was horrified. His spokesman said, “It’s mind-boggling. You don’t send away police officers in a time of crisis.” So, Hecker did a truly courageous thing.

He defied orders. He told his men what the boss had ordered and gave each permission to make their own decisions. But he stayed on the job, as did most of the others. And for that little bit of insubordination, Chief Hecker is in trouble. Swain has brought in the state attorney general’s office which is investigating him for malfeasance.

Makes you want to pull your hair out. Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard ordered the pump operators out of the parish at the critical hour, for their safety, he says, resulting in wide-spread flooding in some areas which cost zillions of dollars, and the citizens continue to be up in arms about his decision. The harbor police stay on the job and save lives and get in trouble.

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like this home.

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Each Wednesday, our ministers/pastors meet at First Baptist Church of LaPlace for fellowship and information. Around 50 of us gather there each time, but it’s never the same group.

Today, November 2, a young pastor who serves a non-Southern Baptist church in Kenner addressed the group. “I’ve been in this area for nine years, and I’ve been impressed with the work of Southern Baptists. I know what you believe and it’s the same thing my church stands for. After Katrina hit, I did not see any of my denomination’s people down here at all. The first people on the ground were Southern Baptists, and they’re everywhere, ministering in Jesus’ name. It’s outstanding. And I want my church to be a part of that. So I am here, officially requesting to join the Southern Baptist Convention.” Everyone applauded. We may have lost 30 or more churches from the hurricane, but we just gained one! (We’ll deal with the details at another time, and explain how one goes about becoming a member church in the SBC.) He brought a laugh of understanding when he added, “I would have been here a couple of years earlier, except I was waiting for one key deacon to go to Heaven.”

After prayer time, our two-hour-and-a-half meeting was jam-packed with one person after another rising to address the group. Disaster relief workers talked about cleanup, building people about permits, and financial people about insurance and loans. One pastor gave a report that Franklin Graham will be leading a two-day festival at the New Orleans Arena, next to the Superdome, on Saturday and Sunday, January 28 and 29. Another spoke of plans to invite all the “first-responders” to a banquet or barbecue to show them proper appreciation for all they did to secure the city. Others told of the counseling available for those having trouble dealing with this crisis. On and on it went. I felt sorry for Lynn Gehrman, trying to get it all down in the minutes.

The First Baptist Church of Covington, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, has invited our ministers and spouses to have our Christmas banquet in their facilities, as their guests, no charge. We gladly accept and agreed on Monday night, December 5.

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Tuesday morning, some folks at Edgewater and Lakeview churches were masked up and tearing out sheetrock, pews, and other church innards. It remains to be seen whether the buildings will be salvageable, but give the folks credit–they’re trying.

“The only word to describe this area is ‘dead zone,'” said Tom Billings. The Director of Missions for Houston, Texas, flew in Tuesday morning and spent the day with Freddie Arnold and me before departing that evening. I’m afraid we showed him more of the devastation than he wanted to see. I took him up Canal Street and across Paris Avenue and Elysian Fields, then over to Algiers and back across the Huey P. Long into Kenner. Freddie took him to lunch while I did a funeral, and then showed him the greater devastation in St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th ward. I expect Tom was happy to get back on the plane that evening.

“This is not going to be a quick fix,” he said. “We’re talking about years.” Indeed. In fact, Tuesday, the folks at Lifeway who were going to provide architectural workshops for our pastors notified me that they think it’s premature, that this needs to be scheduled sometime after the first of the year, that the pastors aren’t at the point of thinking of rebuilding yet. I believe they’re right.

Freddie told Tom Billings the best thing Houstonians can do for us is pray. While this is on target, it’s hard for people to voice the same prayers over and over for years when you are not present to see how the prayers are being answered, and whether they are. That’s our challenge–to keep them praying. New Orleans may be the biggest prayer challenge our people have ever faced.

Wayne Jenkins has a plan.

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