First, I need to tell you about Wayne Jenkins. Wayne leads the Department of Evangelism for the Louisiana Baptist Convention and he practices when he preaches. Last night he walked through the French Quarter witnessing and handing out leaflets telling people how to know Christ as Savior. He met so many Spanish people, he pulled a stack of tracts in their language out of his car and handed out a couple of hundred before the evening ended.
Wayne is making our New Orleans area pastors a deal we shouldn’t refuse. The annual “Louisiana Evangelism Conference” is scheduled for the First Baptist Church of LaFayette January 23 and 24, and Wayne wants to pay our way. He says, “We are providing pastors and staff and spouses in the hurricane affected areas with a $275 scholarship. This should provide two nights lodging, your meals and gas.” To get in on this, our ministers need to sign up now since registration is limited and on a first come, first served basis. You will want to FAX Wayne’s office (318) 445 0055 or call his administrative assistant (her name is Syd) at 1-800-622-6549. He needs to know your name, your spouse’s name, your church, address, phone, and e-mail address. You will receive a voucher in January, so you may make your own reservation and get yourself there. An incredible slate of inspiring speakers has been lined up.
Wayne conceived the idea for the PRAYER WALK for New Orleans which we held today, and he did all the work on it. All we had to do was show up…and take a walk. Nearly 200 of us gathered at Williams Boulevard Baptist Church this Saturday morning, including Dr. David and Patti Hankins from our LBC office in Alexandria, and Rick Shepherd and his wife from the Florida Baptist Convention office in Jacksonville, and a number of church prayer teams from throughout Louisiana. About a dozen of our local churches sent leaders to invite prayer walkers into their neighborhoods. By the time we got underway at 10:05 am, everyone present was wearing a black t-shirt with gold lettering, “Pray New Orleans,” with a fleur de lis on the front. Wayne provided tracts for us to hand out and miniature notebooks to record impressions, prayer requests we picked up from people we met, as well as experiences to remember.
We’ll be having another prayer walk before long, and this time we’ll get into the needier sections of New Orleans. The mold count is so high and the debris so widespread, we felt it would be unsafe to send people walking those streets.
Most of my prayer time was in what Wayne calls PRAYER DRIVING. This is when you cannot get out and walk, but must drive an area. They do this in rural neighborhoods, he says, where you find perhaps one or two houses per mile. And you do it in sections of our city like Bywater, where Grace Baptist Church is located. That’s where I drove after leaving Williams Boulevard. Along the way, I “prayer drove” Celebration Church on Airline and a couple of our mission churches. Grace Church was standing open with all the air blowers running, as so many other homes and businesses were. They gut the house as much as is required, then try to dry out the inside. At any point over a several mile drive, I could have stopped and walked inside stores and churches and homes, all with doors open and no one around. I walked the block around Grace and prayed for the church and the neighborhood, which has such a long way to come back. A few people seemed to be working, but not many.
The streetcars are out of commission down town, the result of flooding. No one knows when they can be repaired and returned to service. Medians (what people here call “the neutral ground”) are piled high with the junk from inside homes, and debris lines streets, in many cases lying untouched where Katrina dropped it over 11 weeks ago. Traffic lights work at perhaps a fourth of the New Orleans intersections. At others, they’ve erected portable stop signs and you hope other drivers stop. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.
On the Lakefront, near our associational office, FEMA trailers and construction campers have proliferated. An 18-wheeler belonging to some construction company now hogs all the parking spaces for our associational team. Driving along Lakeshore Drive down to West End, you were struck by how much of the street has been washed away. Not a pretty sight on this most beautiful of the streets of this city.
I will not belabor this point, but driving through New Orleans continues to be the most depressing thing I have to do. Your spirit sags as you observe residential streets untouched since the storm, with fallen trees, collapsed stores, broken homes, a burned business, a looted grocery, damaged roofs, busted windows, and ruined cars still sitting where they were abandoned by owners fleeing the hurricane. Debris piles as large as apartment buildings have been dumped on the neutral ground of West End Boulevard. The newspaper says all the trash from Katrina amounts to 34 years of our normal garbage and trash.
Every week I see it. Visitors come to town to check out the needs, to talk with pastors and other leaders on how they can go back home and mobilize their people to come help. After no more than an hour of gawking at the ruins of this city, they go into shock. It’s the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look, that says “I’ve never seen anything like this” and “I don’t have a clue what we can do about it.” They go back home; we have to stay.
And yet, we don’t want to be anywhere else. Personally, I’m accepting a few invitations to leave town and speak, but I can’t wait to get back. Nathan Cline and his bride are Carolinians and were new at our seminary when the storm hit. They evacuated to Houston where his wife was able to land a great job, and he’s taking seminary classes on-line. But I hear from him, and he’s hurting to get back here. Think of that: he had been a resident here for perhaps a month. But it’s his city and he feels a need to be here. Nathan says, “God knew when He led us to enroll at New Orleans Seminary this hurricane was coming. His plans for us have not changed.” We know the feeling, young friend.
Metairie Baptist Church was having a block party today, to meet neighbors and to bear witness. I went over from 1 to 3 pm and set up shop in their parking lot to sketch people. It’s not a big thing, but one way I can affirm our churches for reaching out to their neighborhood and meet some of their people.
Sunday morning, we shall meet perhaps the bravest man in the state. The Viet Nam Baptist Church on the West Bank is welcoming their new pastor. They’ve been searching for him for perhaps 2 years, and were all set to welcome him the first of September, before Katrina interfered. To my utter amazement and everyone’s delight, even after the devastation of the hurricane, he has still agreed to come. Sunday will be his first day, and I will add my welcome to this courageous brother who comes to share our suffering and to lend a hand.
OUR CHRISTMAS BANQUET for pastors and staff and spouses will be Monday night, December 5, at 7 pm, at the First BAptist Church of Covington. We will be the guests of the good people of that great church, and there will be no charge. We do need our ministers to sign up so we can tell them how many are coming. Our ministers should call the secretary at First Baptist Church of Kenner 504/466 5381 and tell them to put your name on the list.
Pray for our churches. The healthy ones are struggling with issues of declining membership with so many of their people taking jobs in other cities. The pastors from St. Bernard Parish will meet next Tuesday to begin to discuss what to do about their area where almost no one lives any more and all the churches were put out of commission. A number of our congregations are pastorless, the worst time possible to be without the God-called leader. Pray for our churches, please.