I said to Pastor Steve James of Trinity Baptist Church, “Lake Charles is such a lovely little town. I wish the state convention was a couple of days longer to give me time to explore it.” He smiled, “You could do that in one day and have time left.” Quaint shops, cute cafes, historic streets–I do love lovely little picturesque towns.

Looking back over Monday and Tuesday, I’m amazed at all the activities I packed into the 24 hours in Lake Charles, and that’s without attending all the convention sessions. (Many years ago, as a young pastor, I felt duty-bound to not miss a convention report or a sermon. Over the years, you adjust to the reality of other meetings you need to attend, people you need to see, and your diminishing stamina.) I met with people who are helping to rebuild New Orleans, with the other directors of missions from across the state, with various friends and colleagues, and still had time to hear a number of reports and sermons from Tommy Middleton (Woodlawn Baptist Church, Baton Rouge) and our own Fred Luter (Franklin Avenue Baptist Church).

For my money, there were two highlights of this two day convention. Monday night, Dr. Joe Aguillard of Louisiana College–our only Baptist institution of higher learning in the state–gave a great report on the health of LC, and was accompanied by the college chorale. Then the football team came out, and several players addressed the convention. What we heard knocked everyone off their feet.

“Our guys pray together,” one of the players said. “This year we’ve had 70 young men pray to receive Christ.” Applause. “We do a lot of community missions, too.” Pictures thrown on the screen showed them in nursing homes. Impressive.

“We were speaking in one church and someone asked me, ‘How often does your team pray?’ I guess he was trying to be funny because they all laughed. He did not know we had prayed 3 times coming up there that day, and sometimes during practice we’ll pray 8 times.”

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Cartoons from the First, Second, and Third Epistles of John are now available in the Image Gallery.

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Several weeks ago an enterprising graduate student in finances e-mailed me from some university in this hemisphere–that’s as definite as my memory can get–to ask if she could bring down a busload of her classmates to assist residents of New Orleans in handling/investing/managing all the money they’ve gotten from the government. I said, “What money?”

She said, “We hear everyone is getting 150 thousand dollars for their flooded homes.” I said, “No one has received a dime of it. It’s still clogged up in a government pipeline somewhere.”

That money is beginning to flow, at least in a trickle. The Louisiana Recovery Authority has hired people to receive applications from homeowners, and by all reports, the process is lengthy and laborious. People have been complaining that they’re being asked to reproduce all the applications for any kind of assistance they’ve received earlier, to document everything about their homes, and to produce papers most of which were ruined in the Katrina floodwaters that swallowed 200,000 homes. A few days ago, a fed up Governor Kathleen Blanco announced that the LRA’s slow pace would not get it. At that point, only a hundred or so people had received their money.

The governor said, “I want 10 thousand people to get their checks before December 1.” Well, they heard her and hired another hundred workers and decided it was all right for applicants to handle everything by telephone (not everyone has the internet, to their surprise), and they now announce they’re on track to reach the 10 thousand number by the end of this month.

Footnote: this does not mean everyone is getting up 150 thousand dollars. It’s “up to” that amount. But you have to deduct your insurance checks and a few other things. Even so, we’re thankful.

Twice this week, I received e-mails asking when the cartoons on the Winter Bible Study would be ready. I’ve been turning out a series of cartoons on whichever book of the Bible Southern Baptists focus on each January, for many years. Some of those are available at www.joemckeever. Click on “cartoons” on the right side of the page and have fun.

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Today was our second Wednesday pastors’ meeting at the New Orleans Chinese Baptist Church in Kenner. Pastor Hong Fu Liu welcomed us and told how they’re getting ready to baptize 7 new members on the first Sunday of December. During the Billy/Franklin Graham Crusade in March, they had 21 people to receive Christ. Fourteen have already been baptized.

Before Katrina, this wonderful church–which is celebrating its 25th anniversary; it was a mission from Memorial Baptist in Metairie–had two morning worship services. Now they have only one, having lost some 40 percent of their members since the hurricane. Their facilities were built ten years ago and are still lovely, although Hong Fu says that’s because the insurance paid off well and they’ve repainted and reroofed. He paid tribute to the Southern Baptist Convention which helped them purchase the lovely lot on which their church stands.

The Arkansas working out of Gentilly Baptist Church sponsored a block party on the church grounds last Saturday. They had anticipated 150, but 400 people showed up. They had one profession of faith. Sunday, 174 people attended the worship service, half of them being volunteers from out of state.

Debra and Rachel from Victory Church came to share with the pastors about the Convoy of Hope scheduled for Saturday, November 18, on both the East Bank and the West Bank of New Orleans. They will be giving away free school supplies, 5,000 Bibles, food (including 250 turkeys), gift cards to Lowe’s for $10 to the first one thousand people, discounts for prescriptions, and such. The East Bank (downtown New Orleans) location is 1501 St. Louis Street (corner of Basin Street and St. Louis, next to Louis Armstrong Park).

More than 35,000 pound of free groceries will be given to local residents. They’re also planning health screenings, job fairs, free haircuts–if they can find some barbers willing to work on Saturdays for nothing–and plenty of games and children’s activities.

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Harry Truman was often asked if he regretted dropping the A-bomb on Japan. “I refuse to waste time second-guessing myself,” he would reply. “Under the circumstances, I did the best I knew, and if I had it to do over, I’d do the same thing again.”

That’s one of the many differences between Harry and me. I mean, in addition to the fact that I’m alive and he’s not.

I sometimes beat myself up over something I did and wish I hadn’t. Or did not do and wish I had.

Case in point. I spent this past week at a lovely church in another state. They called the emphasis a “Global Focus Celebration.” The people were wonderful and the hosts where I stayed were the best. The dozen or twenty missionaries who gathered for the event were as fine as they come. But what I was doing there hounded me from the beginning to the end.

The invitation to this annual event came from a longtime friend who served that church as interim pastor recently. “Invite Joe,” he suggested, and they did. I accepted it thinking it was a World Mission Conference, which we now call “On Mission Celebration.” The idea of that is to bring a large group of missionaries to your area and have them speak in churches all over the county, a different speaker in each church each night. But the Global Focus was one church, many missionaries, several days of meetings.

I set up a display in the fellowship hall so people could see my photos of Katrina-impacted churches of the New Orleans area, and stood there Wednesday afternoon while members came by to talk. I streamed photos on my laptop in case they wanted to see where these churches stood now. We had missionary fellowships, breakfasts together, breakfasts with the staff, a cookout in the home of our hosts, a senior adult luncheon at which one of the missionaries spoke, a church-wide missions banquet where I spoke, and we joined with the church members in fanning out over the city Saturday morning and afternoon to do ministry. Saturday night, we each attended a dinner with our sponsoring Sunday School class and each of us spoke to the members. Sunday morning we attended the two worship services and spoke in the Sunday School classes.

It may be just because I’m still new to being a missionary. After pastoring for 42 years, I came to the director of missions position only in May of 2004. Evidently, DOMs and others attend these Global Focus events and On Mission Celebrations a lot. But this was my first. I had a lot of stuff to take with me, so I drove up and back. Over 1600 miles round trip. The drive was wonderful, the scenery spectacular (I caught the Ozarks in the peak of its fall colors), and all that. Nothing negative at all. Absolutely nothing.

Except, I was just wondering what I was doing there.

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I billed it that way because it was! Held Friday and Saturday, November 3 and 4, at First Baptist-Marrero, across the river from New Orleans, this conference pulled together 30 volunteers from Louisiana and five other states. Leader Hope Ferguson e-mailed us her report on Wednesday. Following are the highlights.

Thirty-two churches from this area participated. Most were Anglo churches, 1 was Haitian, and 3 were Spanish. Twenty-seven of the churches are either starting or restarting their church libraries. Three schools participated.

Ninety-five individuals registered for the classes, including eleven pastors.

Get this: churches and businesses and individuals which contributed money or books or library supplies or some of all came from 17 states.

58 attended the class: Administration for beginning libraries.

21 attended: Classification and Cataloging for beginners.

29 went through the class on processing, circulation, and selection.

12 for Children and the Church Library.

14 Planning Promotion.

17 Reading Club Extravaganza

6 Space and Furnishings for Church Libraries

15 Collecting and promoting church history

5 Preserving Church History

6 Writing Church History

Baskets of blessings (information, gifts, promotional items, library supplies) were given to all 32 churches. Nearly 4,000 books were given to these new church libraries, with an average of 150 given to each one.

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“I see lots of evidence that New Orleans is coming back,” said Terry Raines. This Virginia Baptist leader was addressing our annual associational meeting on Monday, October 30, along with other leaders from across the country. Terry has been here several times and says he can see signs of significant progress.

I thought of that today–Wednesday, October 8–while driving through various sections of town. On West Esplanade in Kenner, a huge low-income apartment complex is now an open plowed field, the result of demolition which was made necessary by the hurricane damage. The boarded up complex–occupying at least six full blocks–had been an eyesore for the last year.

Down other streets, new homes are going up, some of them costing huge amounts of money. On Elysian Fields Avenue, our connector between Lake Pontchartrain and Interstate 610, dead trees are spray-painted and marked for the chain saws. In all, there must be 500 such trees, at least a dozen per block, trees that were poisoned and choked to death by Katrina’s floodwaters. At Robert E. Lee Boulevard and Canal Boulevard, the strip mall is up and running. Signs of progress abound.

Plenty of the other kinds of signs, too–untouched homes, potholes, dead trees, weeds up to the rooftops, FEMA trailers, vacant lots, boarded up stores. But we’re learning to look past all that and enjoy the positive signs.

Youth on Mission is a 16-year-old organization, the brainchild of Harry Fowler, which involves teenagers in mission projects from one end of this country to the other. Harry has been to New Orleans on several occasions and, with assistant Bob Adams, has put hundreds of youngsters to work in rebuilding our city. The new brochure from YOM announces projects for 2007 in Atlanta, Chicago, Washington, Pittsburgh, Toronto, and New Orleans. In fact, the front of the lovely brochure shows the youth working at our Baptist Crossroads in the Ninth Ward. You can’t miss all those colorful houses. Thank you, Harry, and YOM. Check out their website at www.yom.org.

Meanwhile, the young people of Mount Vernon Baptist Church in Jasper, Alabama–just up the road from my home–are not plugging into someone else’s program; they’re creating their own. “Impact New Orleans,” they call their June 9-16, 2007, project. Their full-color leaflet which arrived in our office today shows the same colorful Habitat houses as the Youth on Mission brochure. (I’d give a dollar to know how many groups worked on these 40 houses. The other day I met some Junior League ladies from Toronto hammering and sweating!) Minister of Students Shawn Doss left New Orleans this summer with a burning desire to create a low cost/high impact mission experience for his Jasper kids. They’re partnering with Operation NOAH Rebuild and our association. The brochure says the group will be staying at Oak Park Baptist Church, and they’re doing the entire week for $150 per student. Shawn invites his people to check out Oak Park’s website: www.oakparkvision.com.

Readers who want to pursue such a trip for their group are invited to go to www.joemckeever.com and click on the house on the right side of the page, with the title, “If you are coming to help us.” You should find everything you need to know there, but if you still have questions, email us at joe@joemckeever.com.

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Dr. Joe is travelling this week, so Lynn Gehrmann has provided the minutes from today’s weekly pastor’s meeting, held at the New Orleans Chinese Baptist Church.

BAGNO held the weekly meeting with association pastors at New Orleans Chinese Baptist Church at 10:00 am. Freddie opened the meeting with some pastors sharing a blessing that happened during the past week.

Thomas Glover (New Covenant) — They closed on the Woodmere property yesterday. The fall festival on October 31st was a big success. One hundred people attended. Thirty plus prospects and seven professions of faith.

Ann Corbin (Global) — They have received a financial blessing.

Oscar Williams (Good News) — At a eulogy on October 27th, there were eleven people who gave their life to Christ.

James ‘Boogie’ Melerine (Delacroix Hope) — Last Wednesday night, October 25th, there were seven people at their prayer worship. Three of them, Catholic, had been attending worship services at Delacroix Hope. Boogie shared that some people do not like to pray out loud. He asked each person to just say one sentence and at the end of the prayer, some of them had tears in their eyes. He then asked who would be willing to give their testimony on Sunday. One of the ladies, gave her testimony on Sunday and so did her husband.

Tom Pewitt (Memorial) shared that last Thursday, October 26th, their Chairman of Deacons, Ray Gomillon, passed away. He was a Gideon and used to go the parish prison and hand out Bibles. Please keep his family in your prayers.

Mark Joslin (New Vision) — The framework of their building is up. Within the next week, they should be able to start on the walls.

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