The most historic hotel in this city for generations has been the one known through the years as the Roosevelt, and most recently as the Fairmont. It has been shuttered since Katrina, with the owners making no plans to reopen. Tuesday’s Times-Picayune announced that the 114-year-old structure is about to be sold, and the new owners have plans to rebuild and reopen it as a Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

The hurricane flooded its basement with 10 feet of water which destroyed the mechanical equipment. The wind blew rain into nearly every guest room. After the storm, workers began cleaning out and drying out the building when they discovered the hotel had sustained far more damage than originally thought.

A local hotelier says the city needs this hotel back if we’re going to attract a certain class of visitor, but occupancy will be a concern for a few years.

The August 2007 issue of National Geographic features a photograph of New Orleans on its cover, and this large question: “New Orleans: Should it rebuild?” Across the picture, we read: “levees failing/storms increasing/ground sinking/seas rising.”

In a large sense, it’s a moot question because the city is rebuilding at this very moment. Almost 24 hours a day, people are at work. On one block, Mr. Boudreaux is hanging sheetrock in his house. In the next block, the LeBlancs are landscaping their yard. Vacant lots in the next block indicate where the Bourgeois and Landry families demolished their ruined homes. A new modular house is going up across the street. The heavy duty construction trucks burning up the through streets testify to the rebuilding going on here. It’s happening.

Whether it should or not is another question. And basically pointless, since people are going to do what they’re going to do.

It’s like the questions we used to field from outside religious leaders: “How many of your churches are you planning to bring back?” and “What is your strategy for which churches to restore and rebuild?”

The answer to that, we can safely say two years after Katrina, is since every Southern Baptist church is independent and self-governing, it doesn’t really matter if the association or state convention had a grand strategy. Each church is free to do what it chooses. Had they allowed us to decide, we would have chosen one major church for each affected neighborhood and poured all our resources into those. But there is nothing to keep a pastor from returning to the city and assembling the church members he can locate, then making plans to gut out and rebuild. Since hundreds of Southern Baptist churches around the country graciously offered to help and even adopted every one of our churches that wanted adopting, every church that wanted to rebuild has either done so or is in the process.

That’s why we have some fairly-well restored churches, most of them small, in damaged neighborhoods, that are gathering only some 25 or so in worship on Sundays. Not enough people for their offerings to cover the costs of keeping the building open, much less paying a pastor’s salary or even his expenses.

The Sunday edition of the paper featured a large display over several pages of prominent churches in the area that are rebuilding, with information on the progress of each. The large photo shows a worker atop the roof of the First Baptist Church of Chalmette, now being constructed by volunteer laborers.

For most of the numbers and percentages, the paper relied on the pastor of Parkview Baptist Church, Dr. Bill Day, who also serves as a professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary as well as its primary researcher. Bill has sent seminary students to every one of 1,508 pre-Katrina churches in metro New Orleans to find out who’s meeting. He is a well-spring of information on the subject.

In Orleans, St. Bernard, and Plaquemines parishes, worst hit of all this part of the world, 43 percent of the churches are still out of business. That’s down from 53 percent eight months ago, so we’re showing some progress.

In St. Bernard Parish, only 28 of 56 pre-storm churches are open. Downriver in Plaquemines, 29 of 49 churches are open. We Southern Baptists had 5 pre-Katrina churches in that parish, and now have one, Port Sulphur Baptist Church where Lynn Rodrigue is pastor.

On the inside of the paper, a photo of our Franklin Avenue Baptist Church indicates a pre-Katrina congregation of 8,000 and a post-Katrina number of 1,500 locally. The damage to their campus ran from $6 to $7 million. First Baptist Chalmette and FBC Slidell were the only other two SBC congregations featured in the photo display. Chalmette’s numbers declined from 350 pre-Katrina to 60 to 70 now. Slidell’s went from 800-900 down to 650.

“People are trickling back to the place they call home,” reports the National Geographic, adding, “rebuilding in harm’s way.”

“Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in United States history, was also a warning shot. Right after the tragedy, many people expressed a defiant resolve to rebuild the city. But among engineers and experts, that resolve is giving way to a growing awareness that another such disaster is inevitable, and nothing short of a massive and endless national commitment can prevent it.”

That is the lead paragraph to the Geographic article. Here’s one more, then we’ll move on.

“The long odds (against being able to protect the city against another hurricane the size of Katrina) led Robert Giegengack, a geologist at the University of Pennsylvania, to tell policymakers a few months after the storm that the wealthiest, most technologically advanced nation on the globe was helpless to prevent another Katrina: ‘We simply lack the capacity to protect New Orleans.’ He recommended selling the French Quarter to Disney, moving the port 150 miles upstream, and abandoning one of the most historic and culturally significant cities in the nation. Others have suggested rebuilding it as a smaller, safer enclave on higher ground.”

It’s the same situation we Baptists face with our churches, though, folks: people who own their property are calling the shots. We have no leadership to speak of down here, certainly no one with any authority willing to make the tough decisions. That’s why the homes are being rebuilt, a few here and a few there, and the Corps of Engineers is working on the levees, and businesses are trying to re-establish themselves.

If we don’t have another hurricane, we’re fine.

If we do, look for a mass exodus from this city no matter what Washington or Baton Rouge or City Hall says.