No Ordinary Saints Helmet

White Castle First Baptist Pastor Greg Wilton and wife Abby hold a Saints helmet found while gutting houses after Katrina

By Paul F. South, NOBTS Communications

WHITE CASTLE, La. (BP) – As Super Bowl week dawned in New Orleans, Greg Wilton’s face and a tarnished replica Saints helmet graced the front page of the city’s newspaper, The Times-Picayune.
Wilton, 27, tried to quell the buzz from family and friends, but this is no ordinary football helmet.
And Wilton, bivocational pastor of First Baptist Church in White Castle, La., a town of 1,946 where bayous and sugarcane stalks likely outnumber people, is more than, as he puts it, “a guy with a helmet.”
He’s a guy with a message to share.
First, about the helmet, which Wilton hopes someday to return to its owner. Rewind to the spring of 2006, seven months after Hurricane Katrina. Wilton, then a new graduate student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, joined a group of collegians working through the seminary’s MissionLab program during spring break to gut houses in New Orleans’ devastated Upper Ninth Ward, one of the Crescent City’s hardest-hit areas by post-Katrina flooding.