NEW ORLEANS – Pastor Kevin Lee got it right, last Sunday.
By Karen L. Willoughby
Managing editor
NEW ORLEANS – Pastor Kevin Lee got it right, last Sunday.
“Behold, I am making all things new,” he preached from Revelation 21:5
at the first post-Katrina Sunday morning service of Edgewater Baptist
Church in the Gentilly district.
New stop signs warn motorists that electricity still has not been restored in about 60 percent of the city.
New portable outhouses perched at the intersection
of main streets compensate (for those desperate enough to use them) for
all the businesses that used to provide way-station relief, which still
haven’t reopened and in most cases, which haven’t done any restoration
work, judging from random peeks through store windows.
New eating places – or at least one, a New
Orleans-style Chinese buffet operating out of an apparently recently
renovated Korean-owned grocery store near I-610 that also offers chips,
cookies, a vast variety of beer, a limited variety of soft drinks, and
that’s all.
But what makes Greater New Orleans so
heart-stopping, five months after two hurricanes and broken levees
ravaged the region, is that so little has changed since homes and
businesses sat in swirling salt water for three weeks. There is still
so much brokenness.
In the Gentilly area, stunned visitors and residents
can drive block after block after block after block after block after
block after block – two or three miles in any direction, at least – and
view dapper brick homes in what appear to have been well-tended lots
stand apparently ready for occupancy, until you look inside the front
doors flung wide open and see mold crawling up the walls.
In the Lower Ninth Ward, older, smaller wooden homes
crumpled under the beating they received from flood waters. Pitched
roofs that stand atop flattened boards remind amazed viewers of what
was left of the Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West after she
moaned, “I’m melting; I’m melting.”
Half-million dollar homes in Gretna, situated on a
private golf course, were not spared. Blue plastic roof protectors can
still be seen on nearly every home, and inside, corporate executives
wield hammers and paint brushes because workmen are so hard to find.
Back in the genteel neighborhoods of Gentilly, maybe one out of a
thousand residents are returning on a part-time basis to work on their
utilityless houses – hence the need for the portable outhouses. For the
most part, an eerie silence reigns. No dogs; no kids; no traffic. No
birds, even. No life.
It’s like the Rapture happened and you’ve been left behind.
Every Southern Baptist church still in operation has been gutted and is
ready for renovation, reports Joe Mc Keever who, like Rudolph Guliani
after 9/11, rose to the need for leadership. McKeever was called two
years ago as director of missions for what is commonly referred to as
“BAGNO” – Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans.
Soon after Katrina made landfall McKeever saw the
need for pastors to get together and find support in each other, and
out of that was born the weekly pastors’ get-togethers at First Baptist
LaPlace. During those meetings the pastors share coping strategies as
well as current frustrations and future plans.
“[McKeever] has done a good job of connecting us
with the resources, bringing help to us,” said John Galey, pastor of
Poydras Baptist, which held its first post-Katrina service Feb. 12,
which was the first Sunday after the renovations on its fellowship hall
were completed. “I praise the Lord for a director of missions thinking
of me.
“He knows how to get the help from where it is to
where it’s needed,” Galey continued. He’s done a good job communicating
and he does an amazing job of coordinating everything.”
Pastors put on an upbeat face with those they don’t
know, but talk with them long enough and they all admit to the times
they have broken from the pressure of ministering to others,
ministering to family, ministering to volunteers and not ministering to
themselves.
“I knew I was going to hit him or burst into tears,
and I’m the pastor; I couldn’t do either,” said one pastor about his
early-afternoon conversation with an overly-eager, clueless volunteer.
“I ended up going home and going to bed for two days.”
Before Katrina there were 143 churches and missions in BAGNO; today there are at least 54 fewer.
All the churches in Jefferson Parish are open,
reported Freddie Arnold, the association’s church planting missionary.
Eight churches are open in Orleans Parish. As of Sunday, five churches
are open in St. Bernard Parish – three of them meeting together.
And somehow in the midst of this stress, Kevin Lee felt God’s call to
move from an equipping pastorate at Riverside Baptist in Denver, Colo.
to the senior pastorate at Edgewater Baptist in the Gentilly community.
“We lost the entire first floor – had nine feet,
eight inches of water,” Lee said. “But we gutted it back to the studs,
thanks to Southern Baptist volunteers, so now we’re a little ahead of
the rest of the neighborhood. We’re ready to do ministry as the
community comes back.
“Thanks to what Southern Baptists have done across
the city, we have an open window to share the gospel that we didn’t
have before the storm,” Lee continued. “It’s a great privilege.”
Next week: Which churches have been doing what over the last five months in Greater New Orleans.