By Karen L. Willoughby, Managing Editor
CANAAN, Haiti – Even as Southern Baptist disaster relief efforts wind down in Haiti, ravaged Jan. 12, 2010, by a 7.0 earthquake, the Louisiana Baptist Convention focuses its ongoing impact on the million-and-a-half people now living in what two years ago was a green field.
Initial plans include partnering with a church-multiplier national pastor, constructing a church and a medical clinic, and starting an orphanage, all in a part of the Haiti countryside that the people there named Canaan.
“We are intentionally making sure [the new strategy] is not a diversion from what we’ve done in the past with our facilitation of networks,” said Wayne Sheppard, LBC’s partnerships coordinator and executive assistant to the executive director. “But because of what the Florida Baptist Convention has already been doing in Haiti – since 1995 – we’re making sure our strategy works along with theirs.
“It’s still going to be our vision for Louisiana that we facilitate churches to do their own missions, but this is a little bit different direction in the sense that we are loosely partnering with Florida and as such have been assigned this part of Haiti,” Sheppard said.
“We’re moving into the long-term ministry phase of our work in Haiti,” said Jay Johnston, associate pastor at First Baptist Church of Covington, La., and coordinator of the Louisiana/Haiti Partnership. “I think we’re going to have the opportunity to really see the Kingdom of God expand in Haiti through this work.”
Conversations with Sheppard, Johnston and Perry Hancock, president and executive director of the Louisiana Baptist Children’s Home and Family Ministries, attest to the movement of God in the development of the strategy for Louisiana’s efforts going forward in Haiti. “Coincidences” and “chance meetings” plus the input from Louisiana Southern Baptists, have propelled the planning into what in man’s timing might have taken much longer.
When First Lafayette sent a medical team in within two months of the earthquake, they met Jean Odvald Louis – he prefers to be called Pastor Ovald – who is planting Croix-des-Bouquets Church in Canaan. During one of his frequent trips to Haiti, Johnston met Pastor Ovald.
“The pastor is very much of a self-starter and motivator,” Johnston said. “He’s well-respected among the Haitians and Haitian pastors.
“From midnight Tuesday through midnight Wednesday they have a 24-hour prayer meeting,” Johnston continued. “They pray the people in Haiti will come to Christ, that their church will be an instrument of seeing the Kingdom [of God] expand on Haiti and beyond, that that this [church] would be a place to disciple people and in turn God would send more people” through the disciples’ evangelistic efforts.
“The pastor has started building a [church] building on faith, and is making an inroad in the community,” said the Louisiana-based coordinator for Louisiana missions and ministry in Haiti. “He feels like they could plant eight to ten churches out of his church …. He’s been working with the training school there to have pastors for these other churches.”
A couple of para-church groups have a presence in Canaan, but Croix-des-Bouquets is the only church of any kind to be building a permanent structure among that mass of 1.5 million people, Johnston said.
Numerous medical teams followed that first medical mission trip by members of First Lafayette, and over time, “with the strong convictions of many people among Louisiana Baptists who’ve been doing medical missions [in Haiti and elsewhere] it became clear that we need to become established in a community,” Johnston said.
“These medical professionals see the need is to have a permanent place and train nursing students in Haiti to provide ongoing medical care, and then send in teams from Louisiana,” Johnston continued. “In this way, medical care would continue; it wouldn’t be hit and miss” from the sporadic presence throughout Haiti of medical care that is the current strategy.
Many Louisiana Baptists expressed to him their interest in working with orphaned children in Haiti, Johnston said. He talked with Perry Hancock about the Louisiana Baptist Children’s Home and Family Ministries providing expertise for the development of an orphanage that also would be connected with the church Ovald pastors.
“I had just had this chance meeting in Florida,” Hancock said. He learned about a construction ministry specializing in building medical clinics that is equipped to handle the project management of building a wall around the church property in Haiti, and inside that wall, building adjacent to the church a medical clinic and an orphanage.
“The orphanage would be founded but not owned by Louisiana Baptists,” Johnston said. “The actual ownership would be the foundation that’s part of the Haiti Baptist Convention.”
With the three legs of a church that establishes other churches, a medical clinic that also is a training facility for Haitian nurses, and an orphanage, there is much that Louisiana Baptists can do on countless mission trips, Johnston said.
He suggested mission team members could do backyard Bible clubs, day camps and other ways of reaching out to children and their families.
Physicians, nurses, dentists and others could provide medical care and train Haitian medical staff.
At the orphanage, teams could go in a relieve workers – including the cooks, who also would return the favor by teaching the helpers from Louisiana some Haitian recipes, and give attention to children who have lost their parents and grandparents.
“This is becoming clearer every day,” Johnston said. “I think we’re going to have the opportunity to see the Kingdom of God expand in Haiti through this work.”