NEW ORLEANS – Texas volunteers brought economic and spiritual hope as well as personal encouragement when they were rebuilding in the Bywater area here.
By Keith Manuel
Regional Reporter
NEW ORLEANS – Texas volunteers brought economic and
spiritual hope as well as personal encouragement when they were
rebuilding in the Bywater area here.
In addition to their manual labor during the week at
Grace Baptist Church in the Upper Ninth Ward, the 75-person team
ministered door-to-door and invited people to the church Friday evening
for an evangelistic event that was to feature 200 pounds of boiled
crawfish.
“I hope a lot of people come because I don’t
think many of us from Texas are going to eat a lot of crawfish,” team
leader John Taylor said with a wide grin.
Josh Lomax, a youth from Odessa, said the trip, “has
reassured me of why I surrendered to the ministry this past year at
church camp, to do [ministries] like this.”
Team mate Grant Kellar concurred.
“I was just so excited to get down here and get my
hands dirty; then I found out I could go door-to-door and actually meet
the people,” Keller said. “I really wanted to do that and show the
people of New Orleans that there are people that care about what’s
happening to them.”
One of the people the team met was Tracey, a roofer
who professed faith in Christ, yet he was struggling with smoking
marijuana.
“He was trying to get his life together,” Kellar
said. “We talked to him, gave him a tract and prayed for him. His
church was destroyed, so he was looking for a place to go. We told him
that Grace was open and that there were good people to talk to him and
care for him.”
Ivy Shelton is pastor of Sherwood Baptist in Odessa, Texas.
“This is an opportunity for our church to get a
practical view of domestic missions,” Shelton said. “It is an
opportunity for people to see, in a very practical way, how to serve
others and to see what the gospel means. You can tell people about the
gospel all day long, but this is a way to put hands and feet to it.”
The team, representing 24 Texas churches from the
Permian Basin and Lamesa Baptist associations, along with the Basin
Baptist Network, gave a boost to the New Orleans church because the
storm displaced all five of the church’s deacons and about 75 percent
of the congregation, said Bill Rogers, Grace’s pastor for 29 years.
His father-in-law, Leslie Scharfenstein, was the
pastor before him for 36 years. During these two pastorates, the
Bywater neighborhood, so-named in the 1940s because of its proximity to
the Mississippi River and Industrial Canal, has experienced many
changes.
Before Hurricane Betsy destroyed the community in
1965, blue-collar Caucasians inhabited the area. After the storm, a
majority of the white community moved to St. Bernard parish and the
homes became subsidized rental property for a poorer black community.
Pre-Katrina, about 70 people gathered at Grace
Baptist for Sunday worship, with the majority of the families coming
from St. Bernard parish and eastern New Orleans. Since the storm, the
church averages 45 in worship; about 15 are new since Katrina.
Bywater became a historic district in the mid-1990s and interest rekindled in home-ownership, which brought another transition.
A Bohemian culture, known for attracting disenchanted people wanting to
live non-traditional lifestyles, became a growing segment of the
community; this created a gumbo mix with one of the lowest economic
segments of New Orleans.
The Bywater area, now known for its artistic and
homosexual lifestyles, also is known for its underperforming
schools, drug culture and multiple murders.
Today, nearly seven months after Katrina, the
schools remain closed with very little hope of reopening, but murders
no longer dominate the news. According to Rogers, the neighborhood’s
demographics before the storm revealed only 6 percent were children and
youth. Associate pastor Charlie Dale said that since the storm he is
seeing more families moving into the immediate neighborhood with young
children.
Both pastors, with the support of the team from
Texas and elsewhere, said they have a renewed sense of economic and
spiritual hope for their community.
“This area, since most of it did not flood, is
called the ‘Sliver on the River,’” Rogers said. “This is going to be a
land of opportunity.”
While the Texans were painting, hanging Sheetrock,
and wiring new air-conditioning units, the mail arrived with more
encouragement to Rogers, in the form of a $1,500 check for him from a
church in Arkansas.
The pastor is a retired parole officer but his
retirement checks have not arrived since the first of the year.
That’s not stopping him from continuing his
education. Rogers at 76 anticipates graduating with a Doctor of
Ministry degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in January
2007.
“The work that the team has accomplished this week
has done something for Charlie and me,” Rogers said. “It has made us
realize that people care about us. It is my firm conviction that we are
going to have thousands of people praying for us because the workers
will know and remember Grace Baptist Church.”