NEW ORLEANS (BP)–Joe McKeever sat down to write a letter to all the Southern Baptist churches in New Orleans during the last week of October.
“Omitting the churches that were out of business due to the storm, I ended up with only 35 letters,” McKeever, director of missions for the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans, recounted. “Pre-K, we would have sent out 75.”
“The storm” and “K,” of course, refer to Hurricane Katrina.
McKeever, in one of the columns he has distributed via the Internet since the Aug. 29 hurricane, made note Oct. 30 of the pressures facing pastors who remain in the New Orleans area.
“Even the pastors whose churches had no damage have the pressures of a) a smaller congregation, since they lost members to the evacuation, people who have taken jobs or retired in other cities and are not returning; b) members who suffered loss of their homes and/or jobs; c) clogged streets due to the heavy traffic of construction and DR [disaster relief] trucks; d) your favorite stores being closed; e)hosting out of town church groups coming to work in the city, and f) seeing every time you drive two miles from your home devastation which it will take years to erase….
“And one more big pain-giver: you have pastor friends who lost everything — homes, church buildings, and even their congregations,” McKeever wrote.
“How do you lose a congregation? The members lost their homes and jobs and schools, and find little reason to return to this city. Even those who plan to return and rebuild will not be permanent residents here for a long time to come.”
Yet, amid New Orleans’ tragedy, ministers are seeing hope.
McKeever recounted, for example, that Greg Hand, pastor of the Vieux Carre Baptist Church on Dauphine Street, one block over from Bourbon Street, had been invited to a poetry reading by the owner of a bar down the street.
“Poetry in a bar is not my thing,” Hand told McKeever. “The owner introduced me to the 20 customers and said if anyone had a problem, I was a good one to talk with. A lady came over and said she needs help in cleaning out her place, so we have a team that’s going over to help her. This may be a breakthrough.”
Such breakthroughs, McKeever wrote, will be more akin to an act of God than any hurricane.
“The act of God is all the ministry and compassion and hospitality and love the people are receiving wherever they landed [across the United States],” McKeever wrote. “Insurance companies to the contrary, storms and floods and earthquakes are acts of nature, not of God. Wherever you see people loving the unlovely, helping the helpless, blessing the cursed, there are acts of God.”
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Various reflections by Joe McKeever on Hurricane Katrina are on the Web at www.joemckeever.com.
