The Power of the Body United

By Keri Wyatt Kent

In a crowded church basement, the rich, spicy smell of gumbo is thick, like the humidity outside. Tired folks sniff the air, wondering. After a week or two of sleeping on cots or the floor, eating whatever was dished up at the soup kitchen, and feeling lost and frustrated, tonight’s dinner smells like heaven. It smells like home.

In the upstairs kitchen, a diverse group of volunteers prepare an authentic Cajun meal for about 200 displaced New Orleans residents taking shelter after Hurricane Katrina at Central United Methodist Church (centralunitedmethodistchurch.org) in Meridian, Miss. The cooks hail not only from Central, but also from St. Paul UMC (lulm.org), located just a few blocks away. In fact, the dinner is the idea of a St. Paul member who knows that a home-cooked meal of familiar food—from jambalaya to dirty rice—is one way local churches can show the love of Christ to those who need it most.

When hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped through the South in late August and mid-September, respectively, they decimated entire towns, sweeping away houses, uprooting trees, peeling off roofs and flooding neighborhoods.

From across the country, churches like Central and St. Paul, and Christian relief organizations responded, providing food, shelter and kindness to victims. And in that process, some other things were destroyed and knocked down on the Gulf Coast: the walls between denominations, even different faiths, and the barriers between generations, races and classes of people. What was built in their place was a unity that surprised even those who helped make it happen. Surely, this too was an “act of God.“

The fourth most powerful hurricane recorded in U.S. history, Katrina killed more than 1,300 people, displaced more than 1.3 million residents and exceeded property damages of $125 billion—directly affecting an estimated 3 million people (about one-fourth of the combined populations of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama). No single church or even denomination could’ve met the staggering needs. Instead, churches and ministries worked together to quickly respond not with blame, but with a flood of compassion greater than the 30-foot storm swell recorded in Biloxi, Miss.

Together, churches of different denom-inations and cultures reached out—and are continuing to do so in a way none of them could have possibly done alone.

CONNECTING THE MERIDIAN

Meridian, Miss., a community of 40,000 which sits about three hours north of the Gulf Coast, took disastrous hits from both Katrina and Rita, storms that destroyed more than 30 of the city’s homes and damaged 2,500. But Meridian saw racial, social and denominational barriers come down, as well. Little did two local church leaders, Rev. Tim Thompson and Pastor Roger Shock, know that in the course of a day, their diverse congregations would be working side by side.

The day after Katrina hit, Thompson, pastor of two small black churches in Meridian, Haven Chapel and St. Paul UMC, learned that St. Paul’s building had been “devastated“ by Katrina, losing 85% of its roof.

Meanwhile, another church in town, Central UMC, had opened its doors as a Red Cross shelter on Aug. 28, the day before Katrina hit land. One of the largest buildings in Meridian, it’s four stories tall and covers a city block. Central’s 1,600 members are mostly white.

Under the charge of Shock, Central’s associate pastor of student ministries and missions, church volunteers set up 125 cots on Sunday, Aug. 29, the day Katrina hit. At midday, Shock left several church volunteers to look after just a few evacuees.

At 10 p.m., he got a call to hurry back to the church. “We were getting slammed,“ he says. “People were arriving 20, 40 at a time. We had them sleeping in classrooms, even the pastor’s office.“ By that night, 400 people from the surrounding areas had crowded into the church.

While Central had the space, the church needed help to care for the influx of evacuees. News of the situation soon spread through the city. “That’s when people just started showing up, offering to help,“ Shock says.

Despite the damage to their own buildings (including mold that grew quickly in the humid, 100-degree weather), members from Thompson’s two congregations ventured over to Central without being asked to provide hospitality to the mostly black evacuees.

“We felt that nobody could minister to the evacuees like their own people,“ says Thompson.

“Every day, people would just show up, asking, ‘What can I do?’ “ Shock remembers. “I’d tell them, ‘Grab a broom’ or ‘Hold that child.’ And they gladly did it.“

Thompson recalls a black woman from yet another area church who had “always wondered what kind of people worshipped at that big, rich church.“

The woman went in to help and began talking with people, working alongside them. “She told me she found out what kind of people worship there—people who want to serve Christ and put legs to their faith,“ Thompson says.

For Shock, one of the most moving experiences was a worship service led by Matilde Acosta, a volunteer leader in Central’s growing Hispanic ministry. The bilingual service brought together a diverse mixture of people—black, white, Hispanic, rich and poor.

It wasn’t just one big love fest, though. The grief and trauma people experienced, having lost everything, sometimes erupted as anger.

“Some came in very desperate, very angry,“ Shock says. “I did a lot of talking, trying to calm them down and empowering many lay volunteers to do the same thing. I had to break up more than one fight.“

Despite the occasional tension, those involved say serving in the aftermath bolstered their faith in God—and His Church.

“Through this experience, we’ve seen not only the sufficiency of God, but also His faithfulness,“ Thompson says. “We’ve watched God use the connectional system of the body of Christ. People came together across denominational lines, across socio-economic lines. Cultural and racial differences just faded to the background.“

BAPTISTS ON THE FRONTLINES

A few blocks away, less than a mile from Central, First Baptist Church (fbcmeridian.org) volunteers comforted more evacuees, feeding and sheltering displaced families. Two days after Katrina hit, the church welcomed Southern Baptist Disaster Relief (SBDR) volunteers from North Carolina—part of the North American Mission Board’s network of 30,000 trained volunteers nationwide.

“At one point, there were 15 semi’s in our parking lot,“ says Wayne Polk, First Baptist’s minister of missions and outreach. More than 700 SBDR volunteers served at the church over the course of five weeks.

Some SBDR trucks contained generator-powered convection ovens; others had showers, and washers and dryers. Trucks also hauled in food, ice, water and other supplies, enabling volunteers to serve 1,000 meals in an hour. Another truck housed a childcare center.

Over four weeks, the trucks supported evacuees and local church volunteers from a range of denominations—Mennonite, Catholic, Methodist—who showed up to help at Polk’s church. Moreover, the North Carolina SBDR team served meals to volunteers from other area shelters, as well. Denomination was not a factor.

Since the 1960s, the SBDR teams have rolled into affected areas, giving aid to disaster victims and supporting volunteers from numerous denominations, says Bob Reccord, president of the North American Mission Board (NAMB, namb.net). The NAMB—the third largest U.S. disaster relief organization—has a cooperative agreement with the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army to provide manpower and mobile kitchens during disasters, and is actually talking with those organizations to help them learn a better system of disaster response, Reccord says.

“We’re meeting the physical and emotional needs in order that the ultimate spiritual need might be addressed,“ he explains. “We minister to people from all kinds of backgrounds. Jesus did ministry that way.“

In Katrina’s aftermath, Polk saw how the body of Christ working together offered spiritual turning points for both victims and relief workers. He remembers the professional arborist from New Jersey who flew to Meridian to help remove fallen trees. Soon the man was working alongside the SBDR chainsaw crews.

After several days of serving with the crews, the worker, nicknamed “Squirrel,“ prayed to accept Christ and asked to be baptized, preferably in a river.

“We don’t have a river, so on his birthday, Squirrel got baptized in Bonita Lake,“ Polk says. “And when he came up out of the water, his new buddies were there with their chainsaws to give him a chainsaw salute!“

Says Polk: “He came down to help, but he got more than he bargained for.“

A PARKING LOT IN WAVELAND

Elsewhere in Mississippi, Waveland, a poor community bordering Mississippi and Alabama, sustained some of the greatest damage and garnered the least media attention. Yet, as the town of 7,000 discovered the raw power of a category 5 hurricane, residents also saw the restorative power of churches working together as one body.

After Katrina struck, volunteers quickly discovered that the only dry piece of land in the area was a Kmart parking lot—a space large enough, they estimated, to host a makeshift citywide barbecue. So the day after Katrina hit, a handful of volunteers from nearby Christian Life Church in Orange Beach, Ala. (christianlifeatthebeach.com), hauled in a grill and hotdogs to feed the homeless residents of Waveland.

Soon, the church partnered with other nearby churches and relief organ-izations, including Samaritan’s Purse (samaritanspurse.org), to buy and set up a meal tent where, at the peak of the effort, volunteers fed more than 6,000 people daily.

But the cooperation between the churches and ministries that came to Waveland’s aid wasn’t spontaneous; relationships had been building through the years. When Hurricane Ivan pummeled the Gulf Shores area in 2004, Waveland churches came to Alabama to help. This time, it was Christian Life’s turn to reciprocate.

The local churches are also con-nected through Somebody Cares (somebodycares.org), a grassroots network founded by Doug Stringer to bring together churches and ministries for Kingdom building. After Katrina hit, Stringer fielded phone calls from chuhes all over the Gulf Coast, in addition to Waveland.

Christian Life, part of the Willow Creek Association (WCA, willowcreek.com), also garnered help from churches outside the area. As leaders began to describe the deplorable conditions in Waveland to the more than 11,000 churches (from 90 denominations) in the WCA network, churches around the country joined the effort. Heartland Community Church in Rockford, Ill. (heartland.cc), organized clothing drives for Waveland’s homeless. And Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill. (willowcreek.org), got involved.

The church of 20,000 soon donated a gigantic air-conditioned tent for the same Kmart parking lot, this one for sleeping quarters. Willow Creek chose to invest in Waveland because of the complete and total devastation there, says Mae Cannon, director of development and transformation for Willow Creek’s Extension Ministries.

“We also chose to go there out of the relationship we had with Christian Life Church,“ Cannon says. “They knew the culture and the people, and they had the ability to assess the needs.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Church function as holistically as this,“ she adds. “Differences were set aside, and it was the most perfect manifestation of Matt. 25 I’ve ever seen.“

HEALING IN BATON ROUGE

“The storm did not discriminate,“ says Dino Rizzo, pastor of Healing Place Church (healingplacechurch.org) in Baton Rouge, La., located about 60 miles west of New Orleans. “It hit affluent areas and poor areas. And the response from the body of Christ has been the same: It knew no difference.“

Historically, Rizzo’s non-denominational church, with six different area campuses, has aided the low-income community. The church often helps the poor, typically serving 100,000 to 150,000 meals a year.

But in response to these disasters, Rizzo says, the whole body of Christ “took on a massive serving towel.“ “This has been the body of Christ’s finest hour,“ he asserts.

More than 450 Louisiana churches were already connected by PRC (Pastor’s Resource Council), a coalition of churches and ministries Rizzo and other pastors had formed several years ago to address social and economic challenges throughout the state.

So as the magnitude of the devastation became clearer, PRC pastors and ministry leaders began calling each other and as a result formed PRC Compassion (prccompassion.org), an official expression of PRC. They also received calls from national ministries and churches across the country as 80 to 90 Baton Rouge churches turned their buildings into shelters. “About 800 to 900 people stayed at Bethany World Prayer Center, which is a very large church, but we also had tiny local churches that would take 20 people,“ Rizzo says. “Some churches had members take people home with them. Others served people with special needs. We were all calling and talking to each other.“

PRC and a large informal network of hundreds of churches and ministries have donated funds and sent volunteers. Some of the money has been used to pay the salaries and operating budgets of those churches, so that when their members return, the pastors will be there to help. “It’s amazing how much gets accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit,“ Rizzo says. “We said, ‘You need to check your ego and your logo at the door.’ “

RECONCILIATION OF THE ASTRODOME

In the days following Katrina, perhaps most Americans will remember the scenes from Houston’s Astrodome stadium of some 30,000 evacuees crowding into the vacant building on the city’s south side. While reporters shot footage of mass food distribution and thousands of cots lined up like dominoes, only those serving on site knew the story behind the story.

It began with a meeting at Second Baptist Church in Houston (second.org); church leaders mobilized representatives from area churches and from other faiths to discuss how they would provide for the mounting numbers of evacuees.

Senior Pastor Ed Young asked the leaders to stand and give their names and religious affiliation, Worldnetdaily.com reported. “All those sermons and passions you’ve generated, now’s the time to put up or shut up for every faith or religious community here,“ he told the group. “Are you willing to coordinate with other people and other denominations? If you’re not, sit down.“

No one sat. Instead, the leaders came together to help provide food, clothing, shelter and prayer for the weary evacuees, thousands of who had spent the last few nights in New Orleans in the overcrowded, ill-equipped Super Dome. The cooperation was evident.

Marlon Hall, cultural architect of the Awakenings Movement church (awakeningsmovement.com) in Houston and a volunteer serving in the Astrodome, remembers day one when he saw a local Chinese pastor and his congregation members enthusiastically passing out water bottles to evacuees, most of who were blacks. He knew something was happening.

The relationship in many poorer communities between the Chinese and the blacks is “very bad,“ Hall says, especially in areas where Asian- Americans have bought convenience stores that were once run by blacks, acquiring a virtual grocery monopoly in some poor neighborhoods. “The residents in the community feel like the Asians are the enemy who sells them food,“ Hall says.

Given that dynamic, the exchange of greetings and hugs that day took on a whole new meaning, Hall says. “Those people received the water with love,“ he asserts. “I saw African-Americans and Asian-Americans sharing a sincere embrace.

“All the Christian faith communities were out there serving, passing out food and water—Chinese, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist. God did a tremendous work among the churches in this city. The relief effort brought about a synergy between the worship communities, and His Church shined through the clutter to reflect Christ. It was amazing!“

CHRIST IN THE CRISIS

On Sept. 9, a headline in The New York Times read: “A New Meaning for ‘Organized Religion’: It Helps the Needy Quickly.“ Eight days later, in a Nashville newspaper, The Tennessean, religion editor Ray Waddle wrote: “This month, the no-nonsense generosity of the religious community, along with the heroics of the Red Cross and other nonprofits, knitted a silver lining in a catastrophe. ... Organized religion is showing America what it means to believe.“ As the Church came together to be the hands and feet of Jesus in what has been called the country’s largest recorded natural disaster, and as denominational and racial walls came tumbling down, something else happened. The world saw Christ; many touched Him.

From a group of New Orleans evacuees who savored a home-cooked meal in a Mississippi church basement and the black evacuees who were served by their Chinese neighbors in Houston to a chainsaw worker from New Jersey and thousands of news reporters on assignment, people discovered a Church akin to the first-century Church that knew no denominational boundaries and cared for those in their midst. “People were crossing racial and denominational lines to give a tangible expression of Christ’s love,“ says Doug Stringer, whose Somebody Cares organization partnered with Christian radio station KSBJ-FM and local YMCA’s in Houston to collect $1 million worth of retail gift cards to distribute to Katrina victims. “They came together out of a common passion to help hurting people.

“All over the world, the body of Christ needs to let His light shine, so that people can come to know Jesus.“

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