Witness to Hope

Witness to hope

New Orleans Presbyterians are coming to terms with the "new reality" by making their city a laboratory for creative ministryBy Robyn Leary

Work in progress: St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church youth group taking a break from cleaning out a flooded home. Photo by Lawton FabacherAlan Cutter knows something about stressful situations, having served in the Navy during the Vietnam conflict. He left a pastorate in Duluth, Minn., to accept a call to be general presbyter of South Louisiana Presbytery in July 2006, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina inundated the presbytery’s largest city. Cutter gets excited when he describes his concept of New Orleans as a “laboratory” for new ministry.
“We’re a place looking for new ideas, and we’re open to testing them out,” he says. The challenge now, as he sees it, is to help people move from being survivors to being witnesses.
“A witness is someone who can reflect back upon what happened to them and make a connection to God’s story. When survivors do that,” he explains, “they’re able to move forward. Instead of living in desperation, as many of the survivors of Katrina do, they can live in hope. They come to terms with the new reality around them.”
When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coasts in August 2005, it destroyed or severely damaged the social fabric of large and vital communities. As a result it has profoundly affected the ministries of Presbyterian pastors and congregations.
“Ministry can’t be done the way it’s always been done — it’s not going to be effective in a post-Katrina world,” says Lisa Easterling, chair of South Louisiana Presbytery’s Committee on Ministry.
In post-Katrina New Orleans exciting new visions for “doing church” are beginning to emerge. Called to ministry that matters. Prior to the hurricane there were 19 Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) congregations in the greater New Orleans area. One church has since dissolved because so many of its members did not return to the city. The nine remaining members of another church joined a neighboring Baptist congregation. Others are continuing with fewer than half the members they had before the storm. Eight pastors have left their congregations.
Reborn for a new mission: the newly renovated sanctuary of Lakeview Presbyterian Church. Church secretary Amelie Welman says the large hanging cross is one of the few things that “survived the storm and has become a symbol of what we were before.”
Under these circumstances, taking a church job in New Orleans might seem like a daunting prospect. So Don Frampton, pastor of St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church, was gratified last year by the number of applications the church received for an assistant pastor’s post on the staff. “Not only did it surprise us, it humbled us; told us we were not alone,” he says. “What it indicates is a keen interest on the part of many ministerial candidates for putting themselves into a situation where mission is foremost.”
Kelly Hostetler, who accepted a call to the position last June, says, “I was looking for a position first and a location second. But I did want to go some place where there was going to be some real meaning, where I was going to be doing something that really mattered.”
Others also are hearing the call. “Not in the sense of Paul on the road to Damascus, where there’s a sudden blinding light,” says Claire Vonk Brooks, who became pastor at the Chinese Presbyterian Church in Kenner, La., last year. The congregation had been torn apart as members left to seek employment after Katrina. “People who went to Houston found better jobs, or the jobs our people had in New Orleans before the storm no longer exist.”
Still, Brooks accepted the challenge. She defines God’s call as “what you do when it seems impossible to do anything else.”
Difficult decisions
For many New Orleans residents, deciding whether to return to the city or stay away has been an agonizing choice. Nina Bryant-Sanyika served as pastor of Berean Presbyterian Church in New Orleans before Katrina. It is the oldest African-American Presbyterian Church in Louisiana, established in the 1800s. Like most in her congregation, Bryant-Sanyika fled to Houston when the hurricane hit. For 12 months she commuted back to New Orleans every Sunday to preach.
“Most of the time I’d leave Houston on Friday and fly out of New Orleans on Sunday,” she says. “I did it for a year. Finally, it was too much [strain] on my body and on my savings account.” Like many other pastors evacuated from New Orleans, Bryant-Sanyika has settled and found work elsewhere, in her case as a hospital chaplain in Houston. “We still know people who are talking about leaving,” says Easterling, who is also pastor of First Union Presbyterian Church in Luling, La. “We’ve had people leave, we’ve had people come back. When you don’t know if the levees will hold or what’s in store this hurricane season, it can go either way. People are still unsettled.”
In one case, flooding left a church submerged under six feet of water for three weeks. “The congregation was dispersed, so the minister just never came back,” Easterling says. Another pastor left out of concern for his children’s education. “When you don’t have schools and you have small children, you have to find ways to school them.” Money is another factor pastors must weigh, adds Easterling. Can they afford to serve congregations that have lost so many members they cannot offer the same salaries they did before the storm? “You can’t come to churches that can’t pay you a living wage.”
Jean Marie Peacock, former associate pastor of Lakeview Presbyterian Church, returned one month after the storm to find her congregation dispersed and the sanctuary an unusable mess. “The building was heavily damaged, flooded with seven feet of water for about three weeks until the water was drained from the city,” she says. Today the church is still without a landline telephone.
“We’ve been in dramatic transition since Katrina,” says Peacock, who was vice moderator of the 2004 General Assembly. “Initially, the response people had was one of just trying to get some things in order — a place to live, children situated in school. And then you move on.”
But more than two years later, she observes, “there’s a growing fatigue with the way things are, and the continuing stress and struggle of living in New Orleans post-Katrina. There are frustrations about the response of the federal government and the slowness of assistance coming in.”
A changing mission
But the stress New Orleans Presbyterians are experiencing has not dampened their sense of mission. “There is also the strong desire to continue the work of Christ in the midst of this [devastation],” Peacock says. “So we are now faced with developing and creating new ministries that you might never have expected you’d be called to do as a congregation before, where suddenly you are hosting volunteers from various parts of the country and organizing efforts to help people rebuild their homes. All of this has forced our ministry to change.”
In 2006 Peacock became associate presbyter pro-tem in charge of congregational development and disaster recovery. Her work focuses on helping people get their homes rebuilt, with or without government assistance.

Rebuilding Hope:

St. Charles Avenue members host volunteers who come to help rebuild. Photo by Lawton FabacherSt. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church, the largest congregation in South Louisiana Presbytery, has started a rebuilding program called “RHINO” — “Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans.” Members of the congregation founded the group while they were evacuated in Houston. Each week a building adjacent to the sanctuary houses 30 volunteers who come to New Orleans to help rebuild. Last August RHINO partnered with Habitat for Humanity to work on new construction.
“Our goal is to rebuild an entire block,” says Sarah Edgcombe, coordinator of the project. “That’s 14 homes in the Hollygrove neighborhood in uptown New Orleans.”
“I believe the church has a major role to play in helping to shape a new life in the community,” Peacock says. The new community she and other church leaders envision is “one where all people are cared for — poor and rich alike, black and white. Where old barriers are broken down and the welfare of all is uplifted.” Robyn Leary is a New York City-based freelance writer/producer.






Beyond business as usual
A church secretary finds “there’s no real job description here now”
Continuing the work of Christ: Lakeview members Bill Neitzer, left, and Frank Heuer unloading boxes of books donated to the church library after Hurricane Katrina Only a few residents have returned to New Orleans’ Lakeview neighborhood since Hurricane Katrina submerged it under 6–8 feet of water. One of them is Amelie Welman, the secretary at Lakeview Presbyterian Church. Actually Welman was not even living in hard-hit Lakeview before Katrina, but she moved there to help her church.
“I felt God was calling me to come back and to at least try to be part of putting the pieces back together,” she says. “There’s no real job description here now — you just do what has to be done when it has to be done.”
The first task for Welman and Lakeview’s pastor, Neale Miller, was locating church members. “We set up phone banks in the presbytery office in Baton Rouge and just tried to find out where everyone was,” Miller says.
Welman’s procrastination in returning the church’s laptop computer turned out to be a blessing. “I was able to start putting information on our Web site and checking our email.” She was able to have the church’s phone number rolled over to her cell phone, so “people who’d just kept calling the church for weeks and weeks were finally able to get through.”
Worship and church school have resumed at Lakeview amidst continued rebuilding. A rededication service for the church is scheduled for January 27. The church hosts community meals — mostly outdoor cookouts — that serve as a magnet for those who have returned. The church’s day school reopened in fall 2007 but is using the facilities of a neighboring Methodist church while its own building is repaired.
Church members are pressing government officials to enact policies and appropriations that will hasten the recovery of their neighborhood.
Before the storm members of the congregation had been canvassing the Lakeview neighborhood, “looking for new ways to serve the community,” says elder Robert Johnson. “Now it’s an even higher priority.”
Welman says she doesn’t blame anyone who has chosen not to return to New Orleans. “It’s not normal living here, and we Americans like normal living,” she says.
“It’s easy to become very insular — do your thing Sunday to Sunday — business as usual,” Miller says. “Well, that’s by the board. We have to rethink everything we’re doing, and it’s made me and our session much more aware of the world beyond our doors.”
—Jerry L. Van Marter, Presbyterian News Service
How you can help Hurricane recoveryUntil churches along the Gulf coast begin growing again and becoming financially secure, Presbyterians in other parts of the country can help:
Larger-membership churches can become partners with smaller-membership churches along the Gulf, providing volunteers for rebuilding, prayer support and financial assistance.
Retired pastors with other sources of income and the ability to relocate for a few years can provide leadership for smaller churches while they rebuild their membership and financial resources.
For more information about how to help in the New Orleans area, contact Deborah Corrao at Project Homecoming, a rebuilding initiative of the Presbytery of South Louisiana, 3700 Gentilly Blvd., New Orleans, LA 70122; (504) 942-0444.
To learn about, volunteer for and support rebuilding efforts along the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts, visit the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance Web site, or call PresbyTel at 800-872-3283.