Robert Marus/ABP
Joe McKeever, executive director of the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans, addresses pastors and other church leaders from the association during their monthly support meeting Aug. 2. McKeever has been holding such meetings as a way to minister to stressed-out pastors since the storm devastated the area nearly a year ago.
NEW ORLEANS (ABP) — New Orleans has always been a place of vibrant life. But nowadays the liveliest things in vast swaths of the city seem to be the weeds exploding from once-manicured medians, lawns and parks.
And the rats, mosquitoes, mold and nutria — those are giant rodents that thrive in the swampy lands of Louisiana — are the only other creatures swarming neighborhoods that, nearly a year after Hurricane Katrina, are still largely devoid of human beings.
Despite that — and the continuing disappointments stemming from human mismanagement of a continuing disaster — Joe McKeever sees hope in the devastated Crescent City.
“We have a saying: This is a good time to be Baptist in New Orleans,” said McKeever, executive director of the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans, in a recent interview in his office on the city's lakefront. The area — near the University of New Orleans — was one of the few in the city not to suffer devastating flooding in Katrina's wake.
The monstrous storm — by far the most expensive in American history, and the nation's deadliest in a century — made landfall Aug. 29 of last year. It caused breaches in the levee system that was designed to protect the low-slung city from the Mississippi River on its south side and Lake Ponchartrain on its north side. The resulting floods ended up deluging approximately 80 percent of the city and drowning more than 1,500 people.
Baptist disaster-relief teams that converged on the heavily Catholic area — legendarily difficult mission territory for Baptists and other evangelicals — were often the first religious presence many New Orleanians saw after Katrina.
“In fact…people would call into the radio stations during the storm and say, 'Well, my church is locked up tighter than a drum and we can't find the priest, but those [expletive] Baptists were all over the place!'” McKeever said.
The Baptist presence has continued in New Orleans' long-term recovery efforts, and Katrina's aftermath has brought both ruin and rebirth to many area churches. Nonetheless, it continues to be a tough row to hoe for McKeever and the congregations and city he serves.
“I'm not really [an associational] director of missions — I'm a pastor,” he said. McKeever had barely been on the job a year when the hurricane struck. He had previously been a successful pastor at a large suburban New Orleans church, and was puzzled as to why God would call him to the position.
“I'm still not sure why he wanted me to be the director of missions. Then Katrina hit, and now we know,” he said, “because the Lord wanted a pastor in this slot, because the churches and the pastors needed a pastor. They did not need a great administrator. They did not need a mechanic. They needed a pastor.”
A visit to the August monthly meeting for the association's pastors provides a clearer picture of why so many ministers needed ministering in the hurricane's wake.
Many of them had to evacuate. Jose Mathews, founder and pastor of Discipleship Baptist Church in the heavily flooded New Orleans East area, said his church and parsonage took on more than six feet of water.
“Most of my congregation were renters, and they're spread abroad, and they've vowed not to come back,” he said.
He evacuated to Baton Rouge and pondered his future — and his congregation's. In the meantime, tragedy after tragedy in his life followed the initial onslaught of the hurricane. On Dec. 20, he had a stroke. On Dec. 28, his mother passed away. And then, he said, “My son was murdered in Houston, Texas, on March 24 this year.”
Mathews, a New Orleans native and former police officer in the city, said his mother's death and his congregation's dissolution cut his last ties to the area. He decided to stay in Baton Rouge, and was called as interim pastor of a church in nearby Baker, La.
The church — a majority Anglo congregation, although Mathews is African-American — has recently called him as its permanent pastor. He came to the meeting of his former colleagues in New Orleans to bid them farewell.
“It's been hard, but it's been interesting, to see the hand of God in all this destruction,” he said. “I try to get people to see that everything may be destroyed and it looks very discombobulated right now, but God's hand is still in the midst of it…. Just hold onto God's unchanging hand.”
He continued: “There's one thing we can depend on in life, and that's change.”
That was definitely the case for Jerry Garvey, pastor of One Faith Baptist Church in New Orleans. His devastated church's congregation is still meeting — but they're doing it in Texas.
“What I've been doing for the last 11 months for the most part has been ministering to a congregation that went with us to the Houston area,” he said. “We're meeting from house to house still.”
Like many Katrina evacuees from flooded areas of New Orleans, Garvey and his congregants still have not been able to return to their homes. Nonetheless, he said he drives back once a week to maintain a connection to the city, in the hopes that he and his people may one day be able to return.
“It's my understanding…that the Lord wants me here, and that's why I make that trip back and forth,” he said in an interview following the Aug. 2 pastors' meeting. “Many of us in this area find that New Orleans is in our DNA. But more than just what's in our DNA, I have a love and a great concern for the people of God here…. I do believe that this is where God wants me at.”
Where God wants Jerry Garvey, however, can be a depressing place. In the open-mic time at the pastors' meeting, he expressed concern over a recent crime wave that included several murders in the city's devastated Treme and Central City neighborhoods.
Although, according to official estimates, less than half of New Orleans' pre-Katrina population of 450,000 has returned home, its per-capita murder rate is on pace to exceed pre-Katrina figures — perhaps making it the nation's deadliest city.
Many of the murders have taken place in the vast stretches of New Orleans where only a small percentage of the former residents have returned. In some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods, 25 percent or fewer of the homes have been rehabilitated and occupied.
In hard-hit neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward, Broadmoor and Gentilly, many residents have not even been able to gut their houses of the moldy plaster and furnishings left behind after the flood waters receded.
They face a city-imposed Aug. 29 deadline — one year after the hurricane — for doing so or being bulldozed as safety hazards. But the date is controversial. Even many middle-class homeowners have had to rely on church and other volunteer groups to gut and rehabilitate their houses, since flood insurance has often been insufficient to cover repairs and contractors are in exceedingly high demand.
But McKeever said that, despite all that, there are signs of Kingdom-building going on in the city.
When he first came on the job as executive director of the association in 2004, “I discovered … that our churches are so isolated that we're not a team here. It's every man for himself,” he said. “I said I don't frankly know what God's going to do to reverse this. Then God sent a hurricane along and shut the city down and sent all the pastors home.”
According to McKeever, the association went from approximately 140 member churches before the storm to 35 operating a few weeks after Katrina. Now, he said, the figure of operating churches is back up to about 80. But many of the former congregations will likely not rebound.
“Every one of the churches has gone through, is going through, some sort of radical change,” he said.
Occasionally that change is positive.
Jefferey Friend, pastor of Hopeview Baptist Church in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, said his church building took on 13 feet of water and industrial waste from a nearby Mobil Oil facility. His congregation — like so many in the others, largely gone — decided to combine with that of Suburban Baptist Church in nearby New Orleans East. Friend became co-pastor along with Suburban's pastor, Jeff Box, and both congregations meet together at Suburban's facility.
Friend's church is historically black, Box's church historically white.
“Rather than me trying to get an African-American church to go, and him to get an Anglo church to go, whichever way the church goes, to God be the glory,” Friend said. “Before the storm, it was all chiefs looking out for individual entities; now it's about Kingdom building rather than building our own individual kingdom. There's no need to have three churches in the same community when you barely have enough for one building.”
There are other signs of hope. A Spanish-speaking church in New Orleans' western suburbs has started a Portuguese-speaking congregation for the hundreds of Brazilian migrant workers who have come to the city to do construction work. A tiny Baptist mission on heavily Catholic Delacroix Island, southeast of New Orleans, has exploded in growth following the storm — despite the fact that its building was wiped off the map and the church has been meeting outdoors in stifling weather.
But there's still plenty of trepidation in New Orleans. “The first thing that concerns us is that we better not have another hurricane in the next year or so. If we do and it's a major one, this will be a ghost town,” McKeever said.
At the end of the pastors' meeting, McKeever warned the 30 or so ministers and other church leaders present about Tropical Storm Chris, which was then in the central Atlantic and forecast to head into the Gulf of Mexico, again threatening New Orleans.
“Make sure you know where your people are and how to contact them if they are evacuated,” he told the pastors. “Get your records in order.”
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