NEW ORLEANS (ABP) — What do you do when you run a homeless shelter and the city has evacuated all the homeless? That's the situation facing Tobey Pitman, director of the Brantley Mission Center in New Orleans.
As the city rebuilds from Hurricane Katrina, Pitman is among the many local residents who must adjust to a new sense of normal.
“We're retooling our ministry,” said Pitman, 50. “We've gotten out of the homeless business temporarily because there are no homeless.”
Instead, the Brantley Center reopened this week as a 250-bed dorm for Baptist volunteers coming from throughout the country to rebuild churches and homes. “There's at least a year's work to be done,” he said. “We just hope the interest is not lost in coming to New Orleans.”
Pitman and the Brantley Center, just a block away from New Orleans' famous French Quarter, have generated a lot of interest in the past two months.
Just weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, Pitman and his wife, Cathy, were profiled in Missions Mosaic, the missions magazine of Woman's Missionary Union. As a result, church WMU leaders throughout the country have prayed for and checked in on the Pitmans and the Brantley Center.
Pitman finds inspiration from the article's timing, noting that Mosaic works several months in advance on its feature articles. “The storm did not take the Lord by surprise at all,” he said. “He knew we'd need all kinds of prayer support this time of year.”
Pitman, like others, hardly suspected what was to come when he evacuated Sunday, Aug. 27. “Cathy and I have lived here 28 years, and we have never before evacuated,” noted Pitman, who is a national missionary for the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board.
The Brantley Center's staff closed the shelter on Sunday and told clients that the Superdome would be opened as a shelter of last resort.
The Pitmans traveled to the northern part of the state, expecting to be away for “a long weekend,” he recalled. Instead, they were away for 10 days.
Left behind in New Orleans were eight Brantley Center employees. With nowhere else to go, they rode out the storm in the center, a six-story brick building that sits on the corner of Magazine and Common.
The next day they called Pitman from a third-floor pay phone to report they were OK but concerned about rising flood waters.
Pitman called Ginger Smith, a fellow missionary and former Brantley Center employee who now directs a mission center in Houston. With evacuation buses heading from New Orleans to Houston, Pitman asked Smith if she had somewhere his eight workers could stay.
“That's funny,” she replied. “I've got a dorm with eight beds in it.” Many of her employees had left Houston when Hurricane Rita appeared headed for that city, Smith explained, but she had hoped to keep the center open if she could find some help. “You're sending me eight guys who know how to work in this setting.”
When the Pitmans returned home to Pearl River — across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans — they found their house spared but several trees down.
Their son Andrew and his wife were not as fortunate. The newlyweds' new home was flooded by the storm surge. Practically everything in it was destroyed. Today they still live with his mom and dad, hoping to have their home renovated by Christmas.
Last month, four weeks after the storm, Pitman returned to the center for only the second time at the request of a reporter who wanted to see the central business district. “The first time we came back, it was to look for bodies,” he noted grimly.
While winds blew out many windows in the skyscrapers, older buildings like the center fared well in the central business district. Because it is in a region with a little higher elevation, floodwaters didn't enter the Brantley Center.
The building had only three physical signs that Katrina was there: The loss of power spoiled meat and other food in the walk-in refrigerator and freezer; five window panes broke; and a patch of flooring buckled near a window where water blew in.
“Not too bad, huh?” Pitman asked while looking around. “It's a testimony, really, to the old style, Old World construction.
The business district's design — with buildings standing side-by-side with no space between external walls — “makes for great strength,” he added. “Each one supports the other,” he said. “Hmm, wonder if there's some theological implication there?”
Opened in 1927, the shelter was birthed through the vision of local Baptists who sought to serve homeless men who had traveled to New Orleans after the Depression in search of jobs.
Originally housed in a rented gambling hall, the center later relocated to a hotel in the French Quarter before it moved again to its current location in 1962. In the 1940s, it was named for Clovis Brantley, a local pastor and leader of the agency that became the North American Mission Board, who became known as the “father of urban ministries.”
These days, Pitman is working on urban ministries with the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans. Together they are planning ministries for a host of new mobile home parks, recently set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency throughout the city.
“Katrina's given us a wonderful opportunity to provide evangelistic outreach as well as other kinds of social support to the residents of these parks,” he said.
Pitman said he envisions chaplaincy programs and other counseling options for park residents. “Ultimately we'd like to have Bible studies or church services as well as one-on-one evangelism opportunities.”
As NAMB's national missionary for homelessness, Pitman challenges Christians to recognize that homelessness is neither a new concept nor something to ignore. “The Bible is full of homelessness,” he said. “The first homeless people were Adam and Eve.
“God's chosen people were homeless. Many of the prophets were homeless. They wandered from place to place. The deepest theological point of that is that all of us [Christians] are homeless,” he said. “We're longing for our eternal home.”