Cover Story for September 22, 2005
By Jim White
On Tuesday, a week after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, Governor Mark Warner's office called Virginia Baptists for help. His call initiated a flurry of preparation aimed at meeting the Governor's deadline: By Monday, Sept. 12, we needed to be ready to receive 500 persons displaced by the storm.
Even before the Governor's call, John Upton, executive director of the Baptist General Association of Virginia, had considered the possibility of providing temporary housing at Virginia Baptist camps and conference centers. When the call came, Upton already knew who he would ask to organize the effort: Valerie Carter, associate pastor for glocal missions of the Bon Air Baptist Church in Richmond.
Carter, whose high-energy can-do attitude made her an ideal choice, had been jointly employed by the Virginia Baptist Mission Board and Woman's Missionary Union of Virginia before joining the Bon Air staff in July of 2003. After gaining the hearty approval of Bon Air's senior pastor, Travis Collins, she readily agreed to serve.
Carter slept only a handful of hours over the next five days as she and her team brain-stormed the logistical requirements for meeting the needs of 500 guests (she insists that they be called guests) at Eagle Eyrie, Virginia Baptists' conference center in Lynchburg. Rod Miller, director of the conference center, enthusiastically participated in the preparation.
“From the very beginning we focused on 2 major strands of preparation,” Carter explains. “The first was discovering what we had to do at Eagle Eyrie to receive 500 guests.” This included walking themselves through the entire process from a guest's point of view. In addition to the obvious needs of places to sleep and food to eat, the preparation team considered the emotional and spiritual needs of guests as well.
The team invented volunteer positions based on the needs of the guests, developed job descriptions based on those positions and prepared to provide job training based on the descriptions. Intake forms were designed from scratch as was a computer matching and tracking program which will help match the guests to specific kinds of churches to minimize the adjustments they will have to make. Guests may ask to be placed in a specific setting, for example, and every effort will be made to accommodate their requests. The program will also track persons as they progress to homes and churches and beyond as they move toward self-sufficiency.
Miller says, “I can't really say how much time the Eagle Eyrie staff had given to this crisis, but it has to be in the hundreds of man-hours. I can tell you one thing, we've moved a lot of furniture!”
In addition to moving furniture, a receptionist was added to the office staff to handle the number of calls that have come in. Miller continued, “We had to set up a whole lot of classrooms for preschoolers and children. The plan was to provide a safe and stress free environment for them during their stay here and even the possibility that school classes would be held here through the Bedford County School System.” Carter had high praise for the way the Bedford school system has responded to this need. “They have just been awesome!”
Other preparations were made at Eagle Eyrie. Hickory Hill Lodge, once an infirmary, has been converted back into a clinic ready to dispense basic medical care. A medical team is standing by. In the Voight Conference Center a computer lab has been set up so guests will have the ability to make contact with family members on the internet.
The second strand of preparation involved enlisting churches and training volunteers to receive guests and to provide for their total needs. The backbone of this strand had been developed several years earlier in a plan called “One Church, One Family,” a plan for helping churches adopt and nurture a homeless family. The plan lists the steps necessary for a family to move from homelessness to self-sufficiency.
By the Governor's Monday morning deadline, everything was in place. Virginia Baptists were ready to receive 500 displaced persons as our guests. “During these days of preparation I know I acted like a Marine Corps colonel,” Carter laughs. “I'm sure I wasn't fun to be around, but the clock was ticking. Now, I'm just in regular management mode.”
Carter sees parallels between the efforts of her team and the military. Chief among them is the admonition to “hurry up and wait!” The team, made up of a mix of people from the Mission Board, church staff members and lay persons, had mastered the “hurry up” but is now finding the “waiting” equally difficult. “At first I thought that if we were not called upon to actually receive people we would have wasted all this time, money and effort” Carter confides. “But then I had a talk with Craig Wilson who said something so profound I wrote it down. He said ‘The gospel demands that we be ready and willing to serve whether we are ever called on or not.”
But the team is not just waiting idly. They are busily training people and churches. As this issue of the Religious Herald goes to press, 160 persons from 54 churches have been trained with more sessions scheduled this week. Even more significantly, 102 families could be placed in homes offered by churches or with Virginia Baptist families immediately. In addition, help has come from other Virginia Baptist partners. Virginia Baptist Homes have offered to temporarily house some of the elderly. Fork Union, having offered to take students and being aware that each passing day makes it more difficult for a new student to catch up, put wheels to its prayers and sent a van to Picayune, Miss., to bring back as many as 10 students. “One real surprise in all this” states Penny Jenkins, volunteer housing coordinator from Southampton Baptist Church of Richmond, “is the number of churches from other denominations who have called asking to come to the training. They heard what we were doing or saw it on the website and wanted to be involved. Naturally, we are telling them to come on!”
With confidence that she and her team did all that could be expected of them, Carter muses, “We are reservists in the army of the Lord. We have been activated to serve in different capacities, called away temporarily from our daily ministries.”
One question remains to be answered. Now that our eyes have been opened and our hearts have been touched by the needs of displaced persons, will Virginia Baptists be as ready to extend the same level of help to those who live within the Commonwealth? Every indication is that having seen the need, Virginia Baptists will respond with the love of Christ. A full list of volunteer positions may be obtained on the Virginia Baptist Mission Board's website at vbmb.org.
Jim White is editor of the Religious Herald.