Seventy-five people gathered in bright sunshine on a recent Sunday outside Reaping the Harvest Full Gospel Baptist Church in New Orleans. They applauded as pastor Troy Lawrence, resplendent in a three-piece gray pinstriped suit, cut a red ribbon and, for the first time since Hurricane Katrina, led his flock into the completely refurbished building, singing We've Come This Far by Faith.
Three days earlier, pastor Joel Tyler sat at a folding metal table inside Second Rose of Sharon Baptist Church. The little red brick building is a raw, skeletal hulk: bare concrete floor, no power, no water, no furniture. Two men sat across from him, flipping through their Bibles as Tyler led a congregation of two through a weekday Bible study.
“I don't care if only one shows up,” Tyler said later. “We're coming back.”
And so it goes across the city's devastated Lower 9th Ward, where a handful of churches, with or without outside help, are staggering to their feet, struggling to become rallying points for families hoping to return and rebuild their lives.
Before Katrina, the neighborhood of 7,000 was home to an estimated 46 churches, according to Bill Day, a church demographer at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Now there are about six.
Most of those, it appears, lie on higher ground where the elevation did not spare them from the floodwaters, but they drained sooner. Pastors were able to reach them while the lower-lying blocks remained closed for weeks.
Across the Lower 9th Ward, pastors and church members hope their small communities will give displaced residents another reason to return. They hope to offer day care and other resources to the community, provide places for civic meetings–and at the most basic level, provide hope and encouragement to hundreds of people toiling through the most miserable time of their lives.
“The church is the heartbeat of the community,” said pastor Douglas Haywood of New Israel Baptist Church. “One of the reasons people will come back is because of the church. When I had my first service, the average person coming said they weren't coming back. But after the service, everyone was saying they're coming back.
“I'd say 80 percent of the congregation tells me they're coming back because of the church.”
Coming back will be a struggle.
In every case, congregations are gathering only a fraction of their pre-Katrina numbers.
Many displaced members found each other by cell phone months ago. In Baton Rouge or Houston, remnant congregations gathered with displaced pastors and worshipped in rented hotels or, in Reaping the Harvest's case, a funeral home.
Some have been able to return to the Lower 9th and reopen their doors. They attract a mixture of old faces and new worshippers who belong to shuttered churches but who place themselves temporarily under the care of another pastor–“watch care,” in the language of the church.
A few, such as Reaping the Harvest and nearby St. Paul Church of God in Christ, are marvels of reconstruction: bright and cool, smelling of new carpet and paint, better than they were before the storm.
Reaping the Harvest collected $32,000 from World Vision, an evangelical relief effort, and another $20,000 from the Bush-Clinton Hurricane Relief Fund, and benefited from crucial volunteer labor, Lawrence said.
Meanwhile, the neighboring St. Paul Church of God in Christ was rebuilt in two weeks in September by God's Pit Crew, a team of 150 Christians based in Virginia who donated their construction skills and five tractor-trailer loads of building materials and furnishings, said Randy Johnson, one of the coordinators.
Some churches are old anchors, such as St. Maurice Catholic Church, where about 135 people gather for one Sunday Mass a week. “Ninety-five percent drive in from elsewhere around the city,” said St. Maurice's pastor, Joe Campion.
In a sense, all the churches are mission churches–starting anew, gathering new faces around a core of familiar families.
Campion is pastor of two neighboring churches, St. Maurice and St. David, also in the Lower 9th Ward; only St. Maurice is open. While the two churches used to draw about 800 for Sunday worship before the storm, St. Maurice draws about 135 now.
“We're right back to our humble beginnings in our earliest years,” he said. “My job now is to evangelize the people and assist in the restoration of the neighborhood.”
Inevitably, scars are everywhere.
Some are psychological. The service at Reaping the Harvest was dedicated to two women who drowned trying to escape a flooded attic. Close family members sat in the front row, occasionally dabbing tears.
Other scars are physical–nowhere more apparent than at Second Rose of Sharon, a shattered church struggling to continue deep in the desolation that is the Lower 9th.
When Tyler arrived for Thursday's Bible study, he carried two bags of ice for a cooler and two more folding metal chairs he had recently bought to add to the stock of 22 already in the church. “I try to pick up a few chairs whenever I can,” he said.
The church is a hollow shell, without fittings or furniture. Raw, unpainted carpentry provides a few steps up to the platform, but there is no pulpit. On Sundays, a generator outside provides electricity for a couple of fans, a guitar and a keyboard.
Beginning in January, he and his congregants worshipped in a borrowed church in Gretna, “but my members feel comfortable back here, so I'm trying to make them happy,” he said.
The congregation has gone from small to tiny: from 30 pre-Katrina to about 12 now.
“They need the word. They need a lot of attention. They need to be loved. They need to be appreciated,” Tyler said. “I just try to show them as much Christ as possible.”