Hundreds of volunteers swarmed over a wrecked church deep in New Orleans’ flood zone Dec. 3, hoping to start its healing and that of the desolate neighborhood beyond with a furious outpouring of free labor.
By some counts, nearly 1,000 volunteers from Louisiana to Los Angeles laid gloved, healing hands on Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, which drowned under nine feet of water from Hurricane Katrina. They went after the church’s ruined sanctuary and first floor with crowbars and power tools.
The workers were assembled by PRC Compassion, a network of evangelical churches and nonprofits based in Baton Rouge that sprang into existence after Katrina to funnel aid into the storm zone.
PRC Compassion’s roots are thickest in Louisiana, which is covered with independent Christian churches. But aid has flowed to the agency from groups far afield, including Focus on the Family, the potent evangelical educational and political organization in Colorado Springs, Colo. Help has also come from the St. Louis-based Living in the Word Ministry of evangelist Joyce Meyer, said Gene Mills, one of the founders of PRC Compassion.
Born spontaneously in response to sheer need, PRC Compassion is driven by relationships—by pastors networking rapidly with other pastors, then hurrying help to target areas, said Mills.
Its congregations are both black and white. On Dec. 3, they reached out to help Fred Luter, a popular minister who turned around a dying church in the mid-1980s and who works easily across racial and denominational lines.
Now revitalized into a powerhouse congregation, Luter's predominately African-American church had begun to stabilize and reclaim its neighborhood. Before Katrina, nearly 7,000 people worshipped there every weekend, Luter said.
PRC Compassion's strategy recognized that Luter's was a key church to target. Helping Luter now would permit his church to help others later, said Mills.
Religion News Service