Lakeview Presbyterian Church in New Orleans where eight feet of water flooded the building after the Hurricane Katrina-weakened levees gave way in August 2005.

NEW ORLEANS — It’s 9:30 on a warm Sunday morning in January and Lakeview Presbyterian Church is coming to life. In the cavernous sanctuary, old-timers quietly get caught up on the week’s news, congregational leaders check signals on upcoming events and a few kids giggle rambunctiously.

It’s a scene that could happen in any Presbyterian church anywhere, but that it’s happening here is nothing short of a miracle.

Lakeview sits in a formerly middle-class neighborhood one-half mile from where the 17th Street levee collapsed on that fateful August Monday in 2005, just after Hurricane Katrina swept through the Gulf Coast. In a matter of hours the entire Lakeview neighborhood, including Lakeview Church, was submerged in six to eight feet of water. The neighborhood remained underwater for three weeks.

The Rev. Neale Miller, who has been Lakeview's pastor for 10 years.

The deluge came with little warning, though everyone knew Katrina was packing a wallop. “Our immediate concern preceding the storm was very practical — will we have worship or not?” says Neale Miller, Lakeview’s pastor for the past 10 years. “Then the mayor urged evacuation of New Orleans, so we put a sign on the church door, locked up and left,” he says.

Miller and his wife drove to Oxford, MS, on Saturday, Aug. 27, 2005. “We were euphoric on Monday when we heard that Katrina caused some damage but not much, so we planned to drive back to New Orleans on Tuesday,” he recalls.

But they awoke Tuesday to horrifying television footage of Lake Pontchartrain emptying into Lakeview through the levee breach. Miller knew that it would be some time before they could return and that when they did, unfathomable destruction would await them.

Anne Barnes has lived in New Orleans since she was 10 and has been a member at Lakeview for nearly 60 years. “When we heard that the hurricane was coming, my husband and I decided, as we always have, to stay in our house. We figured if we shut the shutters real tight we’d be all right,” she says. “But came Sunday morning we looked at the situation and said, ‘We’ve gotta get outta here.’”

Anne Barnes

The Barneses fled to Baton Rouge, to the home of a friend of their son. They arrived to discover they were sharing the house with 22 other New Orleans refugees. It would be almost three months before they returned to New Orleans — and then not to their Lakeview home but to a condominium they purchased in a part of town that didn’t flood. The Millers have done the same.

Eighty percent of New Orleans went underwater due to the levee breaches around town. More than 300,000 homes were completely destroyed or rendered uninhabitable.

And now, 18 months after Katrina, maybe a third of the population has returned. No one knows for sure. Much of the city is still without electricity or potable water. Only a handful of schools are open, mostly private. Few businesses have returned — Lakeview still has no grocery stores, drugstores, gas stations or restaurants. A hardware store is in the verge of reopening.

What’s eeriest about driving through the once-bustling Lakeview neighborhood is the silence — only a handful of people, no cars, no barking dogs, no laughing children, no singing birds. A ghost town.

At first glance, Lakeview doesn’t look so bad. Most of the houses are still standing, but upon closer inspection the destruction is apparent. Every house, save for a handful, is either an empty shell after having been gutted in preparation for rebuilding, or sits untouched since the water finally receded in mid-September of 2005.

One of the untouched houses is Miller’s. “When we came back at the end of September, I couldn’t get in the front door, so we broke a window to get inside,” he recalls. “It looked like someone took everything inside, tossed it in a giant mixmaster, turned it on for a few minutes and then poured it back into the house …”

The still-gutted church library, where flood water rose to the top of the blue-cowled figure in the stained glass window.

Getting into Lakeview church was even tougher, Miller adds. The two-story, 50-year-old building took on eight feet of water, almost completely filling up the bottom floor, which houses the sanctuary, pastors’ offices, church office, kitchen, library and fellowship hall. The church’s child care facility in an adjacent building was also ruined.

Though the entire first floor has been gutted, rebuilding is being undertaken one room at a time, beginning with the sanctuary. With less than half the membership having returned to New Orleans, that’s all Lakeview can afford to do.

The recovery of the church is wholly dependent on the recovery of the neighborhood, says Elder Robert Johnston. “We’ve got to have more houses so we have more families so we have more kids coming to the church,” he says. “We have a lot of churches in the area and they’re all facing the same things we’re facing here because there’s just no place for people to live.”

Amelie Welman, a member and staffer at Lakeview Church, discusses upcoming events with two church members before worship.

Lakeview’s members are a determined lot. Amelie Welman is a native of New Orleans who came to Lakeview as church secretary in 1999. “I thought I’d be here for a couple of years, that it would be a nice job to have while I went to graduate school,” she says laughing. “I never made it to graduate school, I got so involved in the church.”

Life and work have changed for Welman, who moved into New Orleans from nearby Metairie after Katrina. “There’s no real job description out there now, you just do what has to be done when it has to be done,” she says with a sparkle in her eye.

Like many at Lakeview — and in New Orleans — Welman was not sure she’d come back after the flood. But on Sept. 21, 2005, she and Miller — who’d been with relatives in Wisconsin since moving on from Oxford — reunited at a South Louisiana Presbytery meeting.

“Up until that point I didn’t think I was coming back to New Orleans, but something definitely happened at that meeting for me,” Welman recalls, “and I felt God was calling me to come back and to at least try to be part of putting the pieces together.”

The first task for Miller and Welman was locating church members. “We set up phone banks in the presbytery office in Baton Rouge and just tried to find out where everyone was,” Miller says.

Welman’s procrastination in returning the church’s laptop computer turned out to be a blessing. “I had it by my front door but kept forgetting to bring it back and it was a lifesaver because I was able to start putting information on our Web site and checking our email.”

Telephone technology helped, too. “It took us about a month to realize we could have the church phone number rolled over to my cell phone,” she says, “so once the light bulb went off about that, it got better because people who’d just kept calling the church for weeks and weeks were finally able to get through.”

Streets throughout the Lakeview neighborhood are still choked with piles of rubble from Hurricane Katrina.

But addressing the devastated building was nothing compared to figuring out how to reconstruct a shattered community. “At the start, talking to people about their plans for returning, it became apparent that a lot of people decided not to return,” Miller says. “That means our membership today is less than half what it was [before the storm]. “That doesn’t supply the primary motivation for anything we’ll do in evangelism and other forms of outreach, but it was certainly a wake-up call,” he adds.

Before the storm, members of the 340-member congregation had been canvassing the Lakeview neighborhood, greeting new homeowners and acquainting them with the church’s programs. “We continued that effort after the storm,” Miller says, “but we drove all over the neighborhoods and saw less than two dozen people — thousands of homes and no one around …”

So in recent months, Lakeview has been hosting neighborhood picnics “to announce to the neighborhood vigorously that we’re back and open for worship,” Miller says.

Robert Johnston

Sunday worship resumed at Lakeview on Palm Sunday of 2006. “We’re pretty good because we have a lot of our congregation driving back here to go to church,” Johnston says. “This is new to all of us, having to do this,” he adds.

“Previously our efforts were geared toward maintaining our membership and reaching out and bringing in new members,” Johnson says. “Before the storm we were looking at new ways to serve the community — now it’s an even higher priority. And it’s a big challenge because of the lack of population here.”

The task is daunting. “Initially everyone embraced one line: ‘Lakeview will be back’ and I think when they were making that avowal they were thinking in terms of two or three years,” Miller says. “That thinking, by and large, has been placed aside and wisely so. In terms of this neighborhood, you’re looking at time parameters quite more extensive — five, ten years to get it close to what it was.”

A house across the street from Lakeview Church still awaits basic clean-up.

Miller says he knows many people “very committed to Lakeview who are now reassessing whether they want to rebuild in the near future because they don’t know what neighbors are going to do. You don’t want to be the only house on your block and there’s great uncertainty about what other people are going to do with their property or if that vacant lot next to your house is going to sell — with those concerns there is great reticence to move ahead.”

And so Lakeview church is putting great effort into getting programs up and running that will encourage people to repopulate the neighborhood, including the day school, which will expand to include infants and toddlers and elder day care. A nearby Methodist church is providing space for the day school until Lakeview’s day care center can be rebuilt.

In the face of such overwhelming odds, faith and connectionalism are what keeps the Lakeview Presbyterians going. “How long my wherewithal can last only God knows,” Welman says. “But I’m here now and that outpouring of love from all over the country has really matched the overwhelming feeling of what it was going to be like to be here.

Connor Nungesser and his father, Elder Coby Nungesser, huddle before worship at Lakeview Presbyterian Church. Services resumed at the church on Palm Sunday 2006, nearly eight months after Hurricane Katrina-related flooding inundated the building.

“It’s like, if they could care enough about us, then we need to care enough about ourselves to come back and try to do it,” she says.

“The relief people have been fabulous — I don’t know what this city would have done if these groups of people hadn’t come in to help us rebuild,” Barnes says. “They gave us courage to go on in many ways.”

Miller agrees. “Shortly after the storm I received a phone call from a minister whom I do not know in Pennsylvania who said, ‘You know, this event gives the church an opportunity to be the church.’ I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what that means and he’s right — people from across the church — Presbyterians and Christians of other stripes have been extremely generous in supporting our restoration effort,” he says.

It’s affected Miller’s preaching, too. “It’s hard to prepare a sermon for Sunday morning that somehow doesn’t get into the reality of that greater church connectionalism and the issues surrounding that — as a pastor I feel compelled to really think about what all this means.

“I turn up here every day and feel a wave of depression about our situation — but in the same breath I can say I see great opportunities for ministry in that we are privileged to recognize missional opportunity as never before.”

Power has been restored to Lakeview Presbyterian Church but the interior has not yet been rewired, so extension cords snake from this panel to rooms in the church when they need electricity.

Welman says she doesn’t blame anyone who has chosen not to return to New Orleans. “It’s not normal living here and we Americans like normal living,” she says, “but for other people in other countries, even living in these conditions would be a step up, a huge step up.”

And so, she says, “I remind myself all the time that I’m pretty lucky and blessed that I have what I have and try not to have too many pity parties.”

It’s easy to become “very insular — do your thing Sunday to Sunday, receiving the same number of members you’re losing every Sunday, business as usual,” Miller says. “Well, that’s by the board — we have to rethink what we’re doing and it’s made this pastor and our session much more aware of the world beyond our doors.

“God has challenged us greatly through this event, but there’s much good that can come of it,” Miller says, “when we think about the broader scope of God’s grace and what we can do as partners in ministry.”