Witness to hope
New Orleans Presbyterians are coming to terms with the "new reality" by making their city a laboratory for creative ministry
By Robyn Leary
Work in progress: St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church youth group taking a break from cleaning out a flooded home. Photo by Lawton FabacherAlan Cutter knows something about stressful situations, having served in the Navy during the Vietnam conflict. He left a pastorate in Duluth, Minn., to accept a call to be general presbyter of South Louisiana Presbytery in July 2006, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina inundated the presbytery’s largest city. Cutter gets excited when he describes his concept of New Orleans as a “laboratory” for new ministry.
“We’re a place looking for new ideas, and we’re open to testing them out,” he says. The challenge now, as he sees it, is to help people move from being survivors to being witnesses.
“A witness is someone who can reflect back upon what happened to them and make a connection to God’s story. When survivors do that,” he explains, “they’re able to move forward. Instead of living in desperation, as many of the survivors of Katrina do, they can live in hope. They come to terms with the new reality around them.”
When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coasts in August 2005, it destroyed or severely damaged the social fabric of large and vital communities. As a result it has profoundly affected the ministries of Presbyterian pastors and congregations.
“Ministry can’t be done the way it’s always been done — it’s not going to be effective in a post-Katrina world,” says Lisa Easterling, chair of South Louisiana Presbytery’s Committee on Ministry.
In post-Katrina New Orleans exciting new visions for “doing church” are beginning to emerge.
Prior to the hurricane there were 19 Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) congregations in the greater New Orleans area. One church has since dissolved because so many of its members did not return to the city. The nine remaining members of another church joined a neighboring Baptist congregation. Others are continuing with fewer than half the members they had before the storm. Eight pastors have left their congregations.
Reborn for a new mission: the newly renovated sanctuary of Lakeview Presbyterian Church. Church secretary Amelie Welman says the large hanging cross is one of the few things that “survived the storm and has become a symbol of what we were before.”Under these circumstances, taking a church job in New Orleans might seem like a daunting prospect. So Don Frampton, pastor of St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church, was gratified last year by the number of applications the church received for an assistant pastor’s post on the staff.
“Not only did it surprise us, it humbled us; told us we were not alone,” he says. “What it indicates is a keen interest on the part of many ministerial candidates for putting themselves into a situation where mission is foremost.”
Kelly Hostetler, who accepted a call to the position last June, says, “I was looking for a position first and a location second. But I did want to go some place where there was going to be some real meaning, where I was going to be doing something that really mattered.”
Others also are hearing the call. “Not in the sense of Paul on the road to Damascus, where there’s a sudden blinding light,” says Claire Vonk Brooks, who became pastor at the Chinese Presbyterian Church in Kenner, La., last year. The congregation had been torn apart as members left to seek employment after Katrina. “People who went to Houston found better jobs, or the jobs our people had in New Orleans before the storm no longer exist.”
Still, Brooks accepted the challenge. She defines God’s call as “what you do when it seems impossible to do anything else.”
For many New Orleans residents, deciding whether to return to the city or stay away has been an agonizing choice.
Nina Bryant-Sanyika served as pastor of Berean Presbyterian Church in New Orleans before Katrina. It is the oldest African-American Presbyterian Church in Louisiana, established in the 1800s. Like most in her congregation, Bryant-Sanyika fled to Houston when the hurricane hit. For 12 months she commuted back to New Orleans every Sunday to preach.
“Most of the time I’d leave Houston on Friday and fly out of New Orleans on Sunday,” she says. “I did it for a year. Finally, it was too much [strain] on my body and on my savings account.” Like many other pastors evacuated from New Orleans, Bryant-Sanyika has settled and found work elsewhere, in her case as a hospital chaplain in Houston.
“We still know people who are talking about leaving,” says Easterling, who is also pastor of First Union Presbyterian Church in Luling, La. “We’ve had people leave, we’ve had people come back. When you don’t know if the levees will hold or what’s in store this hurricane season, it can go either way. People are still unsettled.”
In one case, flooding left a church submerged under six feet of water for three weeks. “The congregation was dispersed, so the minister just never came back,” Easterling says. Another pastor left out of concern for his children’s education. “When you don’t have schools and you have small children, you have to find ways to school them.”
Money is another factor pastors must weigh, adds Easterling. Can they afford to serve congregations that have lost so many members they cannot offer the same salaries they did before the storm? “You can’t come to churches that can’t pay you a living wage.”
Jean Marie Peacock, former associate pastor of Lakeview Presbyterian Church, returned one month after the storm to find her congregation dispersed and the sanctuary an unusable mess. “The building was heavily damaged, flooded with seven feet of water for about three weeks until the water was drained from the city,” she says. Today the church is still without a landline telephone.
“We’ve been in dramatic transition since Katrina,” says Peacock, who was vice moderator of the 2004 General Assembly. “Initially, the response people had was one of just trying to get some things in order — a place to live, children situated in school. And then you move on.”
But more than two years later, she observes, “there’s a growing fatigue with the way things are, and the continuing stress and struggle of living in New Orleans post-Katrina. There are frustrations about the response of the federal government and the slowness of assistance coming in.”
But the stress New Orleans Presbyterians are experiencing has not dampened their sense of mission.
“There is also the strong desire to continue the work of Christ in the midst of this [devastation],” Peacock says. “So we are now faced with developing and creating new ministries that you might never have expected you’d be called to do as a congregation before, where suddenly you are hosting volunteers from various parts of the country and organizing efforts to help people rebuild their homes. All of this has forced our ministry to change.”
In 2006 Peacock became associate presbyter pro-tem in charge of congregational development and disaster recovery. Her work focuses on helping people get their homes rebuilt, with or without government assistance.
Rebuilding Hope: St. Charles Avenue members host volunteers who come to help rebuild. Photo by Lawton FabacherSt. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church, the largest congregation in South Louisiana Presbytery, has started a rebuilding program called “RHINO” — “Rebuilding Hope in New Orleans.” Members of the congregation founded the group while they were evacuated in Houston. Each week a building adjacent to the sanctuary houses 30 volunteers who come to New Orleans to help rebuild. Last August RHINO partnered with Habitat for Humanity to work on new construction.
“Our goal is to rebuild an entire block,” says Sarah Edgcombe, coordinator of the project. “That’s 14 homes in the Hollygrove neighborhood in uptown New Orleans.”
“I believe the church has a major role to play in helping to shape a new life in the community,” Peacock says.
The new community she and other church leaders envision is “one where all people are cared for — poor and rich alike, black and white. Where old barriers are broken down and the welfare of all is uplifted.”
Robyn Leary is a New York City-based freelance writer/producer. |
