Joe McKeever: Assessing the situation in the Crescent City

Joe McKeever, the Director of Missions for the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans, provides a brief, general overview of how things stand in New Orleans. Some of it sounds better than I thought, some of it worse than I imagined. He covers everything from car insurance rates skyrocketing, to the silly effort by the New Orleans City Council to pick a new coach for the Saints football team, to a group of people helping people move quickly toward rebuilding their homes in the hopes that obvious restoration achievement will keep the city from pulling an eminent domain end run, forcing people out of their neighborhoods.

I think it's interesting that, when he gets to talking about Baptist churches in particular, he says:

Our North American Mission Board is asking our pastors to decide which churches in which neighborhoods will be brought back first. The idea is that since the population is going to be a fraction of what it used to be for several years, we need to focus on one church in each large area, putting our resources there, trying to build it up, get all our people in that area worshiping there, having an "anchor" church there. Then, as the residential areas are rebuilt, some of the other churches can be reopened and their ministries resumed.

So, here's your prayer request for today. It goes directly against the nature of most pastors and churches to volunteer for their buildings to stay unused for several years, to go a mile down the street and join with other partial congregations in forming another church. But that is precisely what we are going to be asking some of them to do. Pray for these churches and their leaders, please.

The last thing we need these days is a vast number of tiny, struggling congregations scattered across this devastated city, each one needing the charity and assistance of Baptists across America just to keep their doors open and their bills paid. To tell the truth, we had too much of that before the storm.

Our Baptist polity--a chief element of which is the independence and autonomy of each church--is often our strength, and sometimes a great burden.

More about this later, but one of the more fascinating plans being made for next summer is to pull together volunteers from around the country and build forty or more homes in connection with Habitat for Humanity. In fact, before Katrina, we were working on this very scenario. Under the leadership of David Crosby (pastor FBC New Orleans), the "Baptist Crossroads Project" was scheduled to become the largest Habitat project to date sponsored by a single denominational group. When Katrina hit, followed by the flood, and we learned of the extent of the devastation, I had a phone call from David. "Joe, let's build FOUR HUNDRED homes next summer!" I said, half joking, "Man, you have lost your ever loving mind!" Later, I repented of my unbelief. Last week, we had a meeting to resume the planning. This incredible project has a website all its own through which you may keep up with the ideas, plans, and progress: www.baptistcrossroads.org.

Full Joe McKeever post here.