New Orleans Pastors Struggle to Reconnect and Rebuild

c. 2005 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ The same storm winds that shattered New Orleans neighborhoods scattered its faith communities. In the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, once-solid New Orleans churches struggled to reconstitute themselves, worshipping in new, unfamiliar cities. Then came Hurricane Rita, wreaking even more damage. The rebuilding, such as it is, presents […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ The same storm winds that shattered New Orleans neighborhoods scattered its faith communities. In the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, once-solid New Orleans churches struggled to reconstitute themselves, worshipping in new, unfamiliar cities.

Then came Hurricane Rita, wreaking even more damage.


The rebuilding, such as it is, presents enormous challenges to displaced pastors struggling to find hundreds of church members scattered across the country. For those pastors, the stake is material as well as pastoral; most relied on their congregations for a significant part of their personal income.

In places such as Baton Rouge, Houston and Atlanta, displaced New Orleans pastors are locating a few scores of their former church members and holding worship services in borrowed churches or university student centers.

Many are making plans to put down temporary roots in new cities, usually with an eye toward reentering New Orleans as soon as possible.

“This is going to be a Herculean task. I’ve got people in 34 states _ Denver, Oklahoma, Washington, you name it,” said the Rev. Willie Gable of Progressive Baptist Church, once a Central City church of about 400 members.

In Houston, New Light Christian Center has devoted a portion of its Web site, http://www.newlight.org, to a listing of New Orleans pastors’ cell phone numbers so congregants can find them.

But that has proved to be a tool of limited usefulness.

Instead, pastors have found that the dense, thickly textured social networks that held their church members together is largely self-healing. Widely scattered church members are finding each other and their pastors by old-fashioned word of mouth, facilitated only by cell phones and text messaging, many said.

“Church networks are very, very powerful. I think politicians don’t understand just how efficient they are,” said the Rev. Antoine Barriere of Household of Faith Full Gospel Baptist Church.

With Hurricane Katrina approaching Aug. 27, Barriere urged all the 1,000 members of his church to leave New Orleans. He launched word by cell phone that he and his family were headed for Houston.


When he arrived, he began to locate nearby church members and they began to locate him, he said. Word spread among church members hunkered down in Houston hotel rooms, relatives’ homes and shelters that Barriere would conduct a worship service the following Sunday.

“The first couple of days it was all text-messaging,” he said.

But the first Sunday after the storm, about 80 members showed up for the first post-Katrina meeting of Household of Faith-in-exile, said Barriere. They prayed and sang together in Houston in the borrowed Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church.

By last week the service had grown to 300, he said.

Some pastors have found themselves holding services for small bands of dispersed members in different cities every week since the storm.

Like some other pastors in the National Baptist Convention USA, the Rev. Charles Southall of First Emanuel Baptist Church kept a date to attend that denomination’s annual convention in Atlanta the week after the storm. He located 50 or more First Emanuel members in Atlanta and worshipped with them, then returned to Houston to minister to members surfacing there, he said.

Bishop Paul S. Morton of Greater St. Stephen Baptist Church, the largest in New Orleans, is steering church members in Baton Rouge, Houston and Atlanta to specific churches affiliated with the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship that Morton launched in the early 1990s.

At present, Morton or his wife, co-pastor Debra Morton, plans to provide weekend services in each city for Greater St. Stephen members, said spokeswoman Angela Young.


“I tell them, we may not be able to come together in a church building, but we’re still a church,” said the Rev. C.S. Gordon, who traveled from Dallas to Baton Rouge to hold a service last week with members of his New Zion Baptist Church. They met in the student center at Southern University, he said.

For all, the larger question is: Now what? What will these scattered communities look like in 30, 60 or 90 days?

Most pastors, like Southall, Gordon and Gable, hope to stabilize their remnant churches close to New Orleans, often in Baton Rouge, building around a core of displaced members from New Orleans.

Psychologically, the remnant church he hopes to nourish in Baton Rouge is merely a satellite location of his First Emanuel in New Orleans, which awaits his return, Southall said.

Some pastors have already enrolled their children in new schools in Houston or Atlanta, and will have to reconstitute their churches as best they can while anchored where they are.

Financially, the pastors are sometimes in as much economic trouble as their displaced flocks.

“I’m poor, but not broke yet,” said Gable, who left New Orleans with one suit and a few changes of casual clothes. “I thought I’d be gone just a few days,” he said.


Yet by many standards, Gable is in better shape than many. His wife’s job with a nonprofit foundation can be done from Baton Rouge as well as New Orleans. And Gable also pastors Macedonia Baptist Church in Hammond, La., which was unaffected by the storm.

Even so, Gable is digging deep into his credit card reserves, he said.

Ahead is nothing but uncertainty, many pastors said.

For the fourth week since the first hurricane, most of New Orleans remained unhabitable and closed to its returning citizens. It was not clear when hundreds of small and mid-sized churches, and their neighborhoods, might be ready to be reoccupied. Nor does anyone know how many families who fled will come back, and how many will make new lives elsewhere.

“None of us really knows who we’ve lost,” Gordon said. “We may not know until sometime next year.

“I’m starting all over,” he said. “I know most of us are.”

MO/JL END RNS

Editors: To obtain file photos to go with this story, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search for “Hurricane Katrina.” Designate “exact phrase” for best results.

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!