c. 2006 Religion News Service
NEW ORLEANS _ Just days after Hurricane Katrina struck the city last August, some New Orleans churches mounted relief operations that continue to this day.
Some have gone beyond storm relief, becoming centers for planning, encouragement and help that have begun to nourish damaged neighborhoods.
Here are two examples of powerhouse churches filling that larger role:
Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church
In a matter of days, families will start moving into 199 Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers lined up and ready for occupancy outside this church in eastern New Orleans that drives the heart of the area’s Vietnamese community. The church will select the tenants; the culture’s famously cooperative, communitarian spirit will keep good order, said the Rev. Vien Nguyen.
When the trailers are gone with 18 to 24 months, the church plans to build a 300-unit retirement community on the site, he said.
Like many congregations, members of Mary Queen of Vietnam groped to find each other in exile in the first weeks after the storm.
But they succeeded quickly. Through the Internet, cell phones and a Vietnamese radio station in Houston, Nguyen and the parish’s lay leaders found each other. “Within two weeks, the parish council was talking about recovery,” he said.
As Vietnamese residents returned to eastern New Orleans, the church became more than just a relief center. Scores of homeowners camped at the church and its buildings, which had remained dry. They slept on floors, cooked together, dispersed each day to gut their homes, then returned to the church grounds for the night.
Nguyen re-established worship early. The first Mass on Oct. 9 attracted 300 by word of mouth; the next Sunday, 800. Now attendance is 2,300 at three Masses, and there is talk of adding a fourth.
Nguyen said the church’s ballast these days is the hard-won wisdom of its elders _ parishioners driven from their homes in North Vietnam decades ago, then driven again from their homes in the south to an alien culture, and now lashed a third time by the experience of Katrina.
“I’m part of the younger generation. I relied on the older generation to give me guidance,” he said. “For them, this is minor, very minor.”
And while it heals, the church keeps abreast of news from Vietnam. When parishioners learned recently that a powerful typhoon struck the country, bursting dikes that ruined rice fields with saltwater, they took up a collection for their former countrymen and sent it back through church channels.
The take, said Nguyen: $37,000.
Episcopal Church of the Annunciation
Less than a year after taking over his new congregation, the Rev. Jerry Kramer, a hyperactive former African missionary, returned to it in a canoe last September, floating cleanly over its 4-foot wrought-iron fence.
His 162-year-old Episcopal church was drowned; looters had based themselves in the second floor of its education building for forays into the neighborhood. His congregation was gone; his own family’s home of three months was filled with 9 feet of water.
Nine months later, the Church of the Annunciation crackles with activity.
With aid from the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana and donors, and with loans against a previously untapped income stream from a church-owned building downtown, the congregation has begun hauling mobile homes onto its property and buying up surrounding homes as ministry centers.
A trailer serves as the church’s worship space. As soon as a Sunday service is over, it switches back to an all-purpose community center. Another trailer next door has become the permanent home of the Broadmoor Improvement Association, one of the most sophisticated neighborhood planning groups in the city.
“The church has let us have the run of the place. They have yet to say no,” said Rusty Berridge, an association volunteer. “They just keep telling us, `God will find a way.”’
Since spring, an after-school center on church grounds for the few neighborhood children in the area has morphed into a free summer day camp.
Kramer said he and members of his congregation have no carefully developed, long-range plan. “We do all this by listening. The whole idea is to be nimble, be flexible, to have low overhead and make things happen where before nothing was happening.”
Remarkably, Kramer said, he and his congregation have no immediate plans to rehabilitate their church building. They expect to replace the worship-trailer with a modular home and worship there for about 10 years.
“We’ll put our resources elsewhere, where it’s more needed,” he said. “We’re doing front-line kingdom-building work here. God has turned us out of our church and dropped us on our butts in the parking lot.”
(Bruce Nolan writes for The Times-Picayune in News Orleans.)
KRE/PH END RNS
Editors: To obtain photos from Mary Queen of Vietnam and Annunciation, as well as church-sponsored rebuilding projects in New Orleans, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.
See main bar, RNS-NOLA-REBUILD, and related story, RNS-JAKES-QANDA, both transmitted June 14, 2006.
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