MAKING ALL THINGS NEW

Beginning just days after Hurricane Katrina struck the city last August, some New Orleans churches began to mount relief operations that continue to this day.

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Celebration Church in Metairie, First Baptist Church in Lakeview, Light City Church and St. Mary of the Angels, both in the 9th Ward, became relief centers or major bases housing hundreds of volunteers.

Many remain active in storm relief. And some have morphed into something more, 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

In a matter of days, families will start moving into 199 FEMA trailers lined up and ready for occupancy on Dwyer Road, opposite the eastern New Orleans church 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 in a year and a half to two years, the church plans to build a 300-unit retirement community on the site, he said.

Like many church 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 encamped 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.

Today, many families are back in their unfinished homes. But even now a homeowner alerted by an odd noise at night is as likely to call one of the church's three priests as to call the police, Nguyen said.

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. They were joking they were putting on weight eating MREs."

In the months after the storm, Mary Queen of Vietnam became a center where homeowners met with professional planners to sketch their visions of a rebuilt Vietnamese community, with a cultural center, common garden and a farmers market. More urgently, Nguyen has become one of the community's key political voices in opposing a new 88-acre landfill the city wants to open in eastern New Orleans.

The engine that runs the parish is faith and the Vietnamese community's sense of family and community -- a self-reliant network so strong that Nguyen said he carefully considers every government offer of aid. "It encourages a welfare mentality," he said.

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.

 

Church of the Annunciation

Less than a year after taking over his new congregation in Broadmoor, 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 on South Claiborne Avenue 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, from 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 Mass 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.' "

"For the first time in a long while, we're relevant," Kramer said. "It's really exciting to get tied into the neighborhood. We're the capital of Broadmoor."

The church serves a community reaching beyond Broadmoor. Kramer says 40 percent of its residents live below the poverty line; 40 percent of adults are not high school graduates; and only 20 percent of the area's children live with both parents.

Annunciation's ministries still dispense emergency supplies several days a week. Recently, Kramer offered a little patch of open space on church property for yet another trailer belonging to Heart to Heart, a medical ministry.

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."

So it is that members of Annunciation diagnosed their next efforts: Coming soon, a community laundry area and a church-based coffee shop for neighbors to meet and swap the crucial off-the-radar information that helps build community.

"We're a neighborhood resource with worship at its center," Kramer said.

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.

"That's OK. In Africa, we used to do church outdoors under the trees. It was wonderful."