SACRAMENTO — Jean Marie Peacock, associate pastor of Lakeview Church in New Orleans, left with her husband, Peter, at 2 a.m. on that Sunday, not long before Hurricane Katrina hit.
They drove first to Jackson, Mississippi; and when the news reports still sounded bad, on to Memphis; and when it became clear that the levees had been breached and their neighborhood flooded, on to her parents’ home in Illinois.
They live not far from the breach in the 17th Street levy, and they’ve learned that the water rose seven or eight feet in most of the homes in the area, including theirs. Out of her congregation of 335 members, about half lost their homes.
“Our church is now dispersed all over the United States,” scattered from Massachusetts to Florida to Missouri, Peacock said at the General Assembly Council meeting in California. She’s also the vice-moderator of the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and she was asked to speak about her situation because so many people wanted to know what was happening with her church.
About half the people from Lakeview Church have been accounted for. More than half the congregations in South Louisiana presbytery have been damaged or destroyed, Peacock said. The waterline in her church is seven feet high.
Peacock said the Lakeview families are trying to create a sense of as much normalcy as possible — taking temporary jobs, enrolling their children in school, finding places to live.
But she got an e-mail from another pastor who said it will be weeks before they can return, longer before they can worship together, and some people won’t ever return. Whether his congregation can survive this, “God knows, I don’t,” the pastor wrote. Peacock has heard his church is so damaged it will have to be demolished.
Peacock told the council that the first night she stayed in Sacramento, she dreamed she went back to Lakeview church. The senior pastor and the secretary were there, “we’re holding each other and we’re crying, and I pray in my dream,” Peacock said — beginning to cry as she spoke.
“I pray that God remind us that we’re standing on holy ground, even in the midst of the destruction of our church building. May we be reminded of God’s presence.”
A ringing phone woke Peacock from her dream. It was the church secretary calling — the day before, she had indeed gone to Lakeview. As she described the visit, Peacock wrote down what her friend said.
When they left, they closed the door on the church and didn’t lock it, “because there was nothing anybody would want to take anymore — the damage was so extensive,” Peacock said. The secretary described the neighborhood.
“There is no life here,” as she walked through, no one else was there. “Everything has a sense that it is dead. Nothing is green. A grey coat covers everything. When you get out of there, you just feel numb.”
Peacock said she reminded one woman from the congregation, who was despairing and felt alone, that “we are a connectional church” and that Presbyterians are helping, “and we will not be alone as we work to rebuild.”
She asked Susan Ryan from Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to stand — thanking her for all that Presbyterians have done.
“It is going to be a very long road ahead,” Peacock said. “We encourage you to remember a year from now and two years from now that help is still needed … We will make it home knowing that God is our rock,” our anchor in times of trouble.
