Tracking the itineraries of volunteers who have gone to the Gulf Coast is like tracking the progress of the recovery effort itself — from the earliest days of providing for basic survival to more recent efforts to get people back into their homes.
“One of the greatest blessings we could receive is people from all over the country — Presbyterians from all over the country — sending work crews and staying in our building,” said Cliff Nunn, pastor of First Church in New Orleans.
Volunteers cleaned the sanctuary, put up sheet rock, painted, drained the elevator shaft, and the basement. And when that was done, they started working on the neighborhood.
“We have collaborative relationships with the neighborhood association that we never had before,” Nunn said. “We have an Episcopal church down the street that we barely knew existed, that we now have a very good relationship with. … My whole ministry has been changed,” as work groups venture out to rebuild houses of people living all around the church.
At the end of each day, the work groups come back to First Presbyterian, where members of the congregation have fixed a meal. Workers from across the United States sit down to eat with church members and people from the neighborhood.
Following Katrina, “one of the major theological themes that has helped me is (Walter) Brueggemann’s concept of crying out to God for help,” Nunn said. “We have not been timid about screaming out to God to help us.”
Through the volunteers, “God is providing.”
Paul Ransford, associate pastor Westminster Church in Durham, N.C., was one of the early volunteers — in part, because of his past experience responding to hurricanes Floyd in North Carolina and Isabel in Florida. (“They call me the ‘disaster pastor,’ “ Ransford joked.)
About a week after Katrina hit, he appealed to the congregation for funding, loaded up the church’s disaster trailer and headed south to Gulfport, Miss., to help set up a base camp for Presbyterian volunteers.
People from his congregation and from surrounding churches have made seven trips to the Gulf area — including a group of women who worked installing drywall, painting, and mucking out debris. Folks who couldn’t come themselves helped construct shower trailers that are used in the volunteer villages.
And North Carolina volunteers also traveled this summer to Peace River Presbytery in Florida — cleaning up after Hurricane Charley more than a year ago. “Some of those people are really despondent and depressed,” Ransford said. “They worked on a house where no one had come for a year.”
After Isabel, the senior high youth group from Westminster raised $45,000 to build a house for a Florida family, Ransford said — and “folks called geezers” from the congregation, experienced in Habitat for Humanity construction, worked with the teenagers and taught them how to build it.
Ransford has seen that kind of faith-based pulling together at work along the Gulf Coast too.
“This has been the most incredible experience in connectionalism, to sit out in the middle of a softball field in D’Iberville, Miss., while Presbyterians from all over the country say I’ve been to that church, I know your cousin,'” he said. “Nobody’s talking about the PUP paper” — a reference to the controversial report from the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
“Everyone’s talking about, ‘Isn’t it great that we can be here as Presbyterians helping people? ‘”
Volunteers at work
Lehigh presbytery in Pennsylvania sent its first team last October — 22 people drove by van to D’Iberville and spent most of their time “mucking” — tearing down and hauling out sodden debris.
The second team went in March, working on hanging drywall and fixing roofs.
A third team plans to go in October.
About 40 people from Lehigh have made the trips, said Richard McClain, a minister who’s helping organize Katrina relief efforts for the Lehigh Presbytery Helping Hands Care Team. Some are retired, others use vacation time. The accommodations are basic, and “we try to make it as miserable sounding as possible,” so volunteers won’t be surprised, McClain said. “There are a surprising number of people who want to come.”
Those who can’t go themselves often contribute money to buy a bundle of shingles or a supply of sheetrock.
Jim Kyser, a 44-year-old computer consultant from Knox Church in Naperville, Ill., has made two work trips to Mississippi — and hopes to go back again this fall.
He’s hauled out debris and laid tile and carpeting, working for part of the time in Pearlington, a small town in Mississippi that was severely damaged, but which a lot of the relief teams had passed by. Some residents talked of how daunting the idea of tearing down their homes and rebuilding them seemed.
When the volunteers show up, “it’s kind of like getting you over the hump to get started,” Kyser said. “They really do appreciate it.”
Volunteers describe a back-and-forth process — they bring hope and a willingness to work, and come away with lessons in grace and courage.
In March, Pennsylvania volunteers met a Mississippi woman who’d been living in a trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for several months — and for most of that time she’d barely stepped outside. The volunteers started talking with her, and bit by bit “they started to drag her out of her shell,” McClain said. “It was that one-to-one ministry.”
The volunteers meet people who have lost everything — and the question of what is left when all the possessions are gone is put directly before them.
“It changes our priorities and our understanding of what is important in life,” said Nunn. “When you lose all of your furniture and all of your stuff and all of your photographs … after a while, after you cry and plead, you realize how unimportant those things are and how important relationships with other people, with your fellow Christians and your families, are. It’s a changing of your priorities. I don’t watch near as much television as I used to. I don’t spend near as much money as I used to. I don’t have desires for things. I lead a much more sparse life.”
Nunn preaches from the lectionary — and throughout last fall, the Old Testament passages “were all about the exile,” he said. “And I never had a real sense of what those passages were about. We in America have never experienced being conquered and carried off. … Man, I know what the exile is now. I know it very, very well.”
At the volunteer villages, Presbyterians start and end each work day with a time of prayer and worship.
“They really feel like their faith has taken on flesh, and they’re doing something more than just going to church,” Ransford said. “The greatest commodity that we bring from a community of faith is hope. It’s not just that we can do drywall or build you a new house. We’ve told people over and over again, ‘When you get there, just sit out there on the porch with people, or sit in the yard if the porch is gone. Let people tell you their story.’ Just going in and loving on them has made a whole lot of difference.”
Nunn said the turning point for him and his wife, Nieta, came when volunteers from an “itty bitty church in Oneida, S. D.” showed up — Presbyterians who had said they wanted to help a small church in a small town. He told them, “I’m in a small town — 80 percent of the population has left. I’m in a small church because a lot of my members have left.”
The folks from South Dakota worked on his house, rewiring and putting up sheet rock — getting it about three-quarters done. “That was the bridge, the tipping point,” Nunn said, “that helped me see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Montreat campground youth workers from 60s sought — Did your church send any young people to Montreat in 1964 to help in the construction of the Family campground? Were you one of those young people?
Montreat is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the completion of the Family Campground that was built with help from senior high groups from local churches.
Glenn Bannerman, who was the director of the camps in 1964, 1965 and 1967, is trying to locate the churches that sent young people for the first year, 1964. The following churches are known to have participated: Ginter Park, Richmond, Va.; Commonwealth, Charlotte, N.C.; First, Waynesboro, Va.; Matthews, Matthews, N.C.
Anyone with this information can get in touch with Glenn Bannerman by e-mail, glenn.evelyn@att.net or by post, P.O. Box 399, Montreat, NC 28757.
