Alban Weekly from The Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States "PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS: Good Intentions Aren't Enough-HOW CONGREGATIONS CAN MOST HELPFULLY RESPOND TO NATURAL DISASTERS" for Monday, 10 October 2016

Alban Weekly from The Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States "PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS: Good Intentions Aren't Enough-HOW CONGREGATIONS CAN MOST HELPFULLY RESPOND TO NATURAL DISASTERS" for Monday, 10 October 2016

Faith & Leadership
MISSIONS & EVANGELISM
"Good Intentions Aren't Enough-HOW CONGREGATIONS CAN MOST HELPFULLY RESPOND TO NATURAL DISASTERS"
The damage caused by natural disasters such as the Haitian earthquake makes us want to help. But researcher Carol J. De Vita cautions congregations and other faith-based groups to think through the steps needed to make their help practical and effective.
Faith-based organizations are good at providing immediate relief, but have less capacity to support sustained recovery in areas devastated by natural disasters, said Carol J. De Vita, senior research associate with the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, a branch of the Urban Institute, which is a nonpartisan public policy research organization in Washington, D.C.

Planning ahead, working with large, established organizations and connecting with local people are keys to successful relief efforts, De Vita said. In 2007, she served as a principal investigator for an Institute study conducted for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on the role of faith-based and community organizations in relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina(link is external).
She recently spoke with Faith & Leadership about the Katrina study, lessons for relief in Haiti and the role of church and faith-based organizations in disaster relief.
Q: Can you give us an overview of how disaster relief typically works and where churches and faith-based organizations fit into that process?We often think, after a disaster, of immediate recovery, the immediate response effort -- making sure people affected by the disaster have food and water and shelter. But we really need to think along a continuum. The immediate relief effort is just the beginning of what needs to be done. After a while -- and it depends on the size of the disaster what timeframe we’re talking about -- you move into more of a recovery effort and these can take months and even years depending on the size and the severity of the disaster.
What we have found is that congregations and the faith-based community are most likely to respond at the front end, or immediate impact after a disaster. Many churches and congregations are very quick to set up shelters and to provide food and water. Obviously, it depends on how close they are to the actual location of the disaster as to what they can do. But we found in our work after Katrina that all kinds of congregations and faith-based groups emphasized the immediate relief efforts, making sure that people were sheltered and fed and clothed. Over time, when you moved into the recovery stage, many faith-based organizations did not have the capacity to continue.
Q: What percentage of disaster relief is provided by churches and faith-based organizations?
I’m not sure anybody knows. Getting hard numbers is very, very difficult. After Katrina, we did a large survey within Louisiana and Mississippi, the two states most directly affected. We asked respondents how much money, how many resources, how many volunteers they had, and more than a third of the organizations said they couldn’t even begin to tell us. When a disaster happens, people jump in. The last thing on their mind is keeping records. And often a lot of collaborations occur, so the lines between what was a secular group and what was a faith group get blurred and difficult to distinguish one from the other in terms of who was providing what.
Q: I understand that a wide range of faith-based organizations play a role in disaster relief, from individual congregations to large relief organizations such as World Vision.
Exactly. A lot of individual congregations will respond after a disaster, whether it was 9/11 or Katrina or now, Haiti. Often the congregation is miles away or many states away from the disaster. They will take up a donation or send a group of volunteers to the affected area to help in the relief or recovery efforts. So the number of responses can be quite substantial but are intended to be very short term. After the first month or so, some of that enthusiasm dies out because the longer term recovery is harder to sustain and to coordinate.
For many organizations and congregations in particular, they may figure out a way to affiliate with a larger group such as Catholic Relief Services, Lutheran Social Services, or other denominational relief organizations or inter-faith organizations like World Vision or Habitat for Humanity. If you can direct resources to some of these larger groups, they have more sustainability in the recovery effort than do the individual congregations.
Q: You’ve mentioned your study. You did a major study for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services of post-Katrina relief efforts by faith-based and community organizations. Tell us about that.
Health and Human Services was interested in learning some lessons from the Katrina experience to better coordinate relief services in the future. We had more than 200 groups respond to our survey. More than half self-identified as faith-based organizations, mostly congregations, and the rest were secular non-profits. We also did some case studies with about eight different organizations to go more in depth about what they did.
One of the major lessons learned was that a lot more thinking and planning needs to be done before an emergency hits to better understand the capabilities of the faith-based community and where they can be best plugged in to disaster relief and recovery work. One of those capabilities is the ability to get volunteers, although there are difficulties sometimes in getting volunteers to the right places or doing helpful things.
Another lesson we learned is the importance of connecting outside volunteers with people locally who understand the lay of the land, who know where resources may be available, who know what areas may be hardest hit. Those in the disaster zone that are still functioning can be very helpful for directing groups like FEMA or the Red Cross to resources in the local area.
Knowing the local culture is incredibly important and only people locally have a good hands-on sense of how things are done and who you need to talk to to get X, Y and Z accomplished. So connecting to those local resources is very important. But that was something that was not done as well as it could have been and should have been in the Gulf Coast region. Lack of coordination was one of the major lessons that came out of Katrina.
Q: What were the strengths and weaknesses of church and faith-based groups in the Katrina relief effort? What did they do well and what not?
What they did well, at least those that were local, were the immediate relief efforts. Churches that were 50 or 100 miles away from the disaster area quickly mobilized to set up temporary shelters and feeding sites and things of that sort so as evacuees were brought out of the disaster areas, these faith-based groups could assist the people in need.
What was not done as well -- again it’s more a capacity issue -- was the sustained recovery. About half of faith-based groups were not providing Katrina-related services two or three months after the disaster struck. They were there at the initial startup but unable to sustain that effort because of their own inability to continue a recovery effort.
After the dust settles, people need to find jobs. If families have been split up, they need to be reunited. This type of work was logistically difficult for individual congregations to take on. They didn’t have the kinds of resources -- Internet access or the ability to plug into the Red Cross or welfare assistance agencies -- to make the connections. Some of the secular groups that typically work in welfare-related programs were better able to do that type of work.
But if these two groups can communicate and work with each other, you can draw on the strengths of both the faith community and the secular, non-profit and governmental structures.
Another important lesson is about having standards and oversight, balancing the need for accountability with the need for flexibility. Often after a disaster there are very few guidelines on how to use the donations that come in, how help gets distributed, who gets help. Creating protocols or understanding existing ones can ensure that people aren’t working in an uncoordinated fashion. Groups may also want to think ahead of time about how they want to tackle a situation -- whether to work with major responders like Red Cross or World Vision, for example.
Q: One of the key lessons from the study was that major disasters generate major responses. People are moved to respond with the best intentions but often have uneven capabilities. Could you tell us about that?
Anytime we hear about a disaster, our hearts are touched for the people who have suffered. People want to reach out and do something, but sometimes they don’t know what is the right thing to do. For example, people may send winter clothing to a place like Haiti that doesn’t need warm parkas. Money can be a better contribution so people locally can figure out whether they need to purchase food or clothing or some other kind of service that’s needed.
After Katrina, there were stories of people who rushed down with a truckload of food and supplies and yet once they reached the disaster site, they had nothing to sustain themselves, and they became a burden on the local responders because they didn’t bring enough food or water for themselves, much less to help the people in need. So while people are well-intentioned, they don’t always think through all the steps that are involved in making their offer of help practical and effective.
In our Katrina study, we found that two-thirds of the organizations we surveyed said they had never done any disaster relief before. That figure surprised me. We only surveyed within Louisiana and Mississippi and those two states pretty regularly have hurricanes, though, thank goodness, not the size of a Katrina. So the organizations were really novices in terms of what it was going to take to be of assistance, and that’s when people can get in over their heads.
Q: Do you think that same phenomenon -- good intentions but uneven capabilities -- may apply to the situation in Haiti?
Obviously, a number of things are different about Haiti than Katrina. But I think some of it does apply. Haiti is another country, governed by different laws and different cultures. People in the U.S. who want to respond need to take into account that they may need to function differently because they are helping in a different nation and need to be aware of what the protocols might be in international relief efforts.
Q: What could churches, denominational agencies and other faith-based groups be doing better in disaster relief?
A lot can be done just with some planning. Even if you’re not in a geographic area that is prone to natural disasters, it might be helpful for people within the congregation to talk about what would happen if something did happen here? Who can we link to? What do we know? Do we have a list of members of our congregation with all the names and addresses and contact information that we would want to have? Can we link to other churches and faith-based groups and secular groups within our own community so that we’re not doing this alone? Who would we want to be in touch with should a disaster happen locally or in some distant place?
Making those connections ahead of time, having lists of local volunteers and resources, can be incredibly helpful. Having an inventory of places around the community that have kitchens so you could prepare meals or places that might turned into temporary shelters can be very important during a disaster because then you’re not wondering “What do we do?” or “Where do we go?” You already have a list of people and places and know some of the capacity of these groups – information that would be helpful during an emergency situation.
Q: What about distant disasters such as Haiti? What can they do there? And a related question: In a world with great need, what advice do you have for a church or denominational leader to help think through where they should put their resources, their money and gifts?
That’s a very difficult question to answer. Many congregations do look for a role that they might be able to play, and sometimes that simply is taking up a special collection on a Sunday or having a special drive for canned goods that can be sent to a disaster area. That can be very important. I’d recommend first checking with your denomination to see what structures it may have and how an individual congregation can link to that structure for relief efforts either now or in the future. You may also want to have one or two members of your congregation join an existing group that is working either locally or internationally to better learn about disaster planning and what is best needed at the time of a disaster.
Q: You had some interesting findings in your study about the importance of leadership in relief efforts after Katrina.
A lot of leaders really stepped forward. They were people with a lot of compassion, a lot of energy and a lot of commitment. They saw a need and they were determined to do something to help solve a problem. Some of that came about in a very serendipitous manner; a chance meeting on a street that might start a conversation and then people joining forces to do something.
So leadership can certainly come from within the community or from outside. Some people will be naturally adept at figuring out how to set up systems and put them in place. We often want disaster relief efforts to work with the precision of a Navy SEAL team, to go in and get the job done, but we also want people who are compassionate and understand what the victims of the disaster are going through. Sometimes you can get that rolled into a single leader. Sometimes that comes from a team of leaders who help one another understand the full magnitude of what happens during a disaster. Read more of the interview with Carol J. De Vita »
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: NATURAL DISASTERS & MINISTRY
Disaster Preparedness and Response for Clergy and Congregations
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have demonstrated in ways almost too large to comprehend the importance of excellent disaster preparedness, training, and response. The role of clergy and caring teams in congregations is hard to fully outline in advance of a traumatic event, but some basic steps are:
1. Have a plan. We live in a time of universal vulnerability, and every congregation would benefit from having a plan for facing a disaster. Some components might include:

• Getting training for clergy response, offered by Church World Service and other local response efforts
• Establishing relationships with the network of disaster workers in your community
• Maintaining a master list of phone numbers of response teams
• Training a congregation response team (sometimes your lay leaders, sometimes a caring group such as Stephen Ministers) with appropriate outreach techniques and strategies
• Utilizing resources, such as the Church World Service Web site (www.churchworldservice.org), for ideas on preparedness. In an eerie echo of reality, the Church World Service website has an article on “Spiritual Care: Bringing God’s Peace to Disaster” that states that “rural people are less likely to seek institutional help than urban or suburban people. People of color and the poor are less likely to receive institutional help than others, even when they have incurred more damage.” If we are to learn from Katrina, advance networks and relationship building will be essential.
• Familiarizing yourself and your team with strategies for coping and for identifying needs
• Preparing to minister beyond your own congregation’s needs. Having brochures with coping strategies printed in all the languages of your neighborhood is one example of ministering beyond your own walls.

2. Show up and stabilize. The ministry of supportive and compassionate presence is never more important than in a disaster.
Showing up is the earliest and most basic form of crisis intervention.
The biggest mistake that spiritual caregivers and mental health workers do in a disaster, according to one disaster trainer, is to skip over stabilization.
Providing concrete items of water and food and moving people to safety so that things don’t get worse comes before theologizing.
3. Know that at first, everyone looks bad. In the first few days of a disaster, everyone looks traumatized. Distress is not dysfunction. Disaster response includes:

• Acknowledging common reactions to a disaster (anger, depression, not coping, crying, silence)
• Offering some coping strategies (helping others is a key to coping)
• Being aware of children’s particular developmental coping issues
• Using maximum eye contact, be concrete in your communication-the more concrete the suggestion of resource, the more likely the person will use it
• Warning people away from alcohol use, which can magnify depression

4. Use your pulpit and Web site. Worship is an important stabilizer for people in a disaster.
Pulpits are also important for dispelling rumors and providing coping strategies.
Use your Web site even if all of your people do not have power. In the recent hurricanes, I checked my Louisiana relatives’ church Web site daily for news and information about their area and was able to telephone that information to them.
Preach hope. The Church World Service Web site tells us the three major enemies of hope are silence (the repression that says “don’t complain”), fulfillment (“we can manage”) and technique (“we can solve everything”).
5. Watch for signs of prolonged stress. If, after 4-6 weeks, coping capacity is not returning, consider what other help is needed. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder occurs in at least 15% of persons in a disaster and help will be needed in resolving that stress. Some things to know:

• The suicide “zenith” following a disaster is 12-18 months out.
• Disaster workers are often acutely impacted since they are used to taking control.
• Follow up when people tell you they are depressed or sad with “what do you mean?”
• After the immediate disaster, ask people to tell you what happened for them, and what the worst part of that was.
• Care for the caregivers. Monitor you own physical and spiritual reserves, as well as those of your congregation.
• Line up support from colleagues outside the impacted area.
• Identify when you need a mini-vacation and take it.
• Practice Sabbath.
• Pay attention to the early signs of stress and burnout.

It has been said that “chance favors the prepared mind.” Readiness in both the clergy and the congregation can help us move with God’s love in the midst of difficult times.Read more »
Featured Resources

Congregational Trauma: Caring, Coping, and Learning by Jill M. Hudson
All congregations experience stress. Dealing with an out-of-the-ordinary event or tragedy–a fire, a sexual misconduct scandal, or the untimely death of a pastor, for instance–requires a specific set of congregational coping skills. Congregational Trauma addresses those needed skills by providing assessment tools for measuring healing and by discussing care strategies, how to adapt worship, how the judicatory can help, how to handle the media, and how tragedy can give rise to learning.

When God Speaks through Change: Preaching in Times of Congregational Transition by Craig A. Satterlee
Homiletics professor and parish pastor Craig Satterlee reflects in this accessible, provocative volume on how to integrate significant events in a congregation’s life into the preaching ministry of the church. Rather than offering a blueprint for preaching, he gently guides pastors, seminarians, and other congregational leaders who want to make sure the gospel, not an agenda, is preached.-------
Faith & Leadership
VOCATION
Three Stories from Katrina
Five years after the devastating storm hit New Orleans, three community leaders talk about how Hurricane Katrina changed their ministries and their lives.
When Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore five years ago this week, the storm and resulting flooding did more than just decimate the city of New Orleans.
The catastrophe killed nearly 1,500 people in Louisiana and damaged or destroyed 182,000 homes. Five years later, New Orleans has struggled to reach a population of 355,000 residents -- about 100,000 fewer than before Katrina.
The immediate responses revealed a tragic -- and in some cases potentially criminal -- lack of leadership. Yet amid the chaos, people in the community took on the mantle of leadership, responding to crises and effecting a recovery that continues.
Some survivors, such as Alice Craft-Kerney and Linda Jeffers, responded to immediate needs and have built on that to create ongoing organizations. Others, such as Bishop Charles E. Jenkins, used their existing offices in ways unimagined before the storm.
Craft-Kerney, Jenkins and Jeffers are leaders of faith whose motivation to serve the poor constitutes an adamantine commitment. Each voices deeply held biblical values, including the iniquity of indifference to human suffering. Each practices spiritual discernment, the study of Scripture, prayer and holy listening, especially to those most marginalized.
Finally, each of these leaders, deeply and daily immersed in the plight of distressed people for five years, has remained faithful to the call. In the words of Søren Kierkegaard, each has been graced with “the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible.”
The following testimonies from New Orleans offer a glimpse into experiences and practices that have sustained and honed their leadership.

Alice Craft-Kerney
‘Take care of my people’At the time Katrina hit, Alice Craft-Kerney, who had deep ties to the Lower Ninth Ward, worked at Charity Hospital, a state teaching hospital in New Orleans. She began her career as a staff nurse. Even before the storm, she had a strong commitment to working with the medically indigent, and eventually was promoted to supervisor of the prison unit and trauma surgery wards at Charity. After Katrina, however, her vocation as a health care leader took a dramatic turn. Today, she is executive director of the Lower 9th Ward Health Clinic. [Updated July 2015: The clinic has since closed due to funding problems(link is external).]
I was trapped in the Ninth Ward during the storm, because the hospital was short-staffed and I couldn’t leave. The word was, “If you can’t get out, go up.” So my family and I went to my brother’s three-story house near the river in the Lower Ninth Ward. There we sheltered 21 neighbors -- the youngest only a few days old. It was pitch-black at night, and we could hear the screams of our neighbors trapped in their attics. I felt so helpless -- just that sea of human suffering, and you couldn’t do anything about it.
By the seventh day, a Sunday, because we were on higher ground, the water had completely receded. We walked out on dry land. The National Guard took us away and would not tell us where we were going. So we were apprehensive. By now we had seen how mean and cruel the reception had been in other places.
But leadership does start at the top, and days later as we walked off the plane in Albuquerque, we saw the biggest smile on the governor’s face. The mayor was standing by his side. The tarmac was covered with welcome signs, and I remember saying, “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you that these people are being kind.”
The next three or four weeks was a time of deep reflection. We had our prayer circle every night. We read Scripture daily. All sorts of strangers reached out to us in specific ways. And I remember praying, “Lord, I know I’ve lost everything, but I still have everything, too. With you all things are possible. With you I have everything.”
I felt God cleared away everything that could distract me from my purpose. My daily walk was one where I was coming very close to the Spirit. As I walked forward, I asked God to guide me and show me. “Keep my mind clear,” I asked him, because I saw where people were becoming mentally unstable from the worry, and I prayed for a peace beyond understanding.
When we got back to New Orleans in December and saw the devastation firsthand, we were still traumatized, not knowing how to pick up from here. At my mom’s house we ran into some young volunteers on bicycles saying, “Come to Common Ground” -- a center set up in a house in the Ninth Ward. And one day a young woman said to me, “Well Alice, you have a health care background. Why don’t you do the clinic?”
My background was inpatient care. I wasn’t administration. So my first reaction was, “Me?” Then I heard it. I was in the room and it came so clear: “Take care of my people, and I will take care of you.” And I said, “Oh my God, oh my God.”
When I got that command, I prayed very hard, because I didn’t want to go off on my own and say I was called when I really wasn’t. So I was wondering and I was praying, “Show me something to confirm this is what you want me to do.”
I knew I wouldn’t want to do it without my friend Patricia Berryhill. So I asked her, and she said yes. Through her, the house was provided. This was the first confirming sign. After that, a group called Leaders Creating Change through Contribution wanted to do a renovation. They had $35,000 to give, and they gave it to us. With the support of Common Ground and many other volunteers, in 10 days 70 percent of the renovation was complete. People worked around the clock through the night. This was the second confirming sign.
One day I went to City Park, where there was a big relief operation. But when I got there, they were closed. So I asked the lady who was overseeing, “I was wondering if I could get a case of water?” She said, “Follow me,” then led me to an area where people were restocking. She yelled out, “Everybody! Turn around! See this lady? You see her? Whenever you see this lady, you give her whatever she wants and however much she wants.” And I kid you not, when I left that day, my car was loaded down. When I got back to the clinic, people came out and asked, “What’s all this?” and I said, “Nothing but the hand of God.” So that was the third confirming sign, and I knew the Lord had put a call on my life.
I quit my job. I had no means of support. God is my witness and my secret judge. I asked no one for anything. God provided everything. We were able to open not because of coincidence but because of what I call “God incidents.” But you have to walk in faith and keep your eyes like laser vision on him. Stay in constant connection with him and know he has a plan. He has our future.
It has been a huge effort. Over 2,500 people have come through our doors. People were dying because they could not get to a doctor, because they could not get routine medications. Those without insurance were in most need, and they were the ones we served.
God has given me such a sensitivity. I feel the pain of the people so deeply. Sometimes I just cry. The depraved indifference. The lack of progress is shameful. But every time I start wavering in my faith, the Lord won’t let it happen.
What I’ve learned from Katrina, as a receiver and as a giver, is that when you are showing kindness, people can feel you being used by a higher power. God is present and touches lives. It is the way of Christian leadership. Kindness is the command and kindness is the promise God gives when he puts a call on your life.

Bishop Charles E. Jenkins
What do these events say about the moral trajectory of this country?
Bishop Charles E. Jenkins was serving his seventh year as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana when Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Like 400,000 other South Louisianians, Jenkins evacuated to Baton Rouge. From that location he led the first six months of his denomination’s relief efforts, returning to his diocesan headquarters and destroyed home in Slidell in March 2006. Under Jenkins’ leadership, the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana was the recipient of the largest domestic relief grant ever made in the history of the Episcopal Church. With those funds, and influenced by Jenkins’ radical conversion to social justice and racial reconciliation, the church established the Office of Disaster Response (now Episcopal Community Services)(link is external) and spearheaded a transformation of his denomination’s ministries. Jenkins retired in January.
Leading a continual renewal of commitment to our neighbor in the years after Hurricane Katrina was a ministry full of blessing and challenge. For four and a half years I prayed continuously for grace, strength and a vision that was far beyond myself -- and I do believe in the power of prayer. With those gifts come crosses, so that you do not become overly confident in yourself. They continually come, and become less frightening, but no less painful. But that is the opportunity for grace. That is the opportunity for the Resurrection, isn’t it?
Central to our challenge has been the ability to foster the ongoing moral and spiritual maturation of all our people. This is particularly difficult in a society of risk and regression. Is it even possible to mature in such a society? I would say yes, but the risk to the leader is real, and often the leader does not survive.
Nevertheless, I believe it is the leader’s role to build the capacity for differentiation, which involves the ability to withstand discomfort of self and others in the face of difference. I still believe that Christian leaders can be effective when they focus on developing these capacities, and that this is one of our most important tasks.
One example of a way I have sought to differentiate a Christian response to Katrina from other possible and widespread responses is to point out the difference between policies and actions informed by self-seeking values versus those informed by universal ones. I have tried to teach that you can recognize self-seeking values by the number of people whose dignity and welfare they leave out.
One pattern of behavior and policy I have spoken out against consistently -- and that we have seen repeatedly in the five years since Katrina -- is what the writer Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” The primary difference between the way that most religious organizations have gone about their recovery ministry and the way that many public/private partnerships have gone about it is that we have not enriched ourselves financially.
There is a moral issue at stake in this that I, as a Christian, must address. As a leader, it is important that I give it voice and embody it to the extent that I am able. I have stated publicly that as Christians we do not see humans as a means to an end, especially if that end is financial profit. This is especially offensive when we see the poor or the traumatized as means to an end. As Christians, we see humans as an end in ourselves. The cross of Jesus Christ, the hope of Christ crucified and resurrected for humankind, gives value to all.
Enriching a few at the expense of many, and the violation of human dignity this represents, is seen time after time in events that have transpired in the Gulf over the past five years. Each occasion has been a maturing moment -- a moment, I pray, for clearer differentiation.
We have witnessed the enrichment of companies who manufactured cheap, formaldehyde-ridden travel trailers, and we have made active choices to stand by and assist the families living in these trailers in every way we are able. We have spoken out against and joined demonstrations objecting to the enrichment of real estate developers receiving contracts conditional on the demolition of thousands of historically landmarked unflooded units of public housing at a time when 1 in 20 New Orleanians was homeless.
The debate over whether to refurbish and reopen Charity Hospital -- the second-largest hospital in the country for care of the medically indigent at the time of the storm -- is another we have joined. And of course there is our mobilization in response to the impact on thousands for at least a generation of the greatest environmental disaster in the nation’s history: the explosion of the BP rig, flooding of the Gulf of Mexico with oil.
What I have tried to convey to other faith leaders throughout the United States is that Katrina, seen through this lens, is not only a challenge for the faith leaders and people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to grow and mature in our values. Katrina, and now BP, is a chance for the faith leaders of America to help all our people along this path.
The fifth anniversary provides a focal point and a time for us to assess what has transpired and to examine what these events say about the moral trajectory of this country and our communities.
New Orleans may be the American city where we have the opportunity to see most vividly the long-term societal impact of such a moral trajectory, but it is not the only American city where these values are shaping our future.

Linda Jeffers with Louisiana community activists Shakoor Aljuwani (left) and the Rev. Tyrone Edwards (right).
‘You can’t be defeated’
Linda Jeffers -- a faith-based community organizer and leading member of New Orleans’ Women on Assignment -- was stranded in New Orleans at the time of the storm, and began her work as an organizer on the overpass of I-10 immediately after the hurricane. It was there that she organized hundreds to board buses for Houston. Arriving at the Astrodome, she continued to organize, and in the months after Katrina she helped hundreds more find clothing, food, shelter, transportation and jobs. Since returning to New Orleans, she has been a leading force in statewide organizing through the Rebuilding Lives Coalition and regionally through the Gulf Coast Equity and Inclusion Campaign, a role that has put her at the epicenter of recovery from the BP oil rig explosion and subsequent flooding of the Gulf of Mexico with oil. Jeffers recounts the leadership of her pastor during the storm and offers advice for other Christian leaders.
I sit under the Rev. Robert C. Blakes Jr. and his brother Samuel Blakes at New Home Ministries Church. To see Blakes and how he lost everything and how he had to either give up or go on was an inspiration. There was no difference between him and me after Katrina. He was going through everything like we were, and he made a choice. I watched him and saw that we had the same walk.
He was godly. He put himself aside and made a sacrifice to come back and encourage us. First of all he said, “I don’t have a car; I don’t have any money, or any food. But whatever I got, Sister Jeffers, you got, too.” I could reach out and touch him. There were no private numbers. “You want to call?” he said. “Here’s my cell phone number.”
Then he told me, “You are a strong woman in the Word of God. You got to get up. You can’t drop your God. You can’t be defeated.” He took the Word and taught me how to read it and draw encouragement from it. He showed me how to press forward to the things before me, forgetting those things behind.
He showed me how to enter God’s gates with thanksgiving and praise, and to recognize that God had put me in a position to help my people. My voice and my cry was not just my voice and my cry. It was that of my people. So I was able to draw encouragement and encourage others. Not breast-feed them, mind you. Encourage. We had to learn to eat that spiritual meat in a hurry.
But then, of course, I also had to develop my own practices, too.
Every day since December 26, 2006, I and my four sisters, who are in Maryland, D.C., and Florida, get up between 4 and 4:30 a.m. and we have prayer together. To get up and have prayer before the rising of the sun and give thanks sustains us. My mom said she never imagined all her children on the phone every morning having prayer, but that is what we do.
Second, I advise this: Daily, find someone you can do something for. Whatever you need, go give it. If you have two dollars -- go give it. If you need food -- go feed somebody. If you are lonely -- go love somebody. And whatever is ahead of you that day will be in right, perfect and divine order.
I do what my friend and I call “soaking.” It is what others call meditation -- learning how to go into the silence and have that time to commune with God himself. We have taught ourselves how to enter, and how not to wait for that conversation with God until Wednesday night or Sunday morning, when there is an intercessor.
But what keeps me going most of all is my love of people. The love I have and the understanding that they want certain things that they don’t have right now. New Orleans is not rebuilt. Like the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:11-21, too many of our people find themselves in a land they know not. Our people are in that country -- in the pigsty slopping the hogs. That is where we are now. We recognize that our Father’s servants are doing better than we.
So why are we still in a foreign land? Why can’t we come back to New Orleans, to Louisiana, to the land of our fathers and our fathers’ fathers -- 10, sometimes 20 generations deep? What did we do so bad? We long for that carpet to be laid out for our return and to be welcomed home with open arms.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned as a faith-based organizer since Katrina is that we need leadership now. We must be ready. The time Katrina hit was not the time to train leaders. The time the oil rig exploded was not the time to train leaders. We needed people who had already been trained and were ready to make calls and get to work. We need leadership development, and we need to start in our churches.
Whatever the organizations were doing before, it was not effective. And there need to be enough trained leaders that a few aren’t overwhelmed, overworked and drop off. Because mentally and emotionally, the few have been beaten up and down. We need 20 leaders in a community, not one. And I am working to make this happen, and to make sure that churches embrace and support these leaders.
What’s at jeopardy at the fifth anniversary is whether or not we will ever be whole again. We are on the verge of losing an entire generation and society of people. We are about to lose them, because they weren’t embraced. People turned their backs and walked away. The system failed them. The government failed them. Even some churches failed them. So let’s talk about Christian leadership. It is time we do something.Read more from Courtney Cowart »
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Faith & Leadership
MISSIONS & EVANGELISM
The Blessings of Covenant

On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Courtney Cowart, the former co-director of the Office of Disaster Response for the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana, reflected on her experience working in New Orleans in the months after the storm. The divine image of God is a community of faithful relationships, she writes.
About a year into the recovery from Hurricane Katrina, I seriously considered giving up. I had been deployed a few days after Katrina as a strategic adviser to Episcopal Bishop Charles E. Jenkins. A few months later, I became director of the newly established Office of Disaster Response. The invitation was extended because of the role I had played at St. Paul’s Chapel at ground zero after 9/11.
There I had learned a great deal about people power. “The little chapel that stood” -- as St. Paul’s came to be called -- was a museum prior to the terrorist attacks. But seeing its proximity to the devastation, thousands of people from the city, the country and the world descended on the church spontaneously and created a ministry to the recovery workers that became internationally known.
That experience lasted nine months -- until the last piece of twisted steel was removed from the World Trade Center site. But at that point in the Katrina recovery there was no end in sight. In fact, it seemed the recovery had not yet begun. The scale of human suffering was beyond anything I could conceive of, even after nearly being buried alive at ground zero on 9/11.
So a year after the storm, I was beginning to wonder if we would ever be able to make even a dent. That was when Mark Stevenson, canon to the ordinary, said to me, “Remember what Mother Teresa said: ‘God does not call us to be successful. God calls us to be faithful.’”
I stayed. And because I did, New Orleans had the opportunity to teach me what so many of the people of New Orleans know -- that the divine image of God is a community of faithful relationships. The truth of this is in the bones of each of the three people whose leadership stories are honored in the accompanying article. Being in the company of Bishop Jenkins, health care advocate Alice Craft-Kerney and community organizer Linda Jeffers allowed some of their deep faith and commitment to rub off on me.
Traditionally, churches and the ministries they support are the entities that exhibit the greatest staying power in post-disaster recoveries. Perhaps this is because Christian values, faith practices and sustained moral fortitude go hand in hand. Just as the initial response to Katrina was a litmus test for the spiritual health of the nation, so is completion of the mission to build from Katrina’s ravages America’s first 21st-century city, a city worthy to be called “the beloved community.”
I’m not worried about the long-term commitment of New Orleanians to making every neighbor whole. But I know they are worried that vacillations in the public will to assist Haiti, and widespread acceptance of the message that the BP oil fiasco is now over, could be indications that the capacity of American citizens to sustain their commitments to the Gulf is declining.
Addressing our populace’s short-term spiritual attention span in the face of long-term social challenges associated with incarnating God’s reign of shalom is the work of all of us who are faith leaders wherever we serve God and neighbor.
We have a role in combating the systemic pull to return to a pre-storm status quo (as Craft-Kerney calls it) of “depraved indifference” toward the suffering of our neighbors. Without the rest of us, can the vision of a new New Orleans be manifest over the next 10 to 15 years? The outcome may depend on the ability of faith leaders throughout the country to exercise our leadership gifts, to renew our commitments and sustain our covenants.
Doing so would undoubtedly be good for our beleaguered neighbors who have endured the largest natural disaster in our country’s history and the largest environmental one, both within the span of five years.
But, as Jenkins suggests, there may be more to it than that. Only people of deep values stay motivated. Or is it that people who stay motivated form deep values?
At the fifth anniversary of Katrina, renewal of the moral commitment necessary for citizens and neighbors to sustain the faith that does justice on the Gulf Coast may be a gift and a blessing not only to New Orleans but also to people, communities and churches everywhere that choose to stay the course. That choice was certainly a blessing to me.
Read more from Courtney Cowart »

UPCOMING ALBAN COURSE: PREACHING ADVENT
Preaching Advent
An Alban Online Short Course
October 31 - November 18, 2016
Advent, the four-Sunday season preceding Christmas, is approaching rapidly. Because you may be looking for a little help in preparing to preach Advent this year, Alban is offering a three-week online short course that will provide you with new insights into Scripture and with specific ways to engage your congregation's imagination during this sacred season.
Learn more and register »

FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY

Making a Difference in a Globalized World: Short-term Missions that Work by Laurie A. Occhipinti
Every year, an estimated 1.6 million Americans participate in short-term mission trips, spending over one billion dollars-figures that have increased exponentially in the last two decades. About one third of U.S. congregations sponsor such trips each year. While they are referred to as "mission" trips, many trips focus not on conversion or evangelism, but on service projects-building a playground, providing medical care, or serving free meals to the poor. Short-term mission participants have a genuine desire to transform conditions of poverty, yet they don't always know how to go about it; many people involved in short-term mission work virtually reinvent the wheel when they design and plan their service projects.
Making a Difference in a Globalized World: Short-term Missions that Work is a guide to leaders of such trips. The book presents clear insight and research from anthropologists and development professionals, and encourages individuals to lead mission trips that make a greater impact on the communities that they are serving.
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