When you deal with those our society and culture wants to forget, and you see how God works in them, it will teach you how much God will work in your life, and how adequate His grace is.
Chuck Kelley, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary president, on the seminary’s educational programs in several southern prisons
Archives For November 30, 1999
“There is a new form of idolatry that is creeping into the ranks of Southern Baptists…. We’ve got to be so careful not to become Spurgeon-ites. We’ve got to be so careful not to become Calvin-ites and Arminian-ites….If we’re not careful, we’re going to become no different to the Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amalekites. Before we know it we’re just going to become another religious denomination of parasites instead of a people who lift high the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
South Carolina pastor Don Wilton preaching at the SBC Pastors Conference in New Orleans.
Posted by Eric Reed
(New Orleans) — When I visited New Orleans in 2005, a few months after Hurricane Katrina, I stopped at the church where I had served for almost ten years. The doors were off their hinges, a few windows hung open, and the playground was overgrown. The whole neighborhood was a ghost town, with house after house marked with the dates they were searched by recovery crews and the number of bodies found inside.
I slipped into the familiar sanctuary and up the stairs to the balcony. The pews and choir loft were destroyed, the walls lined by water seven feet deep for three weeks.
All I found of the years I had served was one red Bible from the set we had purchased for the pews. From my home in Chicagoland, I had tried to contact the friends and church members we had known and loved in the previous decade, but had located few of those who had fled the city as the waters rose. Looking down on the place where we had worked and worshiped, I wept. Not much was left of our work, it seemed.
Today, I was back in that sanctuary, worshiping with the people who have returned.
Seven years after the flood, there is a church worshiping in that place again. And more important, there is a church reaching the people who have returned to our former community.
Our former congregation was virtually decimated in 2005. Only a couple of families remained after Katrina, wondering how to restore their homes and their church. A neighboring SBC church had a few families, but their facility was completely wiped out. God brought all these things together, with wave upon wave of hearty Southern Baptist construction teams, and over several years a new ministry has been born.
It did my heart good to see people from the neighborhood worshiping there. Present with them this morning were IMB missionaries, former church members in town for the convention, and yet more construction teams from Arkansas.
God bless Arkansas Baptists, and Illinois Baptists, and campus ministries such as the team at SIU Carbondale, who continue to make New Orleans their ministry construction project. As I toured the classrooms filled with bunk beds used by the visiting work teams, I understood what one member told me: “It’s good to be a Southern Baptist in New Orleans now.”
It wasn’t always so. In my experience, our New Orleans neighbors were more interested in Mardi Gras than in the gospel.
“People are grateful for what Southern Baptists have done to restore New Orleans,” she continued. “Today, they will listen when we share the gospel.”
In the aftermath of Katrina, city planners estimated it would take 30 years for the population—and the neighborhoods—to return to their pre-flood numbers. A driving tour confirms that.
But my old neighborhood is looks better than a ghost town today. And to hear the brothers and sisters who continue Christ’s work there as they tell stories of hope and restoration, we see they are well on their way.
An old building is restored and a church is reborn seven years after Hurricane Katrina sent most of the congregation fleeing from New Orleans. Much of the work is thanks to work crews and mission teams from Southern Baptist churches across the nation.
By Meredith Flynn
I’m in New Orleans this week for my ninth Southern Baptist Convention. From Dallas at age 16 to this convention, my second in New Orleans, at age 30, you might say I’ve grown up here. And while there are arguably (well, let’s be honest, inarguably) “cooler” things to do in the summer, I’ve loved them all. Mostly because this is my family (literally – because my whole family still comes, and figuratively – because Southern Baptists form their own kind of family).
There is one very new component to my convention experience this year: I’ve brought along a newcomer! My husband of eight months, Chris, is at his very first SBC after only a few years of attending a Southern Baptist church. Every day this week, check here for a brief (hopefully fun) report of the convention through his eyes (told by me, but usually with him sitting next to me). And be sure to read the July 2 edition of the Illinois Baptist for more of his New Orleans adventures.
For now, check out these pictures from our first day:
Breakfast at Cafe Du Monde, famous for strong coffee and beignets
(fancy donuts with powdered sugar).
New Orleans architecture on display in the French Quarter.
Chris ate his first Disaster Relief meal (thankfully, not in the midst of
an actual disaster). Texas DR volunteers prepared delicious jambalaya
for a block party hosted by Oak Park Baptist Church on Saturday.
By Meredith Flynn
For the next week, the IB staff is in New Orleans covering the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting. Check back here often for updates from the convention floor, the latest from other meetings and events, and some fun bits and pieces you might not see anywhere else.
Tonight’s post: Crossover, the SBC’s annual missions partnership in the convention’s host city. Visitors come a day early to work with local churches in block parties, door-to-door evangelism, prayer walking, and a host of other outreach events.
New Orleans church-goers understand missions. In the seven years since Hurricane Katrina, the city has seen thousands upon thousands of volunteers, people who want to bring hope to a place that had lost all hope. Oak Park Baptist Church on New Orleans’ Westbank has hosted many of those volunteers on its third floor, which was converted into dormitory-style housing after Katrina.
The city can be a draining place to do ministry. When you ask Pastor Bobby Stults if the work is tiring, he smiles, hangs his head in mock despair, and asks, “Does it show?”
Oak Park has seen its neighborhood change drastically in the five years since Stults became pastor. Rapid migration out of the city’s center meant a mostly Anglo neighborhood very quickly became a mostly African American one. Stults, who came to New Orleans to attend seminary in 1995 and never left, has led the church to make a conscious decision (followed by years to conscious effort) to become a community church. A place where its neighbors feel welcomed, accepted, ministered to.
That’s why Stults planned a block party, with the help of volunteers from Texas, Illinois and Arizona, that also featured six African American rappers from a sister church. “This is the music of our community,” he said.
His church has gone through attendance ups and downs, as people have gotten comfortable (or uncomfortable) with Oak Park’s new mission. But the people who worship at the church now are unified behind the idea that this mission field is their responsibility, and they’re led by a pastor who knows, even when the work is draining, that God has placed them here for such a time as this.
For more on Crossover, see the July 2 issue of the Illinois Baptist. Go to IBSA.org/IllinoisBaptist to subscribe.
Pastor Bobbby Stults (right) greets K.C. Leonard, a member of his church, during their Crossover block party June 16.
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