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.