Katrina connections: The New Testament Church reappears
By Parker T. Williamson, The Layman ,Volume 41, Number 1,Posted January 29, 2008, January 30, 2008
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Special Report: After Katrina
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WAVELAND, Miss. – They call it Mississippi’s “Ground Zero,” the Rev. Steve Bryant said as he piloted my wife Patty and me, now two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, down Highway 607 toward Waveland. The town – or what is left of it – couldn’t have been better named. It was here that a 30-foot wall of water driven by the most turbulent maelstrom ever to hit that coast made landfall.
As we crossed some railroad tracks, Bryant observed that the elevated track bed served as a temporary blockade for the water. Its steel rails were twisted like a roller coaster. Eventually, the storm washed over it but, for a time, the tracks held – forming a collection basin for Katrina’s victims.
“It’s been two years,” Bryant said, “and even now when I cross these tracks I can smell what I smelled that day. Buried under eight feet of debris were the mangled bodies of the dead: cattle, goats, pigs, dogs and … people. Body parts surfaced for weeks after the storm. Whenever I come here, I smell the odor of decaying human flesh. I just can’t get it out of my nostrils.”
A railroad trestle bears witness to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina as it wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast region. Later in the day, we crossed the I-10 bridge over Saint Louis Bay, one of the few bridges that survived Katrina’s assault. As we reached the top of the arch, Bryant said, “Take a look at the rail and I’ll tell you what was there.”
Bryant said that when the water began to rise, six people who lived in a low-lying area near the bridge fled for their lives. Spotting the high point on the bridge, some 20 feet above the water line, they ran to the top and lashed themselves to the railing to keep from being swept away by 145 mile-per-hour winds.
When the storm subsided, Mississippi Highway Patrol officers found six bodies dangling from the rail as if bound by a hangman’s noose. Tethered to their “safe haven,” they had been ensnared in Katrina’s fury as the rising tide washed over them.
Confronting the carnage
Bryant and his congregation at First Presbyterian Church in Vicksburg were 220 miles inland when Katrina unleashed her coastal assault. In the howl that tore limbs from Vicksburg trees, punctured roof tops and littered the streets, he heard what the Lord was calling him to do. Borrowing a friend’s four-wheeler, he raced into the teeth of the storm.
Armed with his cell phone and a passion for those who had been caught in Katrina’s wake, Bryant circumvented washed-out bridges, hurdled fallen tree limbs and navigated roads strewn with debris from homes that had been ripped from their moorings. He saw children wandering aimlessly amidst the carnage, having no idea where their parents might be, or even if they might be.
“We sat a beautiful little boy on the hood of the car,” Bryant said. “He was so stunned that he couldn’t even say his name. Highway patrolmen found him walking down the road hand-in-hand with a well-known methamphetamine addict. The ‘meth-head’ said he had come upon the boy in the middle of the storm and was trying to take care of him. He didn’t know the boy’s name, where he lived or who his momma was.”
“I watched those officers entertain the little boy by clowning around and making funny faces, all the while trying to coax him into saying his name. Officer Jay Nelson was jumping around and making everyone laugh, and saying, ‘Come on, little fellow, what’s your name?’
“Over and over again he tried, only to be met with an unintelligible sound. We couldn’t tell if the child was saying ‘toy’ or maybe ‘Troy,’ but we decided to call him Troy. Officer Nelson turned away so the little boy wouldn’t see. He began to sob. I hugged him and said a quick prayer on the spot, choking back my own tears,” Bryant said.
Hurricane Katrina Hurricane Katrina was the costliest and one of the five deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States. It was the sixth-strongest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded and the third-strongest hurricane on record that made landfall in the United States.
- Formed – August 23, 2005.
- Dissipated – August 31, 2005.
- Highest winds – 175 mph.
- Fatalities – 1,836 total.
- Damage – $81.2 billion.
Source: Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina: 23-30 August 2005/ National Hurricane Center. “Hancock County Sheriff Steve Garber said, ‘I’ll take him home with me,’ he said.
“I’ve often wondered what happened to that little boy. Was his mother found alive? Where is he now?”
Bryant made his way to what was left of a Waveland shopping center, a once-thriving cluster of stores. Nine bodies were found on what was left of Wal-Mart’s roof. The paved parking lot had become a staging area for rescue teams, a landing zone for helicopters and a place for separated families to search for news of their loved ones. Here, the Presbyterian clergyman made his way among the refugees of Katrina’s fury, asking, “How can I help you?” and then dispatching their requests via cell phone to his Vicksburg congregation.
On the edge of the parking lot, seven refrigerated trucks were being filled with the dead.
“Human remains were everywhere,” Bryant said. “National Guard Humvees brought them in. Helicopters unloaded them. People brought them in the trunks of cars. People yelled, ‘Body bags, we don’t have enough body bags!’ There’s no way I can describe that scene.”
A Mississippi Highway patrolman came by. He told Bryant that he had chain-sawed his way down a dirt road to check on a house deep in the woods. There he found a man sitting on the remains of his front porch in a catatonic stupor. Out in the yard, just a few feet away, lay the bodies of his father and his little girl – there in the heat of the sun, five days after Katrina.
“The law enforcement and medical people were doing a fantastic job,” Bryant said. “It became obvious to me that here was the priority. They needed help, and they needed it fast. National Guardsmen, some just home from Iraq, said, ‘Baghdad has nothing on Waveland!’”
Bryant raced back to Vicksburg and his nearby Home Depot store. “I want every chain saw and every generator that you’re willing to sell me,” he said as he handed them his personal Visa and Home Depot cards. While maxing his credit line to the limit, Bryant called Larry Lambiotte, a member of his church who owned an 18-wheeler truck. “I need you Larry,” he said.
“You’ve got me,” Larry replied.
A boat sits far from the Gulf of Mexico. Bryant received a call from his friend, the Rev. Rob Weingartner, executive director of The Presbyterian Outreach Foundation. “I have a donor who wants you to find and purchase 100 large generators for the hurricane victims,” he said. “Great!”
Bryant responded, while asking Home Depot to set up a tab and add more generators to his shopping list.
Lambiotte dispatched his truck and driver, loaded Bryant’s purchases along with pallets of bottled water and cans filled with gas and diesel fuel, and began to navigate a circuitous route toward the coast. Bryant, who had now gone two nights without sleep, rode “shotgun.”
Five miles down the road, Bryant called Weingartner to report that his donor’s 100 generators were on their way to the coast. “Make that 200,” Weingartner said.
The driver turned around and headed back to Home Depot, where they exhausted the store’s supply of generators.
Bryant said he realized the Lord had given him two gifts whose convergence might come to the aid of his people.
As a Confessing Church pastor, he was connected to a nationwide network of some 1,300 Presbyterian congregations that identify themselves by their common faith. Their confession of an explicitly Biblical faith sets them apart from the pluralistic culture that has infected the PCUSA. Confessing Churches are in the denomination, but their public stance signals the fact that they are clearly not of the denomination.
Bryant made telephone calls and e-mails to fellow Confessing Church pastors to channel their compassion to his brothers and sisters along the coast.
The second gift Bryant possessed was his personal friendship with Mississippi law enforcement officials and pastors serving churches in Katrina’s path. His brother-in-law, a Presbyterian deacon, is an Assistant U.S. District Attorney, and his friend, Sheriff Martin Pace of Warren County, is a Presbyterian elder. These connections gave Bryant access to the stricken area and the opportunity to organize teams of local church leaders who knew the needs of their people.
Bryant said he believed the Lord was calling him to bridge the two gifts. He would connect his Confessing Church friends with his on-the-ground friends. Soon, he became a guide, meeting planes at the Jackson, Miss. airport, packing visiting pastors and church leaders into his van, and helping them see first-hand what needed to be done.
Bryant’s visitors met local church leaders, channeled money directly from congregation to congregation and arranged for work teams to be housed in portions of church buildings that had survived.
Soon, help started flowing from St. Andrews Church in Newport Beach, Calif.; University Church in Seattle, Wash.; First Church in Greenville, S.C.; Montreat Church in Montreat, N.C.; First Church in Thomasville, Ga.; Solana Beach Church in Solana Beach, Calif.; First Church in Nashville, Tenn.; Providence Church in Hilton Head, S.C.; First Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; First Church in Fayetteville, N.C.; First and Monument churches in Grand Junction, Colo.; First Church in Colorado Springs, Colo.; Westminster Church in Nashville, Tenn.; Grace Church in Houston; and the Board of Directors of the Presbyterian Lay Committee.
Mississippi
- The Gulf Coast of Mississippi suffered massive damage from the impact of Hurricane Katrina, which left 238 people dead, 67 missing, and billions of dollars in damage: bridges, barges, boats, piers, houses and cars were washed inland.
- Katrina traveled up the entire state, and afterwards all 82 counties in Mississippi were declared disaster areas for federal assistance, 47 for full assistance.
Source: Information Relating to the Federal Appropriations for Katrina Recovery. Office of the Governor, Mississippi. Bryant’s network took on a life of its own. Congregational delegations returned home with stories of what they had seen and done. The word spread with hurricane speed and other churches got into the act. The Outreach Foundation sent $150,000 for relief efforts. Covenant Church in Jackson, Miss., sent $100,000. Grace Covenant Church in Richmond, Va., wired $90,000. An anonymous elder in Nashville, Tenn., sent $50,000. An elder in Houston sent $25,000 more than once. “Over and over again, God answered our prayers,” Bryant said. “Each day, He enabled another day of loading and unloading 18 wheelers while we hunted for new needs.”
More than $1.8 million flowed through these direct connections. There was no bureaucracy, no central headquarters, no paid staff – simply a mushrooming congregation-to-congregation network, with Bryant and his volunteers at “Ground Zero” building bridges.
Seven feet of water poured into the first floor of the educational building at First Church in Ocean Springs, but the second floor was dry, so the congregation turned it into a dormitory. First Church in Pascagoula also was flooded, but a second-story space equipped with two showers was set aside for up to 40 out-of-town volunteers. First Church in Bay Saint Louis survived and provided housing for as many as 100 volunteers at a time.
Other congregations, like First Church in Gautier, turned their property into on-site warehouses for a steady flow of materials from Home Depot and other stores.
“I cannot say enough about what Home Depot did,” Bryant said. “They took my personal credit cards and my church’s credit when they really didn’t know if we could pay it off. What they learned is that their most reliable customer was the Lord. He’s the one who paid those bills.”
In the more than two years since the Hurricane Katrina disaster, Bryant has answered the call to serve another Mississippi congregation, Grace Chapel Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Madison.
“We’re still in the building business,” he says, “but we’re doing building of a different kind. We’re building up the Body of Christ, growing our small congregation by reaching out with the Gospel.”
Reflecting on his Katrina experience, Bryant says he had been privileged to see a contemporary version of the ancient New Testament Church. The early church didn’t have any central office or executive hierarchy, he said. What they had was a network of congregations, struggling in the midst of a hostile culture. When one congregation got into trouble or had to go underground, other congregations came to their aid with gifts, encouragement and the Gospel. The Apostle Paul’s letters often were delivered by messengers from one congregation to another.
As Presbyterian congregations across the country connected with Bryant and his friends via cell phone, e-mail and through the Confessing Church network, Christians in Mississippi received desperately needed aid. But that connectivity also pointed to a reality beyond itself. It forged for many of these congregations an across-the-centuries link with New Testament Christianity, reminding them of what it means to be the Body of Christ.
The Presbyterian Church’s purse
Meanwhile, Presbyterian Church (USA) headquarters dispatched appeals to Presbyterian churches, calling for contributions to the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance program (PDA) with the promise that the money would be used to help Katrina survivors. Waves of Presbyterian generosity – eventually totaling more than $23 million – rolled into denominational headquarters in Louisville, Ky.
“I wish they had been as good at spending the money as they were at collecting it,” Bryant said.
More than two years after Katrina hit, PDA still is sitting on more than $12 million of those funds.