African Americans must be involved in recovery, pastors say
Feb. 13, 2006
NOTE: Photographs and a related story are available at http://umns.umc.org.
A UMNS Report By Jeneane Jones*
As the nation celebrates Black History Month, two United Methodist pastors are finding a new sense of mission amid the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and they are calling for African Americans to be more involved in the recovery.
Returning from his church's first tour of duty in New Orleans, the Rev. Kelvin Sauls is considering the impact of the devastation on his own community of Oakland, Calif.
"Being with the First Street United Methodist Church in the first weeks of the New Year gave me a better picture of what it is to be in community together," said Sauls, pastor of Downs Memorial United Methodist Church. "You can see people who can relate to Jim Crow, the civil rights movement. Our African-American community here in California and in New Orleans went through all that together. We need to say that 'we are here with you now.' Nothing can replace the ministry of presence."
A team of United Methodist volunteers from Downs Memorial went to First Street United Methodist in New Orleans, the oldest African-American United Methodist church in the city and one of the few that emerged relatively unscathed after Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29.
"First Street sits in the New Orleans Garden District," said the Rev. Lance Eden, pastor. "During slavery, the plantation owners had their estates in the Garden District up on the hill - the high side of the bowl - while their enslaved servants lived behind and below them. After emancipation, the area was built up but was still impoverished."
After Katrina, for nearly one month, the homes at the bottom of "the bowl" around First Street church stood in two feet of water. "Our church sustained water damage; we lost stained-glass windows and the steeple," Eden said. But Katrina helped redefine the historic church's mission, he added.
"We were a dying church, struggling to figure out what mission was," he said. "Katrina changed that. Now all you have to do is look around you and be willing to work."
Called to outreach
First Street's priority is outreach, Eden said. "On Thanksgiving Day, we fed 300 people. We've gutted more than 40 homes. The church is called to do mission; reaching out is what we are called to do. Before Katrina, we had 75 in worship. Now we have close to 175 and many of them are people who had not been to church before."
He has been living at the church since October. He and most of the First Street congregation lost their homes in the hurricane.
"When I first came back, I slept in the church van. I needed to let people know that the church was still open," he said. "When I did that, they started coming back." After the church reopened, a Minnesota family provided Eden with a RV to live in, but his father and grandmother are now living in it while he stays at the church office.
"Bad things, good things have been working together for us," he said. "It's hard for me to complain. Our church is living out its mission. You can't help but be grateful."
'No one home'
Still, the road to recovery is anything but over. Sauls recalls how eerily the sounds of hammers echoed off buildings around the neighborhood while his team gutted two homes. "There's a stark sense of stillness. The people are not back. The lights are on in the streets, but it's an illusion. You see that no one is home."
According to an analysis released by a Brown University sociologist, the city of New Orleans could lose up to 80 percent of its black population if people displaced by Hurricane Katrina are not able to return to their damaged neighborhoods. Blacks and the poor were disproportionately affected by Katrina, according to the study, led by Brown Professor John R. Logan. The analysis concludes that the difficulty in moving back to the city could mean a massive loss of population, overwhelmingly among blacks.
New Orleans was more than 65 percent black before Katrina hit, but it appears most of the estimated 135,000 residents who have been able to return are white. The study found that if New Orleans' returning population was limited to the neighborhoods undamaged by Katrina, about half the white population would not return and 80 percent of its black population would not.
Sauls is on a mission to educate his congregation and the community to ensure that does not become reality.
"I am aware that African Americans have not been part of the recovery effort in the way our non-black brothers and sisters have been," he said. "It troubles me."
Eden has said that of the more than 60 volunteers to come through his church as part of recovery teams, fewer than five have been black.
While African-American United Methodist churches have stepped up to the plate to provide dollar support for relief, the face of African Americans in the trenches has been missing. Sauls believes for African Americans to remain absent from the front lines is to miss an opportunity to be in mission and also to be lulled into something ominous. "As Martin Luther King Jr. told us, we have to realize that injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. What happens to one of us affects all of us directly."
Taking a stand
Poverty is preventing people from returning to New Orleans. The cost of gutting a home that has rotted from sitting nearly a month in water is between $5,000 and 10,000. Federal Emergency Management Agency and Louisiana officials are pursuing the rebuilding of a smaller, less-populated New Orleans. But a question being asked is: How can a city rebuild with 65 percent of its population missing?
"We can't let New Orleans become an excuse for how local and federal and state authorities respond to 'the least of these' in similar disasters," Sauls said. The Old Testament Book of Esther is a prophetic voice for African Americans outside New Orleans, he said, because the story of Esther is one of a woman who hides her identity to live a life of privilege, and when the lives of her people are threatened, must take a stand and show her true identity to save them.
"So many of us have moved away from the oppression of poverty," he said. "We have moved into the palace, but are now being called on to speak on behalf of those living lives of devastation. Katrina offers an example of how poor people are often treated. The African-American church must raise a voice that mistreatment will not be tolerated: injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere."
Sauls says his mission in 2006 will be to continue bringing African Americans from the Downs Community to New Orleans to be in mission. The next trip is scheduled for April 6-12.
*Jones is the director of communications for the California-Nevada Annual Conference.
News media contact: Linda Green, (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.
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United Methodist News Service Photos and stories also available at: http://umns.umc.org