What was Normal

2019 was a landmark year in our work in many respects. In church health, our pastors gathered monthly to pray, worship, fellowship, and plan cooperative work, in English and in Spanish. Our average meeting attendance was on a steady rise, averaging about one-hundred pastors each month at various associational gatherings, with over 200 at each of our two largest gatherings—a result of Dr. Fountain’s and Mr. Hunter’s tireless work advising and counseling pastors throughout the region, as well as the general spirit of cooperation and love among our churches. Three independent churches joined the association, and we commissioned three new local missionaries—all of this cooperation across racial, political, and ethnic lines in a year marked by division both nationally and in our denomination.

We centered our meetings and our efforts around racial reconciliation and caring for the abused. We invited representatives of the Rising Sun Missionary Baptist Association to speak at our largest gathering in 2019, with all our pastors, which we themed around the hope found in Christ for unity and restoration. Our staff took part in a national denominational gathering addressing issues of sexual and child abuse within our denomination brought to light by the Houston Chronicle that year, and we formed a task force—including doctors, psychologists, and lawyers in cooperation with NOBTS and BCHS—to aid our churches in responsibly handling reports and cases of abuse while comprehensively caring for victims. We made plans to center our Spring Meeting in 2020 around preventing abuse in churches.

In church planting, by the end of the year, we had 30 active church plants to whom we were providing coaching directly or in coordination with the North American Mission Board (NAMB). In partnership with our state denominational entity, we were providing start-up funding. These new works spoke English, Vietnamese, Spanish, Mandarin, and Tigre, and were each in different neighborhoods and communities throughout the city. NAMB announced a new journeyman program, bringing two more full-time missionaries to the city.

Among the compassion ministries we worked to begin or directly manage, we spent the year celebrating. The Baptist Friendship House, a ministry geared at identifying and aiding victims of human trafficking in our region, celebrated its 75th anniversary, and was recognized with distinction by the director of the FBI as well as the department of Homeland Security. BCHS, a health clinic we designed and helped launch post-Katrina to provide quality healthcare in the ninth ward, was awarded full status as a federally qualified health center. This award attests to the highest quality of care given to patients at the clinic and to its organizational excellence—this was one of our main goals in starting the clinic, achieved at last after six years of incredible effort and resource, including BCM funding.

Crossroads NOLA, a ministry to children in foster care and their families, was training families so thoroughly and so well to care for children dealing with adverse childhood experiences that the state of Louisiana asked Crossroads NOLA to begin training every foster family in Louisiana before the family would be certified to foster by the Department of Children and Family Services.

Alex Brian, on staff at the association, was named both the Pastor of Vieux Carré Baptist Church and Regional Coordinator for Southern Baptist Disaster Relief in Southeastern Louisiana. Vieux Carré Baptist has long been a cooperative work among our faith community to minister to people experiencing homelessness in the French Quarter.

Shift

That was 2019. In 2020, everything shifted. The year started with NOBM assuming more of a parent-organization role at Vieux Carré Baptist and deepening connections there with associated churches and ministries. Legal work was done to separate the church and the homeless ministry, thus starting the Vieux Carré Initiative as the homelessness ministry branch of the church’s work. Dr. Fountain retired, and we celebrated his time here. We continued preparations for our meeting on preventing abuse within churches and began pouring every moment we could spare into research toward sustainable models of faith-based engagement with Early Childhood Education. We closed the office for Mardi Gras in early March.

Rev. Brian and his family, ministering in the French Quarter during the parades, were sick with what was then an unknown virus immediately following Mardi Gras, and rapidly in early March all our operations at every level ceased. The city mandated stay-at-home orders as massive community spread was discovered. Within the course of a few days, we cancelled all gatherings planned for the year—about 25 events—and were having discussions of salary reduction. Our usual gatherings of pastors turned to endless phone calls and virtual meetings to check on the mental and physical health of faith leaders and make some sort of plan to respond to the unfolding events. The Friendship House was vandalized and subsequently boarded, the population to whom Vieux Carré ministered was bussed to hotels around the city. Crossroads moved to shift all their trainings to a virtual environment, and BCHS began testing for the virus amid the international shortage of PPE.

Some semblances of a new rhythm emerged when the stay-at-home orders relaxed into a ban on gatherings. Able to leave our homes again, we realized the store of face masks we keep for disaster relief work, to keep from inhaling mold, were N-95 respirators able to be used in a medical context. We called BCHS first to see if they were in need. They had run out of PPE a week before and had been testing for the virus reusing their last disposable masks for days, wearing store-bought plastic ponchos. One of the providers was already diagnosed with COVID-19. The head nurse cried and applauded as we arrived with our store of masks.

Our state disaster relief partners were able to donate more masks to BCHS, and to Ochsner Health. We began to partner with the Red Cross across the state to set up feeding stations for those who had run out of food and lost jobs. In New Orleans, while the city had provided housing for the homeless in hotels, they had not provided food. We began working together with Unity, Travelers Aid and churches across the city to feed the homeless population in the hotels. The association was able to provide meals on a twice-weekly basis for months for the hotel-sheltered homeless, also donating two pallets of food and one of water, for times when other sources of food fell through.

Mr. Hunter began preparing a weekly miscellany geared toward contemplative worship and hope in Christ, meeting with a group of pastors weekly. It was an exercise of lectio divina, and a year-long practical test of our research into Christian communities and historical forms of worship, the bulk of which has already been reported to BCM throughout the course of the research. The results were a rich spiritual communion among our pastors which brought many of us through the darkest days of that year.

During that effort, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, among far too many others. Throughout New Orleans, lifelong hurts, political animus, and cooped-up stress spilled out into the streets as the city reopened, not to the imagined reopening of health and a new day, but to confrontation of what Dr. Fred Luter, on the board of both NOBA and NOBM, rightly termed, “Another Deadly Virus;” the more ancient illnesses of racism, violence, and oppression. This revived, in our association, important conversations from 2019 on race, division, and inequity, first virtually and then in-person as gatherings were allowed. Groups of our pastors met weekly through this time with pastors and faith leaders across the city and across faith traditions. These conversations have grown and shifted into targeted compassion ministry initiatives directed toward housing, immigration, and early childhood education.

It was at this time that NOBA partnered with Baptist Community Ministries and others, donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to help churches financially recover from the virus and meet the new financial challenges of online gatherings and increased sanitation needs. We developed a full and detailed application process to verify, document, and wisely meet the widespread need.

Vieux Carré and the Friendship House reopened and began serving the needs of the homeless as they trickled, then flooded, back onto the streets as the economic recession caused massive job loss and evictions. BCHS began testing at Bethel Colony for the virus so they might continue their work with those struggling through recovery from addiction. BCHS also partnered with Iglesia Bautista la Viña and other predominantly Hispanic churches to do targeted testing in the hard-hit Hispanic community. Crossroads helped do well-checks and ran completely online trainings for foster families.

Just as we managed to recover some semblance of normalcy, Hurricanes Laura and Marco pointed directly at New Orleans. Windows that had been boarded for fear of violence throughout the city remained boarded against the storm. Laura turned into a massive category 4 storm, and we waited for impact. One day out from impact, the storm shifted course and slammed into Cameron and Lake Charles, causing damage all the way through the western part of the state and even hitting Southern Arkansas still as a tropical storm.

The association responded immediately, taking a group of volunteers into affected areas days after the storm to do chainsaw work and tarping, as well as chaplaincy. Our state partners were working with the Red Cross to set up massive feeding units in Lake Charles and all up the Western edge of the state. Hurricane Delta hitting the same area weeks later only complicated things and demoralized those in recovery. Our compassion ministries in New Orleans, again, were involved with feeding efforts in coordination with Unity for evacuees from the Lake Charles area who were housed in hotels in New Orleans.

Knowing the extent of the damage and exhaustion in that region, we returned three more times with three more groups of volunteers to aid in recovery. Our fifth trip was planned to leave the day New Orleans took a direct hit from Hurricane Zeta, so we stayed to help in recovery of our own region. Zeta was thankfully far less damaging than Laura, but still we spent months coordinating and deploying recovery teams of volunteers from our churches. We worked again with BCM and our state denominational partners to help already-struggling pastors and churches pay hurricane deductibles on damaged properties and avoid permanent closures of churches. Again, we used a formal application to verify and document aid.

The New Normal?

In 2021, thus far, we have distributed tens of thousands of dollars of NOBA funds to remediate the increasing financial crisis besetting churches as the pandemic has dragged on and worsened, and many churches ceased gathering again (some have yet to reopen since the beginning of the pandemic, doing church only online so as not to compromise congregants).

This assistance is together with countless meetings and calls to encourage and advise pastors who are struggling through impossible decisions, balancing the physical health of their congregants with the vitality of the church and the spiritual care of the people in their charge. Our ongoing conversations on racial justice and reconciliation echoed the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, in which Baptists voted to make racial reconciliation and racial justice one of five central goals of our denomination. Charles Grant, Executive Director of African American Relations and Mobilization for the SBC Executive Committee, was invited to NOBA to address our pastors on these matters, and we held a special called session in which he expressed encouragement at the work done and direction of the convention, noting our association was setting the pace for our national convention. This encouragement broadly resonated with our pastors.

Optimistic gatherings, such as our annual city-wide youth weekend, and upward momentum at the beginning of the summer have given way to a more somber tone as virus cases surged and we again faced uncertainty in planning, not knowing whether it will be advisable or even legal to gather to worship.

Still, God is faithful, and much good has come of this time. Our association meetings this year have seen an influx of pastors attending and wanting to fellowship with other pastors, discussing creative strategies of ministering in this unusual time, craving commiseration and community. Yet more congregations have joined the denomination. We’ve also seen increased interdependence and cooperation, largely in the compassion ministry space.

Our work with Disaster Relief has seen a huge influx of involvement in this period, which is timely and well-needed as we coordinate a massive 6-state disaster relief response in cooperation with the Red Cross and FEMA to respond with flood remediation, chainsaw work, and produce over 10,000 meals per day in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida.

The Vieux Carré Initiative has continued this year to operate in coordination with Unity, Travelers Aid, BCHS, NAMB, and a number of Baptist and non-Baptist churches, providing spiritual care, social services outreach, access to mental healthcare, and meaningful pathways out of homelessness in the French Quarter. Within the grant period, we connected many people experiencing homelessness in the French Quarter to rehabilitation services, mental healthcare, and/or housing.

The Baptist Friendship House has worked with NAMB this year to provide a nationwide training to churches in recognizing human trafficking, and have provided services, including emergency housing and transportation, to a number of women.

BCHS has been a key partner in this medical crisis, traveling to several of our churches and homelessness ministries to provide vaccines to congregants and community members.

We are pleased to report that the other ministries NOBA has launched evidence the same collaborative culture as NOBA, working with other agencies, other ministries, and nonprofit organizations. BCHS providers have served on advisory boards for NOBA and many churches as we give advice to congregations on reopening and safety protocols. Global Maritime Ministries has worked with BCHS and others to provide vaccines to over a thousand sailors. We’ve also been able to bring doctors from BCHS to our association meetings to speak to our pastors about the vaccines, encouraging our pastors to seek vaccination and counsel the same for congregants.

We are grateful for BCM’s partnership in all of this. These years, more than any other time in my life, have taught us the truth of Proverbs 27:1, “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.” This has been a time of the unexpected, of dispersion, a time of hardship and darkness. But this, too, will pass, and we know a God who holds the future, who meets us in the depths, who stands beside us in trials, and to whom even the darkness is as light. In him we find hope for our future, vibrant life even through hardship, and truth able to guide our hearts, minds and hands in our collective work here in New Orleans.