Sunday, October 23, 2005
St. James of Jerusalem Brother of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Dear Parish Family and Friends,
Grace and Peace and good morning to each of you! I pray this note finds you and your family well during this busy season. It has been three weeks since we have had opportunity to send out a word of report and encouragement, sharing what we as a parish family have been able to undertake in response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Please know that it has not been inaction precluding a letter. Quite the opposite, in the time since Hurricane Rita our local needs have come so urgently as to make reporting difficult. That being admitted, I am sorry for not having been able to encourage each one of you as you have responded in so many significant ways. I remain convicted that it is nothing less than Kingdom work we have been privileged to tend together.

During the first week following Hurricane Rita, while serving our diocese at a meeting in Dallas, Texas, I heard Ms. Lisa Beeman describe a housing program that she and the people of her parish, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, had undertaken. Her story began with the story of some 2,500 survivors of Hurricane Katrina who had left the Louisiana Superdome by bus. While the passengers understood that they were headed for a nearby shelter, they discovered the inns in Baton Rouge and Lafayette were full. Lake Charles, too. The same for Beaumont, Houston, Waco, and Dallas. They drove and drove north for three days, until they found the first available space at Camp Gruber, Oklahoma. St. Luke’s, in response to these evacuees’ needs, worked with a local ministerial alliance to develop a program pairing congregational teams with families from the Camp.

By the time I heard Lisa speak, hundreds of families had been partnered with groups across Oklahoma, including five households through St. Luke’s itself. I was moved by Lisa, a city planner by trade, particularly by her honesty and stubborn confidence in their program. Had everything gone smoothly? Of course not, but neither had anyone wavered in their support of the work. Had every family re-achieved independence? Nope, but she and others remained committed to sowing hopefulness in both the sponsored families and the sponsoring teams. The bottom line was that 2,500 of God’s people needed help, and, as a parish community, St. Luke’s believed they were called to offer themselves to the task. And they were not going to give up.

Further, I found the program itself compelling. Both parties in the agreement made significant and long-term commitments to themselves and to one another, so that dignity and respect were uniformly invited. The covenant agreement, while no sort of binding legal contract, served as a reminder and a witness to the promises that had been made. Finally, the program intentionally moved the sponsored household to independence and a real opportunity to re-make their life, even if in the unlikely setting of Bartlesville, Oklahoma. With the support of our diocese, I invited Lisa down here to Lafayette, so that she could share with our community the story she and St. Luke’s were living. We invited ecumenical groups within Acadiana to come and hear what she had to share, as well as inviting every church in our diocese. In very short order, she flew down on Tuesday, October 4, and, on Wednesday, October 5, she narrated her experience to our group.

During the meeting, those gathered quickly noted an important potential distinction between Bartlesville and Lafayette: available housing. While Bartlesville was in no shortage of rental housing, press coverage suggested that there was not so much as a doghouse, birdhouse, or outhouse to be found in Acadiana. Perhaps inheriting some of Lisa’s stubborn confidence, our group committed to go out and find the unfound homes, prospective properties that we could identify for hurricane survivors and that would enable us to enact the Oklahoma program at Saint Barnabas. Further, we believed that if we could successfully take a bite out of a problem that no one institution – not FEMA, not the American Red Cross, not any single church – had been able to solve, perhaps we could share what we had learned with other organizations and encourage them to take a bite of their own.

We planned to meet the following Monday, October 10, to share what information and properties we had found. Further, considering the significant commitment we would have to make to any family we sponsored, we committed to prayer and reflection about whether we could keep the promises we would need to make in order to move forward. On that Monday afternoon before our scheduled meeting, I received word that Cajundome officials intended to “strongly encourage” its residents to find a new home by the upcoming Saturday, October 15. With that revelation, all of our plans hit the fast track.

As a result of our continued participation in VOAD, we were able to participate in the organization work that went into the screening process by which Cajundome residents’ needs and hopes were assessed. This enabled us to have members of our parish “on the ground” in the Cajundome, to meet and visit with potential sponsored households face-to-face. That evening, we identified some fifteen prospective rental properties, and sent out a small group from the parish to decide on the three best options. Further, we sent church members to the Cajundome for the screening work, and we began to look practically at funding. We committed to meet again on Thursday evening, October 13, following our regular Eucharist. After much prayer and reflection about whether or not we would in fact undertake this work, on Thursday we, as a group, resolved to go forward and sponsor three households. Using information collected by our members during the Tuesday screening process, and through a relationship developed by Sam and Lisa Hawkins, we chose the three households with whom we would partner based on a number of criteria. We paired the best prospective properties with the households, and refined the “Sponsorship Agreement” documents.

Finally, we set a budget of$5,000 for each household. Through the resources donated to our parish for hurricane relief, we were able to commit to funding the entire project through our Ministry Fund. The next day, Friday, October 14, we stood with our first sponsored family as they signed a lease on their new home. By last Sunday, October 16, their whole house was decorated. As of today, all of these families are getting settled down instead of shuffled around. Here’s some information about the good people we’ve committed and are privileged to help and get to know:

Beginning immediately after Hurricane Katrina, Sam and Lisa Hawkins daily volunteered at the special needs shelter located in the Heymann Center. There they met Selma and Paul Leinweber, a mother and son evacuted from New Orleans. Their team, led by the Hawkins, has secured a two-bedroom apartment for the couple. Additionally, in response to Paul having lost the family truck in the post-hurricane flooding, and by a generous gift made by newcomers to our parish, we will be able to provide a car to the Leinwebers. Willa Mae Bennett and her two children, Jasmine and James, eight and nine-years-old, respectively, came to Lafayette and the Cajundome from Beaumont, Texas, following Hurricane Rita. Their team, led by Allison Staton, has outfitted a two-bedroom home on Bellott Drive, between Evangeline Thruway and Moss Street. The children, for the first time since evacuating, are preparing for school, and Jasmine has already made her mark in the Acadiana community, last week appearing on the front page of The Daily Advertiser hugging a Sesame Street character!

Richard and Clarissa Keller, and their thirteen-year-old daughter, Shanquelle, have been living in the Cajundome since Hurricane Katrina. Richard, a facilities supervisor at Tulane, lost the home they owned during the post-hurricane flooding. Their team, led by Kit Howat, has moved them into a home on Judy Drive, near Paul Breaux Middle School, where Shanquelle has already begun classes. Our partnerships with the Leinwebers, the Bennetts, and the Kellers, are an exciting witness to the uncounted many hours our parish family has spent volunteering at local shelters, food pantries, and distribution centers since late August.

Further, the lessons we have learned together in response to these crises – our collections at the church, our experience with the St. James Baptist Church shelter, our coordination with VOAD – have enabled us to be both effective and responsible in the most complete and intimate hurricane outreach we have yet tended. I invite your prayers for these families and for the many in our parish family who are serving them. Further, if you would like to offer of yourself, there’s always room in this inn! Just ring the church, and we will find a place for you to give as God calls.

In closing, I offer us these words of encouragement from the apostle Paul, written to the church at Corinth, and from the lessons appointed for this day in the church calendar, when we remember James, the brother of Jesus: For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God
that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe. (1 Cor. 15:1-11)

Peace and Courage,
morgan+