Mission to Rebuild

Pastors vow to restore New Orleans’s damaged churches

Shortly after the floods unleashed by Hurricane Katrina demolished

New Orleans, the Rev. C.T. Vivian came up with a plan. A veteran civil-rights activist in Atlanta who worked for many years with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Vivian wanted to help restore the city’s poor, predominantly black neighborhoods — something he says many African-Americans did not trust the government to do.

Mr. Vivian thought black churches, which have historically provided social services to African-Americans and helped them during traumatic times, could play a key role in revitalizing New Orleans. He joined with the National Council of Churches, a coalition of Christian denominations, to create Churches Supporting Churches in October 2005. The group hoped to raise $30-million over three years to help restore 36 New Orleans churches, their congregations, and their neighborhoods. Mr. Vivian expected them to start rebuilding within six months.

But, like the broader effort to revive New Orleans, the results have lagged far behind the dreams.

‘A Hard Sell’

To date, Churches Supporting Churches has raised only about $200,000. While Mr. Vivian and his partners hoped that hundreds of religious congregations across the country would “adopt” each of the participating churches, only a handful have so far agreed to do so. And foundations are taking a wait-and-see approach.

“Funding a group of pastors whose track record is running small churches in very poor areas — it’s a hard sell,” says John Briscoe, development director for the National Council of Churches.

That leaves Mr. Vivian shaking his head. “Nobody in the world would have thought that the richest country in the world with the richest Christian churches nationwide would ever have taken this much time to clean [New Orleans] up,” he says.

Progress has been so slow that Joseph Givens, a local organizer who helped get Churches Supporting Churches off the ground, has pulled out of the project to work on alternative plans to help the city’s churches.

The job is simply too big for one group and time is running out, Mr. Givens says. “We need to tell the world these churches are going to be lost forever unless we keep their plight alive,” he says.

Despite the discouraging start, however, the 36 New Orleans pastors who are getting help from Churches Supporting Churches hold out hope they can make the project work, noting that the coalition continues to refine its fund-raising approach and is starting to attract some churches as partners.

“We just believe it’s going to happen,” says the Rev. Aldon E. Cotton, pastor of Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church.

Few Residents Return

The flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina destroyed or damaged hundreds of New Orleans churches and other religious buildings, as well as about three-fourths of the city’s living units. So many of the city’s residents remain uprooted that New Orleans has shrunk to half of its pre-Katrina population of about 455,000. People are hindered from returning by a lack of affordable housing, insurance disputes, and slow disbursement of money from the “Road Home” program, which was set up by the State of Louisiana to channel federal money to homeowners to compensate them for storm-related losses.

While the city’s business district, including the famed French Quarter, has come back to life, many neighborhoods, like the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East, and Pontchartrain Park, look as devastated as a war-torn country, marked by empty houses, shuttered businesses, and debris.

Residents complain that people outside of the region have no idea how bad things still are. “When they see the Superdome reopening, the French Quarter, the plans for Mardi Gras, and all this kind of stuff, some people actually think that New Orleans is back on its feet,” complains Mr. Cotton.

When Mr. Vivian and his partners created Churches Supporting Churches, they envisaged it could help restore African-American churches so they could play their traditional role of fighting for social justice and offering services such as youth programs, housing, education, and job training. They hoped to match each of the 36 New Orleans churches with 10 religious congregations across the country.

Those congregations would provide monthly payments for three years to cover the pastor’s salary and other expenses and to help rebuild or repair the church. They would also work with the pastors in areas such as community development, leadership training, and advocacy programs.

The National Council of Churches agreed to act as fiscal agent, and denominations including the American Friends Service Committee, the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, Mennonite Church USA, and the Progressive National Baptist Convention signed up to participate.

‘A Burden From God’

Mr. Cotton’s Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church served about 125 people in New Orleans’s Central City neighborhood before it was destroyed by floodwater. Mr. Cotton evacuated with members of his congregation to Greenville, Miss., but he says that from the start he felt a “burden from God” to return to New Orleans.

His congregation has shrunk to about 45 or 50, and it has been meeting twice a month in another church. But parishioners have vowed to rebuild their own facility on a lot across the street from the old church.

Even some members who remain stranded in other states have been sending money. “They say, ‘Pastor, listen, I just want to come home. I just want to come to my church,’” Mr. Cotton says.

Meanwhile, Mr. Cotton, who lost his legs in a train accident as a child, has been trying to rebuild his own house, also heavily damaged by the storm, while paying rent on a place in nearby Luling, La., where he lives with his wife and three children.

Even before the storm, Jerusalem Missionary had decided to build a bigger church so it could offer more classes and social services to the neighborhood. That makes fund raising a challenge, since insurance money provided only $175,000 to cover the previous structure and its contents, while the new building will cost an estimated $950,000 to build.

Mr. Cotton says people have begun returning to the neighborhood to live or work on their houses, and his church could provide services to help them heal. “We’ve been talking to the neighbors, and the first thing they want to know is, ‘Rev, are you going to rebuild the church?’”

Fund raisers for Churches Supporting Churches say their efforts have been hampered partly by lack of paid full-time staff members, which has made it difficult to follow through with sympathetic religious congregations.

“We’ve had hundreds of congregations involved in various ways, but it’s hard to get them to focus on this commitment for three years,” says David Jehnsen, the group’s vice chair and chief executive of the Institute for Human Rights and Responsibility, in Galena, Ohio.

The reliance on volunteers has also made it difficult to prepare applications for major grants, he adds. However, the organization has provided briefing materials to about 20 foundations, and some, including the Ford Foundation, have expressed interest in receiving a proposal once the group obtains its own charity status from the Internal Revenue Service, a process that is now in the works, he says.

Meeting Regularly

The 36 New Orleans pastors who are participating in Churches Supporting Churches say the experience has been a uniting force, despite the effort’s initial fund-raising struggles. The pastors continue to meet regularly to plot out ways to revive their neighborhoods, especially by providing low-cost housing.

The group hopes that a recent success — a decision by four churches affiliated with the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America to help one of the churches, Corinthian Missionary Baptist Church No. 2, in the Central City neighborhood — will inspire other partnerships. Among other things, the churches, based in California, Georgia, North Carolina, and British Columbia, have agreed to pay $100 a month each toward the pastor’s salary for three years.

The Baptist church suffered water damage and lost its computer lab and about $30,000 worth of books in the storm, but the building is about 85-percent restored. (The congregation returned for services there last October).

“We’re trying to get some success stories real quick to show this does work and can operate,” says Mr. Cotton, who serves as the local church liaison for Churches Supporting Churches.

While the bricks-and-mortar part of the fund-raising campaign has lagged, the group has been successful in building “a corps of leadership” by holding monthly training sessions in areas like community development, property rights, financial planning, and political advocacy, Mr. Jehnsen adds.

Those sessions won $45,000 in grants from the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Fund, which receives money from donors that include the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, and the Ford Foundation.

Ashley K. Shelton, the fund’s director of policy initiatives, says the recovery effort in New Orleans has not given churches the priority they deserve, noting that many ministers are under enormous pressure.

“That’s an immense job to help hold people’s lives together while they wait on resources to rebuild their own lives,” she says.

The monthly workshops, which included one on how to handle trauma, have been a “tremendous boost to our spiritual morale,” says the Rev. Sam J. Johnson, pastor of Corinthian Missionary Baptist Church No. 2.

“After the storm, I used to spend hours on the telephone counseling people because they were just so devastated,” he says. “I had to act like I’m not hurting, but I’m human. It drains you after a while.”

Mr. Vivian says he is happy with the results of this part of the project. “Many of these fellowsare bonded together, helping each other, wanting to get the best education they can get,” he says. “They’ve kept track of everything going on in New Orleans.”

Revamping Approach

Churches Supporting Churches is now revamping its approach in an effort to attract more donors.

First, it has decided to be flexible about the process of linking New Orleans churches with congregations in other parts of the country.

“Instead of trying to get each church to have 10 [partners], we’re going to try to ensure that everybody can have somebody and build on that,” says the Rev. Dwight Webster, senior pastor of Christian Unity Baptist Church and the group’s national project director. He says the coalition will not insist on a three-year commitment, sending the message: “Look, any way you bless us, we’ll be satisfied.”

The group has also decided to involve more New Orleans congregations, beyond the original 36, in its effort to revive the city, asking each participating pastor to connect with at least five other churches to coordinate plans for providing services to their neighborhood.

“If my church is planning to do a day care, then this other pastor may want to do an after-school program, another pastor might want to do something for the seniors, another pastor may want to deal with housing, so you have these churches working together and not duplicating,” Mr. Cotton says.

The group is giving priority to housing needs, for example, conducting assessments of property that has been abandoned or seized by the city that might be available for churches to develop low-cost housing. The Mennonite Disaster Service has provided $75,000 for the project.

Mr. Givens, the New Orleans organizer, says one flaw in the Churches Supporting Churches approach is that most religious denominations are more interested in helping their own members than churches of other denominations. He wants to promote a “movement” of church partnerships that does not depend on one formula.

Mr. Givens is now working with the Rev. Andrew Young, the civil-rights leader and former Atlanta mayor, on projects to help the city’s churches.

As a first step, Operation Hope — a nonprofit group in Los Angeles that provides economic tools to minority-group members and for which Mr. Young serves as a volunteer spokesman — has agreed to provide personal finance and economic counseling to New Orleans pastors and their congregations.

Mr. Givens is also working with the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, a nonprofit group in Chicago that helps African-American churches promote social justice, on a plan to set up a storehouse of donated or reduced-cost building goods like paint, doors, or flooring that can be tapped by New Orleans congregations.

Iva Carruthers, Proctor’s general secretary, says the reconstruction of New Orleans is on a par with the emancipation of slaves and the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and 70s. “It has that kind of paramountcy in terms of this is a historic benchmark for the African-American community and certainly a call to the African-American faith community,” she says.

Promoting Tolerance

Whatever the outcome of Churches Supporting Churches, some of the participating pastors have been transformed by the experience of reaching out to one another and to religious groups across the country, says the Rev. Donald Boutté, pastor of St. John Baptist Church.

Some, for example, had to overcome an initial reluctance to work with religious denominations that had more liberal views on issues such as female clergy, abortion, and homosexuality, he adds.

“Prior to the storm, a lot of the small African-American churches were isolationist,” he says. “They looked in their congregation for everything and didn’t worry so much about forming external relations. The storm changed all of that.”