WILLOW Magazine, Issue 1, 2006 Target: Katrina by Katie Adams WCA Member Churches quickly mobilize to provide relief to victims of Hurricane Katrina August 23. 5:00 p.m. Tropical depression number 12 grows over the sunny Bahamas. Life along the Gulf Coast continues, unaffected, at a slow and summerly pace. August 28. 2:00 a.m. Officials across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and florida’s Gulf Coast warn residents to take precautions as the storm gathers devastating force in the Gulf of Mexico and becomes a category 5 hurricane. Highways become a neon stream of red lights heading north. The Gulf Coast braces for Hurricane Katrina. August 29. 6:00 a.m. The fourth most powerful recorded hurricane smashes into Buras, Louisiana with 140 mph winds and then again near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Gulfport is engulfed by a 27-foot storm surge, the roof of the New Orleans Superdome rips apart, and Mobile, Alabama experiences its worst flooding in 90 years. August 30. The sun rises slowly over a Gulf Coast that lies in silence. There are no birds flying, no cars on the streets, no planes overhead. Katrina’s fury has passed and the resulting carnage is unthinkable. More than 1,300 dead, more than 400,000 homes destroyed, and damage estimates at upward of $200 billion dollars. Americans watch, cry, and wonder what they can to do to help the victims of what is now considered the greatest natural disaster in our country’s history. At Ground Zero While the rest of the country watched footage on TV, Rick Long, senior pastor of Christian Life at the Beach Church in Orange Beach, Alabama, was on the move. Orange Beach bore the brunt of last year’s Hurricane Ivan. According to Long, “it was fresh on our minds how churches from Mississippi and Louisiana served us. We were ready. We wanted to go and serve somebody the same way that we had been served.” After Hurricane Ivan, Christian Life at the Beach Church became a staging area within its community to meet disaster victims’ needs. As a result of his work, Long is now part of a group that operates with chaplains and the Department of Homeland Security. After Katrina, he was invited to travel with an entourage of officials to survey the damage. While touring, Long was also “looking for a place where our church could serve.” A gentleman asked him “Would you like to go somewhere where there is a profound need? Somewhere that isn’t likely to get much response because it’s not a glamorous site, not a destination spot like New Orleans or a gaming district like Biloxi?” That spot turned out to be the town of Waveland, in Hancock County, Mississippi, which took the brunt of the storm’s northeast wall. Long remembers, “the gentleman asked if I would be willing to help this area where there was mass destruction and concentrated fatalities. I will always remember when he said ‘Highway 90, exit 13.’” Those directions took Long to a Kmart parking lot. “When we drove up, the morning sun was rising and the water was still receding.” It had been just a couple of days since the town had been engulfed by a 30-foot storm surge which reached several miles inland. Long’s first sights were “cars stacked on top of each other in the parking lot, and bodies being recovered.” Waveland was decimated. Seventy percent of the town now sits roadside as 25 million cubic yards of debris. Long began mobilizing his church to help victims with urgently needed food, clothing, and medical care. A few thousand miles away a good friend placed a timely call. Friends, Phone Calls, and a Providential Plane Trip Rockford, Illinois. While Mark Bankord, directional leader of Heartland Community Church watched the news of Katrina’s destruction, he thought of his good friend, Rick Long. Bankord picked up the phone to see how Long was and what he could do to help. “I called him as he was beginning this tour of the Coast and he said ‘Mark, I’ll call and give you an update.’” South Barrington, Illinois. As soon as Bill Hybels saw footage of the destruction, he got on the phone with Willow Creek Lead Pastor Gene Appel and Greg Hawkins, Willow’s executive pastor. “The question was not if we were going to participate, it was thinking of a strategy. It appeared to us from day one that the need was going to be absolutely overwhelming,” Hawkins said. The church took a collection, raising nearly $800,000 and began working Rick Long quickly to determine where to invest those resources. On September 8, Bankord, Hawkins, and three other Heartland members flew down to visit Rick and see the devastation firsthand. “Our plan was to be there for a day and a half, investigate the scene, and catch some of what God’s vision might be for us as a church, said Bankord. “But after three hours we all looked at each other and said, ‘We have work to do,’ got back on the plane, and came home.” The Power of the Church United In the weeks before Katrina hit, Bankord did a series about “Truths that God Uses to Grow Our Faith.” Two of the truths, according to Bankord, are pivotal circumstances and providential relationships. According to Bankord, his friendship with Long is the type of anointed relationship that God uses to grow people’s faith. “It would have been very difficult, both for me as a leader and us as a church, to go down to the Gulf Coast and start a relief effort on our own,” says Bankord. “It was huge to have a local, visionary leader who was clearly getting the job done and was in it for the long run. Hybels agrees. “One of our first decisions was that we’re going to make our play through local churches. We believe that local churches should be on the front line of every human disaster. They should be first responders — they have hearts of compassion and a volunteer network already established.” When the Willow Creek leadership team heard about Long’s heart and his congregation, “it just seemed to me that we had the leader and the congregation, and we just needed to start pouring investments into them,” said Hybels. “We didn’t look at 25 other options, we said let’s just get a lot of resources into the hands of someone we trust.” Heartland and Willow Creek enjoy a close relationship. Bankord’s friendship with Hybels helped encouraged him to launch Heartland, and the two churches are less than an hour apart. The churches joined forces to support Christian Life at the Beach’s ministry in Waveland. Hybels lauds the process that unfolded as the churches discussed how to work together to support Long’s efforts. “I saw a level of cooperation and decision-making that I dreamed about most of my adult life … that churches could see each other as allies and combine talents to get things done.” A Single Focus, A Surpassing Response On the plane ride home, Hawkins and Bankord discussed where they felt God was leading them to support Long’s efforts. “We were overwhelmed by how Rick had gotten his hands around feeding and meeting the early needs of the victims. But the clothing initiative was out of control,” said Bankord. “People were doing what Rick describes as ‘dump and run,’ where they bring a bunch of stuff and set it down thinking that someone’s going to figure it out. So now people who just days prior were gainfully employed, were having to root through heaps of clothing sitting out in the sun and floodwater. We knew that God was calling us to own this and honor people in a process that they had never experienced before.” The men called Long, told him they wanted to own the clothing distribution process, and then presented the vision to their churches. “We said that we want to make this as good as shopping at Target instead of people having to dig through piles of somebody’s dirty laundry,” said Bankord. The churches rallied around the vision. Their efforts started in earnest when Heartland opened the Colonial Village Clothing Center at a nearby vacant J.C. Penney store in a shopping mall that the church purchased for its expansion plans. But this clothing drive was unlike any other. “I told people, ‘Don’t bring in anything that you wouldn’t wear,’” said Bankord. “I want you to take things out of your closet, not out of your basement.” The response was overwhelming. Since Heartland opened its 120,000 square-foot facility, hundreds of Heartland and Willow members have volunteered at twice-weekly “sort fests,” and sent down 14 tractor trailers of clothing. The facility is divided into different areas — sorting, sizing, and separating all donated clothes into 110 different categories. After items have been processed they are packed in uniform boxes, clearly labeled, and loaded into tractor trailer trucks headed for Waveland. When the trucks roll in to Waveland they arrive at a compound setup in a Kmart parking lot. There are four main tents on the grounds: a meal tent that provides 6,000-7,000 nutritious meals a day; a medical tent that provides free medical care; a distribution tent with daily living needs such as toiletries, cleaning supplies, and home products; and the 80x120-foot tent where Willow and Heartland now operate the clothing distribution effort. The clothes distribution process was uniquely set up to return normalcy and honor to the people the team serves. The tent is set up like a department store; “Marshall Fields in a parking lot!” laughs Bankord. There are different areas for different categories of items and all the clothing is neatly folded and stacked in shelving. Some 25-30 guests are invited into the tent at one time and can take their time visiting each “department.” Volunteers manning each department help guests find items they would like. Guests are able to take as many items as they need and they are never rushed. Items are then neatly refolded for the next wave of guests. God has used the church’s partnership to bless thousands of storm victims — 11,000 guests in the first two weeks alone. It continues to provide clothing to hundreds of people daily. But it’s the stories behind the numbers that demonstrate the real impact that the Christian Life at the Beach, Heartland, and Willow Creek teams are making. Jon McNary, Executive Intern at Heartland and on-ground coordinator for Heartland at Camp Katrina, recalls talking with a clothing tent guest named Bruce. “He explained to me that his daughter who was four months pregnant, his ex-wife, and father all died in the hurricane. Their house collapsed on them,” explains McNary. As Bruce shared this story with Jon, “his eyes filled with tears and then he thanked me for how organized everything was! Can you believe that? He had just lost everything he loved in his life and he said ‘Thank you that I don’t have to dig through dirty piles of clothes like I am worthless.’ We are not dealing with clothes, we are dealing with souls,” says McNary. According to Long it’s not just the guests who are impacted, but representatives from the federal government and national relief organizations. “FEMA people and CEOs from all these organizations come onsite say ‘there’s a sense of hope here, it’s different.’” In fact the head of clothing distribution for the YMCA said “you have just recreated the high water mark for how clothing should be delivered.” “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This” Bankord and Hawkins knew it wasn’t enough to send trucks — they needed to send people. More than 500 people responded to Bankord’s initial call to help lead Heartland’s efforts in Waveland. Shortly after the churches announced their commitment they began sending teams. Volunteers from Willow Creek and Heartland go for five-day stints, getting preparation before going, packing just one plastic tub of clothes for the trip and then boarding coach buses to drive through the night for 15-20 hours to arrive in Waveland. Bankord explains. “The work is physically and emotionally demanding. So we made the financial commitment to invest in our volunteers by giving them the space and margin they would need to be refreshed going down and restored coming back.” As teams arrive, departing teams process and prepare the new volunteers, pray together and then hand off their “departments” to the new members. “A lot of people have a hard time leaving. They’re doing frontline work and it’s a big deal to hand the work off to someone else. So they celebrate, tell the miracle stories they’ve witnessed, and then, tearfully sometimes, pass on the baton.” Bankord says the trips have been life-changing for his church. “Every person who has been on a trip has signed up for another one. I now have 250 people who have had this tremendous, life-changing event who are energized and motivated for ministry.” Back in Texas Like Heartland Community Church, Lake Pointe Church in Rockwall, Texas, just east of Dallas, had some previous relief effort experience, but nothing close to what it would undertake in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Pastor Steve Stroope explains that “we have a disaster relief team trained by the Texas Baptists, who have handled smaller, more manageable relief efforts locally.” Within the first three weeks, the church trained an additional 120 people for disaster relief work and sent five different teams to the Gulf Coast to help with meal preparation, water purification, and clearing debris. Meanwhile Lake Pointe’s national and metro staff created a command center to manage the church’s crisis response. “Our first task was to create a phone bank. Volunteers manned the phones for 30 days answering questions about sources of assistance from FEMA, the Red Cross, and other agencies.” But the church’s major thrust was having their small groups “adopt” victims and their families. “First, small groups surveyed local large hotels and assessed what victims’ needs were. Then, other small groups adopted individual families to guide them through the recovery process,” Stroope said. Fifty Lake Pointe small groups adopted 168 families, helping them reunite with family members, find permanent housing and jobs, get counseling, and obtain clothing, furniture, household goods, transportation, and medical care. Small groups used the Lake Pointe phone bank to find out about sources of assistance for their newly adopted families. “We assisted 300 families through our phone bank and,” Stroope adds, “ministered to more than 1,200 victims living in local hotels and apartments.” The key phrase for Lake Pointe’s family adoption efforts was “sustainable assistance.” “We didn’t want to create a welfare state for these storm victims,” says Stroope. “We wanted to give them enough assistance so they could sustain themselves after our help was done.” Lake Pointe established community warehouses where victims, relief agencies, and other churches could obtain items donated by congregation members such as clothing, household items and even cars. “We pulled an 18 wheeler onto our parking lot and told our church members what kinds of things people needed. We just kept informing people as the needs changed. We transported items to a temporary warehouse and also set up temporary centers in the community rooms of apartment buildings where victims were living.” The church has raised more than $300,000 for the relief effort and to date more than 800 families have been helped through their community warehouse efforts. Sharing Willow and Heartland’s belief in partnering with the local church, Lake Pointe has also adopted Celebration Church in New Orleans after a providential relationship through a Lake Pointe member. Stroope explains: “We started having discussions and realized we had a theological and paradigm-affinity so we decided to help them.” The church has committed $120,000 to help Celebration rebuild. “We will send teams bimonthly to do construction and the architect who has done all of our projects is donating his time pro bono,” says Stroope. Another Lake Pointe member, a retired builder, is donating six months to oversee volunteer teams on site. Hope of the World Three churches. One devastating hurricane. Thousands of needs. While potent governmental agencies scramble to mobilize after some of our biggest disasters and human misfortunes, the Church — because it is armed with the life-transforming message of the gospel of Jesus Christ — once again continues to demonstrate to a watching world what can happen when those who have been marked by grace choose to extend some back to their hurting neighbors. A Blueprint for the Future “I haven’t heard of two congregations of different races doing this,” said Michael Emerson, author of Divided by Faith, a book that Bill Hybels says opened his eyes to the ongoing structural inequities in our country. “This may be the point where Willow and Salem will start building relationships and trusting each other. I would love to see both congregations push to become multiracial, so they can do this together and serve their communities. This will be a powerful testimony.” “I saw this type of gathering during the Civil Rights Movement,” added Rev. Roosevelt Rudy Howard. “Now, go back to Chicago and let your lights shine.” Top