FIRST-PERSON: August 2005 was the most exciting start to an academic year in anyone’s memory. We had become the largest of the six SBC seminaries. We had assembled a terrific faculty performing at the peak of their abilities. The students were both passionate and bright, and they came from all over the SBC. Stirring sermons by New Orleans pastor Fred Luter and our Dean of the Chapel David Platt had the whole campus buzzing.
Never before was our seminary family so filled with high expectations. Everyone knew this was going to be an exceptional year at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. In fact 2005 would become the most exceptional year in the history of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary but for far different reasons than any of us suspected.On Friday morning, Aug. 26, a category 1 hurricane named Katrina was moving toward the eastern Gulf Coast. By that afternoon it exploded in size and kept moving westward. By Saturday it further transformed into a monster storm filling the Gulf of Mexico, and for the first time in history the mayor ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city of New Orleans. By Saturday night our campus was virtually empty. Forecasters now warned this could be the end of New Orleans. After intense debate with my administrative team Sunday afternoon, I evacuated before a storm for the first time in my life. On Monday, Aug. 29, the storm left the city battered and some of the levees broken. I sat on the end of a bed in a hotel room in Birmingham, Ala., watching TV in shock as more 70 percent of New Orleans went under water for days and days. A campus buzzing with energy and excitement days earlier became a silent lake devoid of hope on Tuesday.
My first memory is of a crushing weight of loneliness, grief and despair. My wife and I were now homeless. As far as we knew we had nothing but what we carried into our hotel room. I had 400 employees, almost all of them now homeless and overwhelmed. We had 2,000 students studying in New Orleans, many more up and down the Gulf Coast. The school and all of its faculty, staff and students were my responsibility, but this was trouble too big for anyone to fix. I never imagined a soul could feel such a depth of grief and despair. Not even our cell phones would work.
Then suddenly it changed. As my wife and I wept and prayed before the Lord, Psalm 46 moved into my mind and heart and refused to leave. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.” An amazing calm began to push back the flood of grief and despair. It filled the whole room. God started teaching me this was His problem, and He showed me how to let it go. My city and my campus were underwater for weeks, but Psalm 46 became my dry ground, the solid rock Katrina could neither flood nor shake.
My second memory is that our mission became our lifeline. As clearly as I knew my name I knew we had to teach all our classes and have graduation in December. This captured my attention with an unshakeable grip. We started our classes before the storm with a deep excitement about the evidence of God’s grip on us, and that grip had not been loosened by the worst natural disaster in our nation’s history. By His grace we were going to finish what we started. When we did, we would know we were in the midst of a miracle, not a tragedy. That perspective made all the difference. Beginning work on the mission cleared the fog of where to start in the midst of such chaos and destruction.
I gathered our administrative team and a few faculty, staff and student leaders in Atlanta three days after the storm and told them we were going to find a way to keep teaching every class. We were going to have December graduation and get our students to their fields of service. As we tracked down each faculty member and student, we told them we would not stop what God had started when the semester began. We were going to find a way to keep teaching. We would have graduation as scheduled. As we found our students, 85 percent of them told us they wanted to keep studying in spite of what happened. Each of the professors wanted to find a way to keep teaching. We were homeless, stricken with grief, and completely uncertain about much of the future, but we knew we still had a mission that required our attention. That sense of mission was the only point of certainty in the midst of so much unknown. It was the lifeline around which we rebuilt our lives and our seminary. Knowing we were on mission became important in a way I never imagined.
A third memory etched deep in my soul is that of discovering anew how grateful I am to be a Southern Baptist. The connections we share are truly ties that bind. Katrina destroyed much of the infrastructure of New Orleans, including the cell phone towers. Communication with each other, was extremely difficulty even long after the storm. We learned that we were not isolated, however. Wherever a Katrina evacuee ended up, Southern Baptists were there. Whenever they came back to New Orleans, Southern Baptists were there.
The winds were just dying down when the disaster response teams began arriving. And they kept coming and coming and staying and staying. Every place Katrina blew our seminary family, they were taken in, assisted, and loved on with tender mercy. Within days the Georgia Baptist Convention found places for hundreds of our seminary family, including me, to live. The Florida Baptist Convention moved heaven and earth to get Wal-Mart gift cards to our faculty at the point of their most desperate need. The largest single gift we received, more than $6 million, came from the Cooperative Program. Every SBC entity sacrificed funds that would have come to them in order to help us. Many sent additional funds and volunteer workers as well.
What makes the story all the more remarkable is that aid and assistance went far beyond what Southern Baptists did for Southern Baptists. The image of Southern Baptists in New Orleans was transformed because of what our people did for those they did not know. New Orleans was amazed that we worked our way through neighborhoods helping anyone who needed it. They were amazed that we would not accept some form of payment. When a great spiritual harvest comes to New Orleans one day, it will be the fruit of seed lovingly and sacrificially planted by thousands of Southern Baptist volunteers.
Katrina taught us that being Southern Baptist is more than a doctrinal identity making clear what we believe. It is more than a missional identity making clear what we do. It is a relational identity making clear who we are. We are a family, a family far larger than any one church. Like a family, it matters not how our relationships look to outsiders. We do deeply care about one another, and we will stand with each other when the hard times come. You do not know how much that means until relationships are your strongest evidence for hope. The day the SBC entity heads got me on a conference call to tell me they were recommending $6 million of Cooperative Program funds go to NOBTS and not to their entities is a day I will never forget.
My fourth memory is one of a gratitude and pride that will be with me until my last breath. Ten days after the storm our faculty gathered on the campus of Southwestern Seminary with little more than the clothes on our back. That first evening I had to walk the faculty through pictures of our campus after the storm. Since most of our faculty lived on campus, I was confirming to family after family the loss of everything they had. Words cannot express how hard that evening was. We wept. We worshiped. We prayed. The next morning this remarkable group of men and women gathered and spent the entire day creating ways to reinvent every class being taught that semester.
Their personal lives were in tatters. They would not have the use of their homes or their offices for a year. Neither they nor their students could even go the library. No other faculty of an educational institution in New Orleans was being asked to do what we were asking them to do. And yet they did it. By the time the day ended, the decision was unanimous. We could keep teaching every course we started. We would have graduation in December. We were still in the grip of God. I think it was the most remarkable performance by a theological faculty in the history of the world. For the good of the Kingdom, for the sake of their students, and for the love of Jesus, these men and women created a new way of doing seminary and carried their students with them all the way through the Katrina experience. We were not participants in a tragedy. We were participants in a miracle of God.
My fifth memory is the lesson burned into my soul during all that was my Katrina experience. Thankfully the worst of the memories slowly recede with time. Our campus is beautiful again. Children are on the playgrounds. Students are in the classrooms. So much has been restored people who come now ask how we managed to avoid being damaged by the great storm. Of course we were deeply damaged, physically and emotionally. But God proved that He is a Redeemer. Out of something ugly, He made something good. The most important lesson I learned is: Do Not Be Afraid! God is able to see you through any storm that life may bring.
As I travel across the country I encounter so many of our seminary family who went through the storm. None tell me what they lost. All get very excited to see me so that they can tell me what God did. What God does in response to the worst of times makes a far deeper impression on the believer than the difficulty of those times. Although none of us can know the challenges and trouble life will bring, every child of God can be absolutely certain that God’s grace will be sufficient for each day we live. DO NOT BE AFRAID!
For weeks after the storm, there was absolutely no light in New Orleans outside of the downtown area. When the sun went down, most of the city went completely dark, with not even a traffic light able to function. Not long after the storm, however, our amazing contractor was able to get a little power up and running. He used it to turn the spotlight on our steeple when the sun went down. Night after night that steeple was the only light visible in much of New Orleans.
The sight of that steeple shining brightly touched people all over the city in the darkness of those days. It was a reminder that the darkness would not win. It was an affirmation that hope was alive. It was a statement that God still reigned. It was a call to come in out of the dark. This is my witness to you when your world goes dark and a grief you never anticipated settles into your soul. Some of us have been to that place. We rise to tell you the light cannot be quenched. Do not be afraid. Jesus is a Redeemer. He will see you all the way home.
-30-