Oct 5, 2006
By Gary D. Myers
NEW ORLEANS --Tracking down information about churches in post-Katrina Louisiana was a difficult task for Bill Day as he began working on a study called “The Impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Viability of Churches in the Greater New Orleans Area.”
Day, professor of evangelism and church health at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, relied on lots of leg work to determine the number of churches still operational one year after Katrina.
The research focused on the five parishes that form the Greater New Orleans area -- Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and St. Tammany. Day wanted to learn which churches were still operating and those that were not. The research will continue to follow the churches for the next five years to see which ones will die, which ones will continue and which churches will actually grow.
Each parish received significant damage, and more than half of Orleans Parish was flooded after levee failures inundated New Orleans with water. Every home, business and church in St. Bernard Parish was flooded as Katrina’s storm surge swept ashore.
Day discovered that Baptist Community Ministries, a New Orleans-area foundation, also was collecting data on all area churches had developed a list of the 1,508 churches that existed before Katrina. The list included all the churches from all Christian backgrounds in the five-parish area. A company working with BCM had placed several telephone calls to each of the churches, and the company was only able to confirm 300 functioning churches through the calls.
With that information and BCM’s church list, Day launched his own effort to locate functioning churches. He started by contacting denominational offices to determine how many functioning churches each denomination had in the five-parish area. Through those calls Day confirmed 100 additional functioning churches, but that left more than 1,100 churches to research.
Using Scan U.S. demographic software at New Orleans Seminary’s Leavell Center, Day plotted the remaining addresses on the computer. Initially, he planned to conduct a random sampling of the locations to provide statistical data for his study. Instead, he opted to visit each of the 1,100 church locations with the help of seminary students.
Gene Huffstutler at The McFarland Institute in New Orleans provided a small grant to help pay the students involved in the research, and students began visiting the sites in April.
By fall, the students had visited each of the 1,100 sites. As they visited each site, the students photographed the building or the church site. The students now are in the process of visiting and photographing all the churches that were confirmed operational through phone calls. The goal is to have a photo of every church in the five-parish area.
The visits often yield interesting information, as Day discovered when he visited two Catholic churches near the seminary. He saw two different approaches to recovery.
As Day arrived at a large Catholic church on Elysian Fields Boulevard he noticed a sign in front informing parishioners that the church has been consolidated with another church. While he was there, Day spoke with someone from the Catholic archdiocese. The person said the church, which needs about $4 million in repairs, would not reopen until more residents return to the area.
Just a few blocks away at a smaller, Vietnamese Catholic church, Day encountered church members working to restore their building. The members have been meeting at the site since October of last year, and they have been holding services in their building since February.
After the storm, an engineer from California visited the Vietnamese church and laid out a plan of restoration. Each night after they spend the day at their jobs, members meet for a meal together and work to restore the building following the engineer’s guidelines.
Students also have visited addresses on the list only to find the ruins of a church building. In St. Bernard one student could only confirm his location with a global positioning device. At the site, the student found only a non-descript slab and no indication of a church remained.
Next April, Day will send students out to each of the 1,508 church sites in the five-parish area again to collect further data.
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