SPE Spotlight
Anchor in the Storm
Gulf Coast pastors look back for lessons learned after Katrina
A year and a half after Hurricane Katrina, life is slowly returning to normal along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, at least as normal as life can get in the wake of one of the most powerful storms in living memory. Trash bags and tattered old mattress covers still hang in the highest tree branches. Thousands of people are living in “temporary” FEMA trailer parks. Piles of debris still need to be hauled away, and many homes and businesses are yet to be rebuilt, empty shells and bare concrete slabs awaiting reconstruction. For many people, a near-overwhelming fatigue has set in, a sort of post-traumatic stress, manifested in rising divorce rates, domestic violence, and stress-related illnesses.
But as the slow work of recovery continues, a group of United Methodist pastors in Gulfport, Miss., is beginning a salvage and recovery operation of another kind. With support from the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Program at the Center for Ministry at Millsaps College, the pastors—members of a longstanding covenant peer group—are looking back over the past year and a half for lessons learned.
“We think we have an important word to share with the world,” says the Rev. Rod Dickson-Rishel, pastor of Mississippi City United Methodist Church. “Whether or not we have the strength to say it at this point is a different proposition, but our experience together has given us something to say.”
One of the most important lessons, says Dickson-Richel, is how to do ministry with nothing. Literally, with no resources at all. As Katrina taught the Gulfport pastors, the material marks of pastoral ministry—the building, the pulpit, the pews, bibles, hymnals, commentaries, and choir robes—can all disappear in an instant.
But ministry can still go on.
“Ministry is about the commitment to be a servant of God,” says Dickson-
Rishel. “All the trappings, right down to a place to sit, can and did disappear overnight and are irrelevant. But you can still find ways to be in ministry to one another and to the community with nothing.”
The Rev. Becky Youngblood, director of the Center for Ministry, says the group has much to say that would be of use to other pastors, even those who will never have to worry about a hurricane. All pastors, she says, can suddenly find themselves trying to do ministry in drastically altered circumstances.
“Their whole fabric of life was disrupted,” she says. “So, what can all of us learn from them? What can we learn about ministry that helps bring order out of chaos? What can we learn about excellent ministry in such circumstances?”
Under a SPE grant awarded earlier this by the Center for Ministry, the Gulfport pastors are tentatively planning to write a book about their experiences after the storm, most likely on “preaching without resources.” Though plans are still underway, the book will probably contain sermons that the peer group pastors gave in the first few weeks after Katrina, and articles about the circumstances each pastor was dealing with at the time and the process he or she went through in preparing the sermon, says the Rev. Terry Hilliard, pastor of First United Methodist Church in Pass Christian.
That first Sunday after the storm, Hilliard had to hike three miles to get to her church because all the streets leading into Pass Christian were closed by the National Guard. Only one member was able to make it to church that day. Hilliard and the man prayed together, and she gave him some supplies. The next Sunday, when six members made it through, they had their first congregational gathering since the storm.
“I told them ‘I bet today you’re wishing you had a male pastor who can suck it up and doesn’t cry, but you don’t,” she says. So, they talked, prayed and cried together.
Hilliard did not have even a pencil or a piece of paper to prepare that first sermon after Katrina and will have to recreate it for the book. Instead, she had only a rough collection of thoughts swirling through her head about what she might say to parishioners about the storm and its aftermath.
“I told them we’re going to wander through these things that are on my heart and trust that God will weave them together,” she recalls. “And that’s what happened.”
At Dickson-Rishel’s church, Mississippi City UMC, the damage was even worse. A six-foot storm surge, made the sanctuary look as though “the Jolly Green Giant had come along with a fire hose and washed it out,” Dickson-Rishel recalls. Pews, pulpit, chairs, baptismal font, hymnals—everything was scoured out of the building and scattered for blocks around. Choir robes were a block and a half away, hanging from the tops of trees.
At the same time, debris from properties closer to the beach had washed onto the church grounds, including three 18-foot trucks, two dumpsters, a couple of hot tubs, and glasses and other barware from a nearby Ruby Tuesday’s and the local American Legion hall. Half the congregation was homeless, Dickson says. And by that, he doesn’t mean a tree had fallen on a house or a roof was blown away. He means the entire house was gone. In the new vernacular of the post-Katrina world, some of his parishioners had been “slabbed.”
“That’s when you go back to where your house was and there’s nothing left but a concrete slab,” he explains.
In those first weeks after the storm, Dickson says he felt compelled that his congregation would somehow continue to worship every Sunday. When members gathered each week, it was euphoric, he says.
“People came wearing every kind of clothes you can imagine, whatever they had left or could find,” he says. “It was just unbelievable how joyful those gatherings were. We were still alive. Just to see each other’s faces had a lot of power.”
Of the eight pastors in the covenant group, six were “churchless” and seven were homeless the day after the storm hit. In those first few weeks they were all simultaneously trying to find their congregations, keep church going, and take care of themselves and their families.
The Rev. Victor Chatham, a chaplain at Gulfport Memorial Hospital and pastor at Fayard Chapel UMC, says the most difficult challenge for the pastors was taking care of themselves. In the midst of overwhelming need, it was hard to find time simply to rest, but without first taking care of themselves, it was impossible to take care of others, he says.
“So many people needed so many things from you, but at some point you had to stop and take care of who you are and what you are,” he says.
Dickson-Rishel says that he spent so much time talking on his cell phone that, when it would ring in the evenings, his teen-age daughters would start crying and beg him not to answer.
“We were basically camping out in the upstairs of our home,” he says. “There was always somebody needing me. People who were wanting to help or bring something. Church members. Everything you can think of.”
Although the material resources of ministry were gone, the pastors did discover one other important resource they still had: each other. Thousands of pastors in SPE programs nationwide have experienced the extraordinary impact that peer support can have in sustaining ministry. But few have learned that lesson as deeply and intensely as the pastors along the Gulf coast.
The Gulfport peer group had been meeting since the early 1990s, with various pastors—mostly Methodist—in the area getting together periodically to talk about the usual challenges of ministry. In the months after Katrina, however, the pastor peer group became a sanctuary and a place of refuge like never before.
“It was the one place where we could talk about our grief and sorrow, about what we lost and who we lost,” says Hilliard. “It was so powerful just to be with other people who understood how we felt.”
For Chatham, the peer group was a vital source of strength in those initial months after the storm, “the only thing that got me through.” In the group, he says, he didn’t find sympathy, but empathy.
“They felt with me, not for me,” he says.
No matter what else was going on, no matter what other demands and needs the pastors might be experiencing, the covenant group came first. It was a fixed and immovable appointment on everyone’s calendar.
“I cannot overstate how important those peer group gathering were for the first year after the storm,” Dickson-Rishel says.
The meetings were the one place where pastors could share whatever they wanted, says Hilliard. It’s difficult to explain to those who didn’t go through Katrina, but sometimes the most well-intended support from outsiders only heightened the isolation and absurdity of the situation the pastors and their congregations faced. At one meeting, Hilliard recalls, a pastor spoke about getting a phone call from a church in another part of the U.S., offering to send choir robes.
But robes were superfluous when the entire church had building had been washed away.
“They don’t get it,” the pastor said. “They just don’t get it.”
“I never ran across anybody whose heart was not intended to be loving and good, but the constant absurdity of our situation caught us off guard,” says Hilliard.
Ever since the storm hit, the pastors and their churches have been slowly rebuilding. That first Sunday, Dickson-Rishel’s church met in the parking lot. Then, for the next five weeks, in another church that wasn’t damaged and ever since in a rented metal building that had been a local gym.
“You scratch up what you can,” says Dickson-Rishel. A church in Indiana brought a truckload of folding chairs. Another church sent hymnals. A church in Jackson gave a piano.
In some ways, sermon preparation became easier after Katrina, even without access to commentaries and other aids, says Dickson-Rishel. Along with the storm damage, Katrina also brought a clarity that didn’t exist before, he says.
Since the storm, Dickson-Rishel says he’s been essentially preaching variations on the same sermon every week, never straying too much from the same basic message.
“We serve a gracious and merciful God, and we are going to make it,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what the text is, that’s the sermon.”
That constant message, says Dickson-Rishel, was fitting for a people whose abiding presence served as a powerful witness. Many pastors could and did leave the area, but the peer group pastors and many others stayed.
“We all had the opportunity to walk way, but nobody chose to do that,” Dickson-Rishel says. “To me, that was heroic. To go day after day to the trash piles we called churches and homes and say, ‘No, I have a responsibility. God has called me to serve in this place and at this time, and I’m going to fulfill that responsibility.”
With no resources, the pastors depended on two things, says Chatham.
“We depended on memory and each other,” he says. “What we learned was that we were each our own best resource, and then we became resources for each other.”
