US DOV Committee Calls for Recommitment to Rebuild New Orleans and Address Issues of Systemic Violence
US Decade to Overcome Violence Committee Calls for Recommitment to Rebuild New Orleans and Address Issues of Systemic Violence
When a World Council of Churches-sponsored “Living Letters” delegation seeking to learn more about the influence and extent of violence in U.S. society visited several cities last fall, its members expressed shock at the continuing devastation still evident in New Orleans three years after Katrina, and its lingering impact on families uprooted by the hurricane.
Impressed by the commitment and witness of the local churches and people of faith who, they said, “endured against all odds in the aftermath of the hurricane,” the members of the “Living Letters” delegation urged the U.S. Conference for the World Council of Churches to include the situation along the Gulf Coast among their priorities. As a result, the Decade to Overcome Violence Committee held it most recent meeting in New Orleans, 27-28 February, 2008, viewing the destruction and hearing the stories of local pastors and people of faith whose homes, churches and communities have been radically impacted by Katrina.
“As we consider how best to respond to what the US DOV Committee has witnessed,” said the Rev. Dr. Bernice Powell Jackson, Moderator of the United States Conference for the WCC and the North American President of the World Council of Churches, “we will want to find ways to engage people across the country in the issues not only faced by the people in New Orleans, but also in other cities in the United States. These issues include protecting the environment and health of people, ensuring the welfare of disaster-related refugees, dealing with street and gang violence and domestic abuse, and engaging in the national dialogue on racism and systemic violence.”
Membership in the Decade to Overcome Violence Committee includes representatives of the World Council of Churches member churches in the United States that work actively on peace and justice issues. During their visit to New Orleans, some took one day to volunteer for hands-on rebuilding in Chalmette, under the disaster response program of the Church of the Brethren.
“Hurricane Katrina and the continuing scandal of faltering relief efforts on the Gulf Coast have revealed the ongoing and pervasive impact of racism, violence and economic injustice in U.S. communities. The challenge is to maintain focus on these situations,” said the Rev. Phil Jones, co-chair of the Committee and head of the Church of the Brethren’s Witness and Washington Office who served as the committee’s liaison with local church leaders.
US DOV Committee member Alex Patico, head of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship and a member of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, said there needs to be a dual focus on efforts to rebuild after Katrina, as well as ongoing violence reduction and peace-building initiatives in each local community. He strongly advocated for “partnering with other churches that can play a role by the mutual exchange of stories and by offering models to overcome violence.”
“The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina was not only the violence of the storm but the violence of poverty and the absence of sound leadership that led to the breaking of the levees,” said Committee co-chair, the Rev. Dr. Angelique Walker-Smith, a Baptist minister and executive director of the Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis, who cleared debris from the house of one family who had to use insurance money to pay off a mortgage and lacked the money to rebuild.
New Orleans, she said, is “a microcosm of the macro picture” of what is occurring not only in the U.S., but throughout the world – “the displacement of people, the destruction of family and family life, lack of resources, little regard for reconciliation among factions within communities, the government and, sometimes, faith communities.”
Committee members emphasized the need for more help to Gulf-region churches and spent time talking with local pastors, members of Churches Supporting Churches, a project supported by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA to assist African America congregations in 12 areas of New Orleans where Katrina destroyed or seriously damaged their facilities. These clergy said one of the greatest challenges they face is finding 360 partner churches around the country needed to help support 36 “anchor” congregations in the worst-hit areas of New Orleans.
The committee also visited the historic Beecher Memorial United Church of Christ in the devastated 7th Ward of New Orleans, which is served by the Rev. Dr. Bernice Powell Jackson, former General Minister of Justice and Witness Ministries for the United Church of Christ and the lead spokesperson for the United States Conference for the World Council of Churches.
“New Orleans is really a tale of two cities, as Dr. Powell Jackson often puts it – the one that the tourist board trumpets is back again in the French Quarter, and the one largely hidden from public view which still shows the scars of Katrina as though the storm had hit three months rather than three years ago,” said the Rev. Deborah DeWinter, a minister of the United Church of Christ who serves as the World Council of Churches Program Executive for the United States, based in New York. “It is not acceptable that three years after the scandal of Katrina, citizens of this so-called superpower are still homeless, living in tents under overpasses in a city that people around the world recognize as a major US tourist destination.”
Sarah Deardorff, a former young adult World Council of Churches intern who had volunteered in New Orleans with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance in 2006 and who now helps resettle refugees in Chicago, said her generation is impatient when it sees that progress is slow. “We met some incredible leaders of the churches there who lived a Gospel of hope and faith despite the desolation around them. As much as I shared their joy, I felt a sense of urgency and impatience to find a way to ‘fix’ the situation, and to ‘fix it now,’” she said. The challenge is great. I wish I knew the answer. I think groups that advocate for partnerships with local churches are the best start.”
Last fall, the international “Living Letters” delegation led by the WCC’s global coordinator of the Decade to Overcome Violence, Rev. Hansulrich Gerber, a Swiss Mennonite, brought church leaders from Lebanon, Brazil, Pakistan and South Africa to meet with their counterparts in the United States. In New York they visited an Arabic Lutheran congregation and Muslim leaders in New York on immigration issues affecting Arab and Middle Eastern communities in a post 9/11 environment. In Washington, D.C., they discussed with church and government leaders the war in Iraq and the problems over gun control, the exportation of arms and pervasive violence in the media industry.
In rural Pennsylvania they visited an Amish community still grieving from the tragedy in which a gunman two years ago killed two young girls and injured others in their one-room school house. Urban violence was the focus in Philadelphia when the delegation visited neighborhoods most affected by violent death and learned about innovative peacemaking ministries. The “Living Letters” delegation was part of what is expected to become a major worldwide mobilization of churches for peace that will culminate with the WCC’s International Ecumenical Peace Convocation scheduled to be held in Kingston, Jamaica, May 2011. (Please visit: www.overcomingviolence.org for more information on the Fall, 2007 Living Letters Delegation to the United States and the upcoming International Ecumenical Peace Convocation.)
DOV member reflects on visit to New Orleans
Alex Patico, who heads the Orthodox Peace Fellowship and is a member of the US DOV Committee wrote this poetic reflection after the meeting.
Experiencing The Easy
Pleasure and Horror -- Idiocy and Nobility;
New Orleans today is not just one thing (as though it ever was).
On a day that feels like early Spring,
We wander through the French/Spanish/Cajun/African étouffée
That is New Orleans.
Catfish, redfish, crawfish and shrimp; beignets and chicory coffee;
Jazz and zydeco drifting from strip clubs and bubbling out of sidewalk buskers.
But the chilling stories are stored in memory.
Of a five-year-old plunging into cold, dark water to save a two-year-old.
Of stiff hands clinging to limbs four long days,
On an ordinary tree in the middle of a field that looks nothing like Mount Ararat.
X’es* still mark the spots where dead were found or not found or never found,
On the streets where the American Dream became Desolation Row.
We hear of houses that cannot be moved, because the water moved them.**
Of liens placed on lawns whose mowers languish in Mobile.
Housing being razed that has not been damaged.
Teachers being fired while their students need – more than ever -- to learn.
As in Denmark of old, time is out of joint; something is rotten.
Here is the system that was supposed to protect The Lower Ninth’s
Inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength;
They will mount up with wings of eagles.
A grandmother drives five hours with a bad back for bible school.
Out-of-town church folk and schoolkids find their own souls far from home.
Their handwriting is on the wall:
My God is a rock in a weary land, and a shelter in a time of storm.
They will run and not be weary; they will walk and not faint.
And a sign on a lot reads:
“I am home/ I will rebuild./ I am New Orleans.”
* Emergency personnel placed inscriptions on the exterior of homes inspected as the waters receded. A large “X” showed, in its four quadrants, the date, agency inspecting, number of human beings found, the number of pets. These inspections, hastily done, were often inaccurate. Later visits revealed the remains of those who had reached the attic fleeing the water, or even, in a few cases, survivors.
**As a part of the recovery effort, the City of New Orleans will demolish and remove a property-owner’s unsalvageable home, unless it has been shifted by the floodwaters onto his property from elsewhere and is not owned by the resident.
Read a statement from Churches Supporting Churches regarding Katrina:
- Files:
CSC_GUSTAVSATEMENT.doc
