Pray for Disaster Relief

As Hurricane Gustav barrels into some wary Gulf Coast state, many of you will faithfully pray for evacuees and homeowners and law enforcement personnel in the affected area. Might I ask you to take an extra minute on your knees and to lift up before our Lord the thousands of volunteers with Southern Baptist Disaster Relief who will mobilize to meet this disaster wherever it strikes? I'm sure that they could give you an ever better idea of how to pray, but I'll offer these suggestions:

• Pray for opportunities to share the gospel. Unapologetically I will say that any disaster relief that does not bring people to a confrontation with the gospel is, in eternal terms, a missed opportunity and a wasted effort. Our disaster relief volunteers want to share the gospel, but more importantly, local congregations get the opportunity to present the gospel through the efforts of disaster relief efforts. Indeed, sometimes the efforts emanate into the community from a headquarters at a local church.
• Pray for their safety. A hurricane strikes quite a blow against the infrastructure of an area. It also sometimes attracts looters and miscreants. Law enforcement officers do a great job of keeping the volunteers safe, but even an emerging medical problem can pose extra difficulties with the local doctors' offices decimated and local hospitals overwhelmed by the effects of the disaster. So pray for the health and safety of the volunteers.
• Pray for the families, homes, and enterprises left behind by disaster relief volunteers. These people drop everything at a moment's notice and trudge miles and miles away to help people they've never met. Contrary to what you might presume, they are not all retired people with nothing to do (indeed, most retired people are not people with nothing to do!). These volunteers need the blessing of God upon the things that they sacrifice and neglect in order to provide disaster assistance.
• Pray for wisdom for the people in leadership over disaster relief. The coordinating efforts required to manage a disaster response are formidable. I'm talking about our NAMB and state DR leadership, but I'm talking about even more people than that. In the 2005 Astrodome response in Houston, it was my blessing to sit through some of the briefings and meetings managed by Harris County Judge Robert Echols and to see at close hand some of the labors borne by incident commanders and other people in leadership on the scene. These people didn't sleep very much…not for days or weeks. They faced a multifaceted set of problems that was unprecedented and unanticipatable (to coin a word?). The effectiveness of our volunteers usually depends to some large degree upon the effectiveness of these people. So pray for them. Not all local leadership is of the same caliber, and depending upon where Gustav chooses to make entry, this item may require more or less prayer attention. I think we've all seen in years past what the varying quality of local leadership can do to affect the response to a disaster.
• Pray for the churches in the disaster area. Some churches didn't survive Katrina and Rita. Ideally, a moment of community crisis (if the community survives!) should be a season of opportunity for God's people. Pray that God will sovereignly use this destructive hurricane to draw errant souls to Him.

Perspective

I am returning early (two funerals) from FBC Deweyville, TX, where First Baptist Church of Farmersville wraps up its second mission trip of the year (of six planned this year) on Wednesday. Deweyville lies just across the Sabine River from Louisiana, out in the country. The nearest urban center is Orange, TX.

Upon arriving in Deweyville, I was a little dismayed to discover that my cell phone didn't work there. Also, there was no wi-fi in the church gymnasium where we were staying, and the office only had a dial-up Internet connection. Our entire team was a little bummed out to learn that we would be several days without cell phone service.

Then, late this morning, I spent a while visiting with the Associate Pastor of FBC Deweyville. After Hurricane Rita passed through the area, Deweyville was without ELECTRICITY for TWO MONTHS.

That little revelation put things into perspective for me.

Speaking of perspective, I hope that the victims of Hurricane Rita haven't dropped out of yours. FBC Farmersville's first mission trip of the year was to Waveland, MS, where we continue to fulfill our ongoing commitment to serving the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Members of FBC Farmersville were on the ground at Houston's Reliant Astrodome to serve Katrina victims just days after the storm, and these fine people whom I love continue to serve the victims of Katrina.

But don't forget about the victims of Hurricane Rita in Deep East Texas. Our crew is repairing a home near Kirbyville that was bisected by a fallen tree. Meanwhile, this afternoon, our children gathered fallen limbs into a burn pile near an elderly woman's mobile home in Deweyville. More than two years after the storms these residences remain uninhabitable, their residents stuck in limbo until someone will help them overcome the storm's havoc.

Don't stop a thing that you are doing to help Katrina victims, but do you think that your church might be able to add some volunteers or resources to assist the victims of Hurricane Rita as well? If so, I commend to you the fine folks at Nehemiah's Vision. Our church was able to be present at FBC Vidor last Sunday night as Nehemiah's Vision celebrated their 500^th residence repaired since Rita. FBCF has helped with six of those houses. Your church can help, too.

How to Know When Bart Will Vanish Temporarily

Here's the sequence of events:

1. Some sort of disaster hits in Texas (see here).
2. My wife's Disaster Relief Child Care unit gets activated (see a woefully out-of-date website here. The child care unit is not on stand-by—they've been up and running for two days in Gainesville).
3. That means that I have Jim and Sarah all by my lonesome, and Mr. Mom barely has time to breathe, much less blog!

So, I hope it does not offend all of my faithful readers to learn that you come in somewhere other than first on my priority list. I have a few more things to post in June. I'm taking July off from blogging, primarily to make more time for shady, smoke-filled-room, behind-closed-doors, nefarious politicking. ;-)

The Myth of Hard-Hearted Southern Baptist Conservatives

Disaster Relief

Southern Baptist Disaster Relief is the third-largest disaster relief organization in the United States of America. Normally people don't crow about the bronze medal, but consider who comes in ahead of us: The American Red Cross (ARC) and The Salvation Army (TSA). Disaster relief items get top billing for those two groups, while for Southern Baptists it is decidedly secondary to the propagation of New Testament churches. Still, can you imagine ARC or TSA being on the receiving end of the tongue-wagging, finger-pointing lectures that Southern Baptist conservatives receive about not caring for hurting people, all while we're dishing out upwards of 90% of the meals that ARC feeds people in disaster situations? I don't think so.

Poverty Assistance

Yesterday, while I was at the dedication of a new disaster relief unit, teams from FBC Farmersville were making repairs to the houses of two impoverished families in our community. Of course, this will slip entirely under the public radar (OK, except for this blog post). The government had no role in it, so it will not appear in their statistics. We did not alert the media to come take pictures of us being generous. In a very "Matthew 6" kind of way, we quietly and simply went about doing good.

I do see changes in the way that Southern Baptist churches assist the poor—changes reflective of overall shifts in our ecclesiological paradigm. Once upon a time with regard to missions, benevolence, etc., our paradigm was more-or-less to invite people to pay for someone else to do it. Now, although we still collect money, individual church members desire to be more involved hands-on: thus, the kind of event we had on Saturday.

Polls have indicated that conservative evangelicals are among the most generous people on earth. Southern Baptists fit into that category for these purposes. But, because Congress didn't get to vote on things like our ministry on Saturday and because nobody's political coalition got to take credit for it, people chastise Southern Baptists as though this kind of ministry were not going on every week across the nation.

The Eternal Gospel

Of course, I'll grant that the Southern Baptist apparatus emphasizes evangelism over the meeting of physical needs. That's exactly how things ought to be, and I will not apologize for it. If a person is going to Hell, it matters not whether he goes from a neat little Habitat house or a slumlord tenament. Southern Baptists perform a lot of ministry to physical needs, but such ministry is subservient to our efforts to share the gospel.

Ben Cole has observed on his blog:

If Southern Baptists would commit to issues of social justice with the same rallying cry that founded the Cooperative Program for the task of world missions — namely that we can do more together than we can apart — we might find the good and pleasant blessing promised of God when brothers dwell together in unity.

I'm glad that Ben has a heart for helping people. We all benefit from that spirit. But Southern Baptists are already committed to appropriate issues of social justice. I don't know that our approach has been any less effective than LBJ's forty-year-and-counting War on Poverty and whatever else the government is doing to address "issues of social justice." The image of Southern Baptists as disengaged from the plight of hurting people is simply unfounded, unsubstantiated liberal stereotyping (i.e. liberals are the origin of it, whoever may be repeating it). And one can understand the need for the stereotype, because if liberals cannot convince themselves that they are the more-enlightened, more-compassionate among us, then what do they have left?

I'm all in favor of us doing more. Let's become #1 in Disaster Relief. Let our churches be even more involved in ministering to physical needs. But frankly, I agree with Nathan Finn that our greatest need for improvement is in the area of sharing the eternal gospel, not the social gospel. I'll guarantee you that a good number of the people working on houses for us yesterday have never personally presented the gospel of Jesus Christ to anyone. But we're working on that.

Now I'll be accused of "triumphalism." :-)