Faith Works 4-01-06
Jeff Gill

No Foolin’, Really, Honest!

April Fool’s Day is not the right timing for me to say more following last week on the subject of drinking, society, and the church. Suffice it to say I’m channeling the spirit of Carrie Nation these days – no fooling a’tall – and a cooling off period is in order.
Stay tuned, as they say on our television colleagues’ newcasts. More is certainly coming on this channel.
For now, a look to the south. Most of us thought there had to be fools at work in the state and federal relief effort following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Hearings, investigation, spin and counterspin are all now efficiently in progress, while progress on some feeble stabs at "planning the rebuilding design proposal outline" are barely in the "draft management plan" phase.
What hasn’t stopped progressing is the work of church and faith-based groups, who were on the scene even before the wind blew out and the rain stopped, and they’ll be working faithfully long after FEMA is just a dim, bitter memory.
The Spring Break season has seen over 100 Licking County folk head down to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to work. Some from local churches, others out of our area with national parachurch organizations, and including students resident here going with college groups from all over the country.
They were all converging on the stinkiest, most devastated, and often eerily silent landscape they will ever see.
Doug Lehner from Centenary United Methodist Church in Granville described it this way in worship: he asked all the men to stand, and then invited them to switch sides of the center aisle and sit down. As the pictures from their work group’s experiences scrolled by on the projection screen, the sanctuary was filled with shuffling noises until everyone was awkwardly re-seated.
"Now you have just a small sense of what life is like for the people of that area; they aren’t where they’re used to being, surrounded by people they don’t know, seeing every aspect of their lives from a new angle," Doug went on to say.
Along with many who were down there mucking out houses, some were doing a renovation of a devastated church building that was going to be re-purposed as a dorm for future workers. They were, like many, driving 30 minutes each way into St. Bernard Parish to work. As they spoke to the members at Covenant UMC, they told of the crew from Clemson University who began this effort. That group was sparked by a student from . . . yep, no foolin’, Licking County, out of Johnstown UMC.
These kind of connections and serendipities are taking place all through the region. And the heart of the work is being done by Mennonites and Antiochian Orthodox, evangelical Christians and socialist faithful, Salvation Army insignia now as familiar along the Gulf Coast as military ranks. Ecumenical, interfaith, and cosmopolitan, the volunteers who are choosing Destruction-World over some other –World for their spring vacation are making an impact that amazes even the most cynical on the scene. They could be in Cancun, but instead they are living out the "Can Do" of religion at its best.
For patient, persistent, comprehensive relief efforts, no one will replace the role of faith-based groups in the clean-up and reconstruction. There is a kind of mindset, separated from elections and budgets, that is better suited to doing the un-plannable, un-handbookable work of reweaving a community network into a newly intact fabric. No agency will ever do that, or at least do it well (my guess is the former).
We needed government, official, armed forces skills to do things like rescue 30,000 off of rooftops with helicopters, and they did that well, brilliantly even! And we need a major civil effort to support the civil engineering of levees and pump stations.
If they can do that part, we’ll take care of the rest.
No foolin’.
(Oh, and set your clock forward tonight, OK? No, um, joking. Or if you show up early, they may send you to choir practice or Sunday school or some other unimaginable fate. You’ve been warned!)

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell your group’s work trip story through disciple@voyager.net.