The Church is More Than a Building

The following photos are taken from the inside of a beautiful church
building in Chalmette, a suburb of southeast New Orleans. 600 people
used to worship in this building Sunday mornings. Now the building is
ruined and the community has no population.

70,000 people lived in this community and everyone was flooded out,
including this church building. As you look at the map of southern
Louisiana, you will see that there are thousands of acres of swamp and
marshland. As the hurricane roared through this swampland, the tidal
surge pushed the muck and marsh grass ahead of it and generously
deposited it in all of the buildings. One of the huge crude oil
storage tanks at the refinery failed and added its sludge to the mix.
If you look closely you can see the sludge on the floor of the
sanctuary.

The men who are mucking out the buildings must remove about 6 inches
of muck from them with shovels and wheelbarrows.

The church building, which took the brunt of the storm, sheltered a
new steel building behind it, which was about to open as a prayer
center. This smaller building was spared damage other than having 6
feet of water and sludge inside of it. It has been cleaned out and
now awaits sheetrock and insulation. I was down this week and
replaced the breakers and outlets so the electricity could be turned
back on. They want to use this building as a distribution center as
well as a chapel as the people start trickling back into town.

One of our problems is that we are experiencing a temporary shortage
of sheetrock.

The work seems overwhelming, but all we can do is one job at a time
and one day at a time.