FUMC Gulf Coast Work Team 2006

WORK TEAM RETURNS FROM NEW ORLEANS
by Larry Young

The 17 members of the FUMC Gulf Coast Work Team (pictured at right and below with Bethany friends) had a very productive time restor-ing part of the campus of Bethany UMC in New Orleans during Holy Week. While there, they:

• Helped install a new sprinkler system for the church lawns;
• Repaired and painted a wrought iron fence around the campus;
• Arranged for the removal of four dead elms alongside the church;
• Installed new sod along the front and in the side yard of the church;
• Planted palms, bushes, and flowers in front of the church;
• Repaired and straightened a wood stake fence;
• Paid for all of the above with your gifts and those of other supporters;
• Strategized with Bethany and two other partner churches about how to support Bethany’s ongoing recovery;
• Shared our faith and love with the Bethany congregation.

Bethany’s pastor, the Rev. Hadley Edwards, included the following words in the insert to his Easter Sunday order of worship:

GREAT PEOPLE! GREAT LOVE! GREAT JOB!

Our partner church, First United Methodist of Santa Monica, CA sent a team of volunteers who have worked this week at Bethany Church and they have done a FANTASTIC job! We will never be able to show our utmost thanks and appreciation for what you have done in this phase of the Resurrection of Bethany’s Campus.

We have truly experienced a resurrection not only of the grounds but of our hope! You have given of yourselves, your time, your energy and your funds to create this beautiful oasis here in Pontchartrain Park among the rubble of debris left from the most devastating event in our history. You have connected with us in ways that we can feel your passion, your love and your concern for or future. You have truly shown yourself to be PARTNERS with us in this struggle. We thank you for giving us HOPE in a time of troubles. We thank you for standing with us and helping us to see beyond the brokenness and onto the restoration of our beloved Bethany. We thank you for helping our Church, our community, and our world to know that God is ALIVE and answering prayer.

WORK TEAMS LEAVES FOR NEW ORLEANS
by Larry Young

The Team Being Commissioned During Worship on March 26 (From left to right: Leonard de Leon, Anson Nordby, Leslie Nordby, Jim Krause, Rev. Patricia Farris, Rev. Brad Beeman, Rev. Larry Young, Carol Reich, Karen Hopkins, Charley Worley, Jennifer Worley, Kendra Gorlitsky and Carl Rogers. Team members not pictured include: Todd and Sherry Erlandson, Fred Marvin and Pam Vondrak)

FUMC’s Gulf Coast Work Team—15 strong—will be hard at work in New Orleans during Holy Week helping Bethany UMC, our partner church, restore its landscaping as they assess other ways we at FUMC can help Bethany in its recovery. They will also be meeting with representatives of Bethany’s two other partner churches to develop a coordinated plan for assistance.

You can follow the team’s progress during the week on our FUMC website! Just click on “Gulf Coast Work Team” where pictures will be posted. The team asks for your prayers as they work. They are grateful for the contributions of many toward this project, but continue to welcome gifts from those who still want to be a part of it. Gifts should be made payable to FUMC with the notation “GCWT.” If you are interested in sending the request for help out to others, one of the GCWT members Jim Krause has written a letter that can be utilized for that purpose. Visit the GCWT page on the church website where you will find a downloadable/printable copy of the letter as well as photos to send to friends and family.

Last weekend, Todd and I returned to New Orleans for the first time since we left with our family two weeks before Hurricane Katrina. I had been warned that for most people “it was worse than they expected.” I am not sure exactly what I expected, but the devast-ation was overwhelming. It worsened as we drove closer to the Lakefront area and neared our partner church. There were men wearing masks and orange vests as we turned onto their street. I can’t accurately describe what it is like to see home after home, destroyed and empty.

We were greeted by Rev. Hadley Edwards and a small but very bright and energetic group from his congregation. I knew instantly as we entered the room that this was where God wanted us to be. I was grateful for the opportunity to be there and to be with them. And I acknowledged immediately the fact that, without these unique and tragic circumstances, I would never have met any of them or have entered their church.

In many ways, Bethany United Methodist Church, shares our vision and focus for our own congregation, “Be the Hope.” New Orleans needs them, and they need us. Our Gulf Coast Work Team will be doing a landscaping project, but it is not about plants and trees. It is about providing a sense of life and color in an otherwise dead and grey neighborhood. It is about sharing the hope and love with them, so that they can share it with others, who are in even worse conditions in the ninth ward. We can help inspire and encourage others to rebuild their neighborhoods and their lives, to invest in each other, and to build relationships that will surely benefit us all.

When he wrote online to mark the 48th anniversary of Bethany UMC in New Orleans, Reverend Hadley R. Edwards addressed his congregation as “Your Pastor, Shepherd & Friend.” In a message of hope to the “Saints of Bethany,” (www.bethanyumc.info) Pastor Edwards acknowledged his new post-hurricane awareness of what it really means to “shepherd people.” Clicking on the website’s “Membership Information” link makes it clear the flock of this good shepherd is now scattered across America. Worst of all, Pastor Edwards doesn’t know the whereabouts – or the well-being – of hundreds of his congregants who weren’t around to celebrate this year’s church “homecoming” because they no longer have a home to come to in New Orleans.

Still Pastor Edwards sees hope beyond the present disaster, believing “God has sent us angels in disguise” to offer comfort during these troubling times. “People’s hands have been graciously outstretched to do whatever they can to make the lives of a displaced person better,” he writes. “That is HOPE.”

For many of us that also seems like a clear mandate: to work not only to restore some ravaged church property in New Orleans, but to begin building a joint – and lasting – partnership of recovery with a caring pastor and his displaced congregation.

FUMC LEADS THE WAY IN BRINGING MORE THAN
MONEY TO HURRICANE RECOVERY EFFORTS

by Carl Rogers

A damaged church in New Orleans, Bethany United Methodist, has been selected as a Gulf Coast site for our congregation to assist with hands-on recovery efforts. Working directly with the Louisiana Methodist Conference in Baton Rouge, FUMC has been chosen to lead the way in organizing the first Gulf Coast Work Team to be dispatched from a Los Angeles District United Methodist Church. It’s not unusual for our congregation to step up first when the call goes out for emergency relief assistance. We topped the list in immediate fundraising when our church conference put out an urgent call for hurricane recovery aid last summer, and we soon followed with a successful fundraising concert in our sanctuary, producing a record post-Katrina donation from the Los Angeles District. Now as many as a dozen FUMC members are making plans to give a week of volunteer service to the Bethany United Methodist Church in the heart of New Orleans. Read the full article...

“This 850-member church, founded in 1968, took a devastating blow from Katrina,” said Cindy McQuade, a team member helping to launch a series of fundraising events. “The creation of Gulf Coast Work Teams is an exciting way to bring more than money to the hurricane recovery efforts.” Our team plans to leave Los Angeles Palm Sunday morning and be back in time for Easter services a week later. While expecting to provide some much needed clean-up and reconstruction help, the group also sees themselves as going on a fact-finding mission to determine how other congregations in our district might most effectively follow suit in sending two, three, many more Gulf Coast Work Teams to the ravaged region.

Accordingly, our initial planning group has immediately picked up on an idea from FUMC member Sherry Erlandson to use “Red Beans & Rice Mondays” as an on-going fundraising vehicle to help cover travel and related costs for sending a series of volunteer work teams to New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas. Sherry and her husband Todd know first-hand of the long-standing Southern Louisiana tradition of serving red beans and rice on Mondays, since both went to school at Tulane University in New Orleans and returned as visiting professors there last year with their family.

Sherry, who will supervise the dinner preparation with her family at next Monday night’s first fundraiser, hopes this kick-off event will prompt our congregation members – and others being invited to join us from metropolitan LA Methodist churches – to pick up on this idea and regularly use “Red Beans & Rice Mondays” as continuing reminders of how much remains to be done for the renewal of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. She explained to many of us the cultural significance of eating Red Beans and Rice on Mondays, pointing out that everyone does it in New Orleans from local restaurants to university and grade school cafeterias. “Plus,” says Sherry, “a pot of beans and rice can inexpensively feed a good-sized group, so we hope people will take the savings in food costs and start their own pot of ‘Gulf Coast Relief Funds’ which future volunteer work teams can personally deliver to the congregation of Bethany United Methodist Church in New Orleans.”