Why Katrina Reshaped The Landscape And Unity Of New Orleans Churches
NEW ORLEANS — The church doors would remain open, David Crosby decided after the levees failed New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina.
Someone from the Midwest sent a huge generator to First Baptist Church of New Orleans, Crosby’s pastorate at the time, enabling the church to reopen as soon as the law allowed.
Near constant news coverage flashed scenes of bodies floating atop floodwaters, hungry babies crying, families handling the dead bodies of their loved ones with whatever dignity the chaos allowed.
READ: Recalling How Christian Groups Helped Millions After Hurricane Katrina
Water still lingered in whole neighborhoods as First Baptist began helping with relief efforts in October 2005, aided by the generator and thousands of volunteers including Southern Baptists and others who rushed to help.
“All the churches had to turn outward, toward the community, during the recovery,” Crosby told Baptist Press 20 years after the storm. “Katrina washed us out of our pews and into our communities. Nobody locked any doors for four months in all of the flood zone. What was the point?”
As Southern Baptist churches in Metro New Orleans commemorate Katrina, they’ll do so with a New Orleans Baptist Association of churches that is more diverse and more united than it was when the waters dirtied the city, leaders told Baptist Press.
Churches outside the levee protection system were washed away and never reopened, but other churches were planted in areas where population returned, and several churches that were not Southern Baptist have joined the fellowship, NOBA Executive Director Jack Hunter told Baptist Press.
“The aftermath of Katrina had a way of reshaping the association, not just in terms of its composition, though that’s true,” Hunter said. “Our association is more African American now than it was pre-Katrina. It’s more Hispanic now than it was pre-Katrina. And it’s that way because our embrace has widened and our community has become richer.
“And I think in many ways, we look more like the Church. And there’s a high appreciation for that among our churches,” said Hunter, a member of First Baptist Church of New Orleans who began leading NOBA five years after the storm. “We’re a diverse association. But we feel a great unity in our diversity.”
Southern Baptists embraced multidenominational cooperation in recovery, Dennis Watson, senior pastor of Celebration Church told Baptist Press
“Two months after Katrina, I called together the pastors of our city. A lot of pastors still had not returned because their homes have been destroyed, campuses have been destroyed.” Watson said. “But we had 120 pastors return and we formed the Greater New Orleans Pastors Coalition and we began to work together across denomination lines, racial lines, community lines, etc. And for those first five years after Katrina, we had sometimes close to 300 pastors and churches working together to serve the people in the communities around us in some capacity.”
During recovery in 2005, Watson distributed loads of goods to those in need, spending the millions of dollars he received in donations on relief efforts because he thought he wouldn’t be able to rebuild Celebration. The $1.5 million the church had in flood insurance wouldn’t cover the $16.5 million repair bill.
“And so we really just started giving away the monies that were coming in,” Watson said. “We were feeding about 5,000 people a day hot meals. And a thousand people a day were coming to receive food, water, medical supplies, baby supplies, whatever people sent us from the nation, we gave out and distributed.”
A smaller, second Metairie location the church acquired only weeks before the storm – the former Crescent City Baptist Church – had less flooding, accommodating worship for the quarter of Celebration’s members who were able to return in the months following Katrina.
Franklin Avenue Baptist Church sat under 9 feet of water before senior pastor Fred Luter was able to survey the damage. The campus was damaged beyond occupation.
Luter called his friend Crosby for a meeting venue to accommodate worship for Franklin Avenue members who began returning to the city in October. Luter held worship at First Baptist for nearly three years after the storm, while also shepherding members who scattered across the U.S. for safety under the mandatory evacuation.
Remembering Katrina is always difficult for Luter. Days before this year’s anniversary, he was praying with a local business owner who had an entire wall of photos of his business destroyed under Katrina’s waters.
“When you see things like that, your mind just goes back and reflects on how bad that really was. So, you always think about all the things that you went through, how you had to evacuate and lost so many people, so many people who relocated to other cities and they’re now there and not ever coming back,” Luter told Baptist Press. “They come back to visit, but that’s about it.”
But Luter appreciates the city’s resilience.
“To be able to build back,” he said. “What we’ve done, that’s been a blessing.”
The three pastors — Luter, Crosby and Watson — will gather with the greater Southern Baptist church family in a Hurricane Katrina 20th Anniversary Service Aug. 29 at 7 p.m. at First Baptist New Orleans, hosted by Senior Pastor Chad Gilbert. Crosby retired from the church in 2018 and in retirement, pastors First Baptist Church of Goldthwaite, Texas, on a part-time basis.
Hunter and other NOBA pastors will attend the service, including many pastors of the 18 Hispanic churches and 41 African American churches that are now among NOBA’s approximately 130 congregations.
By the numbers, the association has just as many congregations as it had before Katrina, according to then-NOBA Director of Missions Joe McKeever, who tallied 135 churches and missions, or 140 including the Plaquemines Baptist Association that merged with NOBA after the storm.
Just two years after Katrina, NOBA congregations had dropped to 82 churches and missions, McKeever wrote in NOBA’s 2005-2007 annual directory.
“The fellowship between our ministers has been forever changed,” McKeever wrote in the annual. “Pre-Katrina, we had a Spanish fellowship of pastors, the African American pastors pretty much did their own thing, the Anglos tried unsuccessfully to involve everyone, and the Asian pastors were fairly well isolated.
“No more,” McKeever wrote. “These days, our weekly ministers’ meetings welcome everyone. … Pastors have learned each other’s names and lasting bonds of friendship have been formed.”
Those relationships have endured and grown, said Hunter, who gives much credit to Luter, Crosby and Watson for helping rebuild the church community after the storm.
He credits in part Luter’s graciousness for NOBA’s success in drawing African American pastors, and notes that NOBA embraced the Honduran community that swelled in helping Metro New Orleans rebuild after the storm. Of the 18 Hispanic churches in NOBA, 15 are majority Honduran.
Metro New Orleans became a hub for Hondurans after the storm. As recently as 2023, Hondurans comprised 29 percent of Hispanics in Metro New Orleans, the U.S. Census Bureau reported, compared to 2 percent of Hispanics nationwide, the Data Research Center reported, based on U.S. Census numbers.
Churches in the New Orleans Baptist Association shared the Gospel with the new population.
“We want to be strategic, planting the churches where the need is,” said Geovany Gomez, pastor of Iglesia Bautista La Viña in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, NOBA’s church health strategist and himself of Honduran descent.
When Katrina struck, Gomez’s pastorate was one of two dozen NOBA language mission congregations embracing not only Spanish but Asian Indian, Haitian, Indian, Korean, Middle Eastern, Filipino and Deaf groups.
Many of the language missions were discontinued after Katrina but others are now churches, including Gomez’s pastorate that has since planted two majority-Honduran churches of its own, namely Iglesia Bautista Bethel in Kenner and Iglesia Bautista La Viña in Westwego.
NOBA’s churches have followed the population, Hunter said, serving people where redevelopment has given them opportunity to live. Many former home lots are now green spaces, and much of the Lower Ninth Ward remains undeveloped, leaving no need for churches in parts of the city. Dozens of churches no longer exist.
“There are a few churches we have that were maybe stronger pre-Katrina than they are now, but we have a lot of churches that are stronger now than they were pre-Katrina,” he said. “But there are 50 congregations that we have, by my count, that we did not have pre-Katrina.”
Some of the 50 new congregations are NOBA congregation church plants, but Hunter estimates most are pre-existing churches that joined NOBA, or churches that began after the storm.
Celebration Church, for instance, not only rebuilt at its Airline Drive location, but has seven additional locations that are thriving. In the past two months, the Celebration network has baptized about 300 people, Watson told Baptist Press.
“We actually gave away the first several million dollars that came to us because we didn’t think we could rebuild our Airline campus, so we just invested it in helping the people of communities around us,” Watson said. “But the more we gave away, the more the Lord blessed us with. And so at five years after Katrina we were able to rebuild our campus on Airline Drive and to continue launching campuses.”
First Baptist continues as a majority Anglo yet ethnically diverse congregation, enriched by the relationships forged during the time Franklin Avenue worshiped there, Crosby told Baptist Press.
“When you have a flood, you have a fire that affects the community and people work together. They set aside their differences, prejudices and preconceptions about others and they work together,” Crosby said. “And that happened in our community.
“The world seemed chaotic, unmanageable, in the aftermath of the storm. Thousands of people left in great waves of depopulation, many of them simply unable to see a way forward,” Crosby said. “We were forced into awareness of one another. We rediscovered the value and joy of helping each other. We experienced the loss of all things, so to speak, and found true joy and riches in our relationships with one another and with God.”
Crosby nominated Luter for SBC president in 2012, a position Luter held two terms. He remains the only African American to have held the post.
Luter’s church renovated its campus at 2515 Franklin Ave. before rebuilding and relocating to New Orleans East in December 2018. A location launched in Baton Rouge to serve more than 600 Franklin Avenue members who moved there after Katrina continues as United Believers Baptist Church, averaging 122 in Sunday worship, according to the 2024 Annual Church Profile (ACP).
Houston’s Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, launched to serve members who relocated to Houston, also continues, Luter said. The congregation averaged 425 members in Sunday morning worship when it last completed an ACP in 2017.
The original Franklin Avenue location now houses Rock of Ages Baptist Church, a non-Southern Baptist congregation acquiring the property on a lease-to-buy agreement. So many churches lost members, Luter said, that the property sat vacant for years, with no one able to purchase it.
Luter helped plan a month of activities commemorating Katrina as a member of New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s K20 Advisory Commission. On the calendar are various interfaith events among others embracing the New Orleans community.
“One of the things I’ve learned is that we no longer can be complacent if a hurricane is in the Gulf coming towards New Orleans, or Mississippi or Alabama,” Luter said. “We did it for years, just knowing that the hurricane would pass and we might be without electricity or lights for a while. But we’d never flooded like it did with Katrina.”
The National Weather Service attributed 1,833 deaths to Katrina, as well as $108 billion in damage, amounting to $200 billion when adjusted for inflation.
“So one of the lessons we’ve learned, and I’ve learned, is don’t take hurricanes lightly,” Luter said. “If it comes near us, if it gets up to a Category 3, then you do need to seriously consider evacuating.
“Because so many people lost their lives.”
This article has been republished courtesy of Baptist Press.
Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ senior writer.