Listening Is Sometimes The Best Medicine
The work of this Bedford church's mission team goes on years after Hurricane Katrina
 By Ginni Spencer, Member and Chair of the Gulf Mission Team at First Church of Christ Congregational, Bedford
When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, it compelled many members of the First Church of Christ Congregational of Bedford into swift action -- action that has been guided and sustained for the last three years by the mission statement we created at that time.
The urgency of the needs in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina in September, 2005, was painfully obvious -- the situation there dominated the news for weeks. The daily reporting was a constant reminder of the dire situation -- right in our own country -- and became a compelling call to action for many in our congregation. The challenge was to turn the feelings of wanting to do something into meaningful, immediate, and practical action.
We partnered with the Worcester Area Missionary Society (WAMS) which had established working partnerships with Good Shepherd UCC Church in Metairie, Louisiana and the UCC Disaster Relief Office in New Orleans. Good Shepherd, substantially damaged itself, was providing modest dormitory accommodations for volunteers who worked on church restoration and repair, in local schools, and on rebuilding of damaged homes identified by the Relief Office.
Having this structure in place gave us a means of preparing appropriately for our first trip, planned for November, 2006, and ensured that our efforts would be optimized.
In the earliest meetings we drafted a mission statement for our work: We at First Church in Bedford, with the help of our community, will partner with those impacted by Hurricane Katrina in both spiritual and practical ways. We share our gifts to aid in the healing and rebuilding of this community. We offer our fellowship and support to affirm faith and hope in the lives of this community. We strive to build an ongoing relationship that will establish a bridge connecting our communities.
We didn't haggle over the exact wording, but there was strong agreement from the outset that we wanted to emphasize "survivorship" not "victimhood", "partnering" not "handouts", and that we envisioned and were committed to a long-term relationship that would go beyond responding to the immediate crisis. Since its inception, this mission statement piloted our work.
We spent the next nine months raising money for our trip, collecting books to replenish school libraries whose entire collections had been destroyed, and reading as much as we could to educate ourselves about New Orleans, the levees, and the facts of the storm's devastation. Fundraising was definitely enhanced by the daily reporting in major media about the devastation to homes, businesses, neighborhoods, and lives. We discovered that most people wanted to do something and were simply confused or unable to determine how they could act with impact.
Our donors were actually relieved and grateful that our efforts provided them with a way to respond.
Perhaps most importantly, because we were a local group, when we returned from New Orleans we were able to bear witness directly to our supporters. We told them about what we had seen and experienced, providing names and faces and personal stories to demonstrate both the hardship and the full value of the aid we were able to provide as a result of their contributions.
"Bearing witness" or "bearing testimony" are terms that seemed more evangelical in nature than many on our Mission Team were comfortable with. Although we had been advised by our WAMS liaison (Rev. Shantia Wright-Gray) that listening to people's stories was the most important thing we could do as volunteers, few of us really believed that. We were going to New Orleans to do, i.e., tear down, rebuild, paint, clean; not simply listen.
How wrong we were.
Everywhere we went people wanted to tell us what happened to them, what it was like, where they ended up, how afraid they had been -- and in many cases, still were. An old woman who lived near a home we worked on tottered over to us as we sat eating lunch on the curb. With no preamble, she began her story of being airlifted from a hospital to Georgia, and then on to a cousin's house in North Dakota where she saw snow for the first time in her life. A local plumber working with us described in vivid detail how he commanded "legions of angels" to surround his house and keep the flood waters away as he frantically loaded his family into the car (his home survived). Another man told about coming back to his house during the first "look and leave". "There was no birdsong," he said, voice cracking, "no sound, nothing. Just black and gray everywhere." And always, always, people wanted to tell us how grateful they were for our coming, how much they appreciated everything we were doing.
By the time we came back to Bedford, we were eager to tell their stories and our stories, having learned that bearing witness was healing, motivating -- and humbling.
The work of our Mission Team goes on, although its focus has shifted somewhat from immediate recovery to longer-term projects to address inequities that existed long before Katrina.
We are finding now that a lot can be accomplished through the continued development of relationships we began with that first trip in 2006 -- the bridges we spoke about in our mission statement. New "recruits" have joined and made more recent trips to New Orleans; some of us have dropped back and begun focusing on other outreach opportunities.
We all believe our experiences on the Mission Team changed us in a fundamental way, enhancing our understanding and appreciation of community, the role of the church in addressing social injustice, and lifting us beyond the vague anguish of what can I do? to the focused passion of I can do this! We made a difference and we learned that making a difference, particularly where the interaction between "giver" and "receiver" is face-to-face, can be illuminating and even transcendent.
The energy we generated as volunteers, and re-generate when we bear witness and guide others who want to help, seems like a bottomless well we can draw on whenever we need to be refreshed in the course of helping others.
Contact Ginni at the church office: 781-275-7951 or email fchurchb2@verizon.net.
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