I need your help. I’m writing an article, due too soon, for The Worshiper, a new magazine “for the people in the pews”, on the Church’s role in hurricane relief efforts. I’ll talk about the philosophy of mercy showing, why we should be involved as Christians etc and then share a story or two of churches or individuals out there making it happen in real life. I have stories of my own but wanted to give Shloggers a chance to chime in before I start typing.
Tell me your story. What are you or yours doing to aid those affected by Katrina? Post a comment here or e-mail me at shaungrovesfanmail@charter.net. Subject: “Katrina story”.
Here are the last 500 viewers of SHLOG.COM. Yep. Pretty American at this point. Let’s spread the love a little. If you have friends in non-American places I’d sure like your help getting them to SHLOG.COM. We need a global conversation here, more than one perspective, about the important matters of music, life and um...what do we talk about here again?
Anyway, help spread the word. Please?
-SG
Bad news first. When I was in Beaumont I got to talk with a cousin of mine who works for Entergy, the electric company scrambling to get power back on in and around New Orleans. He’s in charge of a group of guys doing the repairs and reported to me that looters had stolen a van of theirs and had made the repair efforts next to impossible in New Orleans proper because of attacks on Entergy’s offices. A bad element had been shooting at their offices and repair crews in a fight for food and other supplies or valuables in the office buildings or repair vehicles. As of this past weekend (9.10,11.05) repair crews were being escorted by armed guardsmen and were still unable to get to some parts of New Orleans due to the imminent threat to their lives. The very people Entergy is trying to help, the poorest of New Orleans, are thought to be the very people making that help impossible to render.
More sad news. This same cousin, a heavily armed NRA card carrier and second amendment enthusiast, went to the gun range this weekend with a friend from the FBI. This agent reports that the FBI has snipers in and around New Orleans, on rooftops, and has been “picking off” looters and other criminals. The FBI, he says, will not release their “kill count” to the media but claims “it is very high.”
GREAT NEWS! Brian and I visited his brother Chris while in the Houston area. Chris is a pastor at Ecclesia (a church in Houston) and is personally housing 20 volunteers from Erwin McManus’ church Mosaic in Pasadena, California. These volunteers are primarily twenty-somethings giving their time and skills to the care of evacuees in Houston: visiting the Astro Dome, distributing food and clothing, organizing donated items at a warehouse etc, through Ecclesia. And sleeping on Chris’ floor.
Chris reports that the main need at this point is not housing, since the bulk of evacuees relocated to Texas are already being absorbed by Church families taking them in or finding them apartments or other suitable housing. The greatest need is funding for these efforts. A family in Houston who has decided to put an evacuee family in an apartment will eventually need help paying that rent since evacuees are believed to be displaced for at least a year in some cases. Churches like Ecclesia are also operating on budgets and tithes not designed for such massive relief endeavors like this. They are buying supplies and paying staff at a pace most churches could not sustain without outside financial help of some kind. Any church hit by the storm or involved in caring for those affected by it now needs churches in the rest of the US and the world to help them financially. Findhelter.org is working on ways to connect such churches in need with churches willing to give assistance. I’ll keep you posted.
Central Baptist church in Bryan/College Station, TX, where I played Friday night (9.9.05) has placed approximately 300 people so far and reports that city officials enlisted the help of local churches like theirs in finding homes for displaced families. Now there’s a welcomed change: The government asking us to do our job instead of us asking the government to do it for us. Hope that trend sticks when the debris clears.
So there’s news from the front-lines of the Texas relief efforts.
It might not matter that much what radio stations play at all some day. Seems like a lot of us have already stopped listening.
I ran into an artist in the airport this weekend who told me he/she/they were working on a “worship” record. Turns out this artist was allowed by his/her/their label to make two “substantive” records that would not probably sell well or get played on the radio (one because of the other obviously) IF he/she/they would make a “worship” record between the two. A “worship” project that is not “substantive” would be guaranteed to make the label enough money to make up for two not-so-well selling projects.
Vomit. Is this “worship” movement a “move of God” or a move of capitalism?
