"Say unity!"

Tod sent this article and I've been slow in getting it posted. Not knowing what commercialappeal.com's schedule is for keeping articles live before they're sent to archive, I've pasted the piece in its entirety below. I don't want you to miss it.

We are part of something wondrous. God is doing amazing things in the hearts and minds of a diversity of communities. It's not just about the work WE do ... it's about paying attention to all of God's children, and how they coexist, create, serve, and grow in God's creation. We have much to learn, much to give, much to do. Who's packing for the next trip?


True labor of love for Disciples assisting New Orleans church
Members roll up their sleeves for battered sister

By Wendi C. Thomas
September 24, 2006

NEW ORLEANS -- Her clients were always asking for New Orleans-style gardens, but landscaper Nancy Evans had little idea what they meant.

She would scour the Internet and cobble something together that included crape myrtles.
"I'd do a pretty good job for someone who's never been there before," she says.

After last weekend, Evans, 48, can't say that any more.

She was among the busload of members from New Direction Christian Church and Lindenwood Christian Church who traveled to the Crescent City on a post-Katrina missions trip.

Nearly 50 signed up to sacrifice -- paying to ride the bus down, eating cold sandwiches for lunch, sleeping on a hard gym floor, listening to the chorus of snorers all around, making scary trips to the Porta Potties.

God's work this day is at Westside Christian Church, a sister church in the Disciples of Christ denomination that was battered by last year's hurricane.

At the church, Vance Moore, Westside's pastor, gives the marching orders: A team that includes three New Direction members -- surely the hardest-working, most focused women to ever wield crowbars -- will take down the old roof to make way for one made of steel. Another group cuts aluminum siding. Others will wrest nails from boards so they can be used again.

Some -- including Lindenwood member Kevin Lofton, who is blind -- will sledgehammer the bricks from the church's walls. New Direction's assistant pastor Kelvin Turner tears down drywall, dodging wasps that have made a home there.

The Dumpster next to what will be an expanded sanctuary costs $900 to unload just one load -- up from around $250 pre-Katrina -- so others stand inside it, packing in the debris as tightly as possible.

And Evans? Well, she spied a ground mover as soon as the bus rolled up to the church.
"Nancy will run the Bobcat," Pastor Moore announces. "She's an excellent Bobcatter, but that said, don't get run over."

He asks her to spread out a pile of dirt -- dressing out the yard, Evans calls it -- and she does so, her straw cowboy hat mashing down her long blond hair.

Evans notices the stump of a tree at the front of the church. "Think the pastor wants that dug up?" she wonders aloud. The tree is clearly dead, but she won't proceed without permission.
"You have to be careful with stuff like that," Evans says, her skin tan from hours spent working in the sun. "They'll say, so-and-so's mom planted that tree."

But no, Moore says to root it up, and Evans does.

The damage Westside suffered wasn't from rising water, but from falling water and wind, says Moore, who was a builder in a previous life.

The denomination sent him here not just to rebuild the building, a daunting chore by itself, but to rebuild the church, which has just 12 members now -- down from 20 before Katrina hit and a high of 200 or so in the 1980s.

This Saturday happens to be Moore's 60th birthday, and during the lunch break -- before the sandwiches are eaten with dirty fingers -- the group gathers to sing "Happy Birthday."
And then it's right back to work, with the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love," blaring through a speaker that's been dragged outdoors. It's sweaty, exhausting, dirty work, but it will make it possible for future teams to have the same back-breaking experience. The building next to the sanctuary is being turned into housing for other Disciple teams who will rebuild the homes of those who had no insurance.

Evans takes a break from the Bobcat, but her landscaper's eyes don't stop roaming. In the front of the church, in flower beds that don't yet exist, she imagines planting azaleas (red, of course, since that's the main color in the Disciples' logo).

She and Moore walk to the back of the property, and she shares her vision, which calls for truckloads of soil to level out the land.

"You can't buy dirt here," Moore tells her, it's just too expensive.

"Man," Evans says, "I'm going to pray for you some dirt."

Forty-five people have labored most of the day, and yet there's so much more to be done. Moore says 1,000 volunteers have been through the church since Katrina, and it looks like it could take 1,000 more to finish all the work.

Torrential rains that bring out the frogs cut the day short, and the group climbs back onto the bus, filthy and damp.

Twenty-five are here from Lindenwood, which is predominantly white, and 17 are here from New Direction, a predominantly black church. (Disclosure: I have attended both churches.) Of the 45 on the trip, 11 are in New Orleans for the first time.

Back at the sleeping quarters at First Christian Church of Greater New Orleans, disposable cameras come out.

"Say unity!" someone calls out as members of both churches pose. They vow not to make this a one-time thing, and it isn't. Since the trip, members of Lindenwood have gone to New Direction for Bible study and men from New Direction have visited a men's group at Lindenwood.
The next morning, Sunday, the mood is more somber -- perhaps from exhaustion, perhaps in anticipation of the next stop.

Before church, the bus takes the weekend missionaries into St. Bernard Parish, and the group is as still as if someone had said, "Let us pray."

There are blocks and blocks of abandoned houses, and on the front of each one are spray painted sad messages -- how many bodies or pets found inside, the date the house was searched and by what rescue team.

"Slow down!" several on the bus call, and the driver pulls over. The group files onto the sidewalk, and instantly, a few of the women start crying.

Next to a gas station where the gas is still $1.49 a gallon stands a pay phone. Just above the receiver is a brown line -- the level to which the water rose.

"It almost feels like an invasion, a sacrilegious thing to take pictures," Evans says.

Still, she snaps away, at a picture of Jesus and Mary taped to a window, at an American flag stuck to another window.

You must have this sort of perspective, an eye for life, to labor in New Orleans, where clouds of failure and futility float above the miles of ruins.

Just up the street is a two-story pale green house, with ornate trim and tall shutter doors painted a darker green. It was beautiful once, but what stands out most now are the words spray painted on the siding, in a garish orange.
1 -- male
1 -- female
1 -- female pup
Atlanta B/5
9/20/05

Evans puts her camera down, stunned into a rare silence.

Then, in the front yard, behind the chain-link fence, she spots the wild daisies.

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