STUDENTS, STAFF JOIN GULF REBUILDING EFFORT

Thirteen students spent a week in March on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi building a house for a family who lost theirs to the winds of Hurricane Katrina.

The students joined volunteers from around the country working with Habitat for Humanity in the town of Gautier. They were accompanied by the Rev. Michelle Holmes, ABSW vice president, and Dr. Margaret McManus, associate professor of historical and theological studies.

Natalya Johnson, who graduated from ABSW in May, was one of the organizers of the project. She volunteered in New Orleans last year, an experience that "really changed my life," she says.

This past fall, while attending the Orientation to American Baptist Life in Green Lake, Wis., she spoke with the Rev. Dr. Aidsand F. Wright-Riggins III, executive director of ABC's National Ministries and an ABSW alum (M.Div., 1975), and shared with him the students' desire to build community at the seminary and have a hands-on ministry experience. National Ministries ended up linking the ABSW group with Habitat and paid for much of the trip.

"We saw a home come together," Johnson says. "We also bonded as a group at ABSW."

The Rev. Bill DeSena, who also graduated from ABSW last month, and Jake Thibault, a student at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, were among the travelers. Here are their reflections:

I hope we can look at the possibility of rebuilding the devastated churches in the Ninth Ward at some point in the near future. I think that if those churches are rebuilt, it will send a message to New Orleans, the state and the federal government that any plans to build something other than a community of families in the Ninth Ward are doomed to failure. We saw in Biloxi the steps leading to a missing house a block from the casinos and the vacant look of the town without its people and local businesses to provide the social backdrop that a living community needs to function. We cannot permit corporate greed and public indifference to win.

"Finally, I believe that God sends challenges to us everyday to see if we take the shorter route of escape, denial and blame or the longer route of acceptance, responsibility and action. Katrina may well prove to be a wake-up call to the people of this land to remind us not to take for granted the security and comforts we who live in America have been blessed with but to remember that somewhere in this world at any given moment a tragedy is taking place. It is in the storm that we, like Job, finally meet God, and what we have heard becomes what we can now see face to face. I will never forget the experience of this trip and all of you, my fellow laborers in the vineyard."— The Rev. Bill DeSena

Like Simon the Cyrene, at my first glance of the poverty of Christ, I resented and despised it. I condemned the poor, not their poverty. As Simon despised Christ until he yoked himself to the cross of Christ and shared in his work, so did I despise the poor from the 'deep south.' Carrying the cross beam in Gautier, we were bitten by gnats, endured heat and humidity, splinters, blisters, dirt, and our own weaknesses. Carrying that beam we were yoked to the sufferings of a people whom we did not know, and we toiled for a family that we would never meet.

"Mystically we were united to Christ; mystically we were serving Christ; mystically we were becoming more like Christ. Through these beams and nails, we were bringing forth new hope for the downtrodden. This hope was not in the physical materials of a house but in the love of neighbors with whom they will share their lives, and in the love of Christ who calls us together to be one people of one mind and heart. We were building a Kingdom not just of building materials but of righteousness. St. Paul wrote, 'For the Kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit' (Rom. 14:17)." "— Jake Thibault