Bethany: The Story Part 1

Every time that our youth have visited Bethany UMC over the past two mission trips, Reverend Hadley has left us with a task that extends well beyond our two weeks of construction work. Our role, he says, is to be ambassadors for New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and all of the affected and displaced survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Each day of this trip, we have been learning new parts of the message that we must take home with us, and this evening, we learned more about the story of Bethany UMC. After a delicious homemade dinner of spaghetti, meatballs, salad and bread pudding and a fun “one last song” with those members of the choir who still happened to be lingering after choir practice, we sat down, and heard it from Hadley from the beginning:
News broke. A mandatory evacuation had been called. It was going to be the worst hurricane in the books, and, if someone chose to stay, the governor suggested in a phone message that they write their social security number on their wrist and forehead. Reverend Hadley picked up Dr. Anita Crump (a pillar of Bethany UMC) and her sister-in-law to evacuate. They all took about three days worth of clothes, expecting typical evacuation patterns. When they hit the interstate, the traffic was one-way contraflow, all lanes designated for outbound destinations of Dallas, Houston, Denver, and other major cities. When the three arrived in Dallas, Reverend Hadley was shocked to see the news. Anderson Cooper stated, “New Orleans is gone.” With image after image of familiar buildings in complete ruin, he figured that Bethany must be lost. At the same time, he and the thousands of other victims had to stand in line for government assistance in the form of fuchsia-colored wristbands that signaled to residents and sales clerks of the evacuation cities that “We are Katrina refugees”. Hadley recalls the process as being “dehumanizing”.
Meanwhile, Reverend Hadley worked to contact his congregation through a mass email, “If you can hear, holla back.” As the list grew, the mass email became a daily devotional to help all of Bethany’s members displaced by the hurricane cope with many new “storms” in their lives. The church community of Bethany was still alive, just very spread across the United States.