Rebuilding New Orleans

Mike Broadway over at Earth as it is in Heaven has posted a couple of helpful items showing how churches in New Orleans are using the principles of Christian community development to rebuild the communities that were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Mike and some of his students from Shaw University Divinity School were in New Orleans this past week as part of the Churches Supporting Churches project which seeks to assist African American churches located in the areas of the city that were most severely stricken by Hurricane Katrina.

Churches Supporting Churches operates on the belief that "the Katrina catastrophe exposed again the triple evils of poverty, racial injustice and militarism in this region of the US identified by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. nearly four decades ago. This Kingian Legacy is the context we need to address the moral and practical challenges to address these conditions." Consequently, their objective is to go beyond simply providing food, clothing, and shelter to Katrina victims but to actively support churches in the task of rebuilding their communities and, most importantly, preserving the integrity of those communities for the original residents rather than allowing them to be bought up and redeveloped by land speculators.