One year later in the Gulf Coast

One year ago, New Orleans campus staff member Myron Crockett was helping freshmen move onto campus and preparing for new student outreach at Tulane and the University of New Orleans (UNO). And then hurricane Katrina struck. Myron’s home was destroyed. He and his family and his students were scattered across the country. But InterVarsity stayed in New Orleans.

On the one year anniversary of the Katrina upheaval, the Tulane chapter is still strong, even though a large group graduated last spring. The University of New Orleans was hit harder than Tulane but there’s still a small core of students forming a chapter there. And a new chapter is also being launched at Loyola University. Katrina made ministry more challenging, but the hurricane has also revitalized InterVarsity’s work on New Orleans’s college campuses.

“It’s actually opening up good opportunities for us to do ministry in a different way,” Myron says. “And to be more intricately involved in campus activities and reach out to more people.” Since Tulane’s Rogers Memorial Chapel was heavily damaged by the hurricane, the InterVarsity large group meeting needed a new location. The meeting ended up across the street on the Loyola campus. The large group meeting night has been moved from Friday to Wednesday, in an effort to attract more students who are busy on the weekends. Small groups are also being revamped.

As a native New Orleanian, Myron identifies with the loss and emptiness of the students. “Every area that I grew up in has been devastated,” he says. He’s heard professors comment “students are here physically, but they are vacant on the inside.” He feels it’s important to talk with the students about their losses and help them mourn in healthy ways. The feelings are especially strong on the UNO campus, which was more severely impacted than Tulane. Students at Tulane, who are not as typically from New Orleans, seem more interested in focusing on the experiences of the past year as a foundation for something good in the future. “I sometimes feel split myself in ministering to two kinds of students,” Myron says.

Myron has also been ministering to another kind of student, volunteers from outside New Orleans. Between November 2005 and July 2006, 600 students from campuses in ten states came to New Orleans to be a part of the Katrina Relief Urban Project (KRUP). “It was very grueling because we don’t have a lot of staff workers in what’s called the Gulf South Area of InterVarsity,” Myron says. “There were four of us who were working with these 600 students. It was logistically challenging, and some of it was exhausting but very rewarding.”

InterVarsity teamed up with local ministries such as the School of Urban Missions, Trinity Christian Community, Edgewater Baptist Church, First Baptist Church, and Urban Impact to identify damaged homes for students to clean out. “Those ministries were wonderful and gracious and it was wonderful to work with them,” Myron says. But InterVarsity was interested in more than just renovating property.

“If the students just come here and gut houses, and go back to whatever they’re used to, then people have this feel-good thing going on,” Myron says. InterVarsity challenged the students to seek a deeper response that probed God’s love for residents of every city. “In my mind, as a New Orleanian, it would’ve been a travesty to not talk about the fact that twenty-eight percent of the people in the city, pre-Katrina, lived in poverty. We had rich and poor living right on top of each other. There are a number of people who lived below half the poverty threshold in our nation. We had to go to those issues and figure out what God’s heart is. So we had students thinking about ‘How does God cause you to see the poor?’ ‘What does God want you to do back in your own city?’ ‘How are you going to be Christ’s hands or feet and fight for justice?’”

Many of the students who arrived for KRUP were already committed to working for justice. Others came specifically for the opportunity to seek God’s voice, because they have learned that God is passionate about the poor. “The students were wonderful about being honest about where they were,” Myron says. “We tried to create a gracious atmosphere where people knew we were all on different stages of our journey concerning race and poverty and how we respond with the gospel.”

InterVarsity groups that came to KRUP recruited not just from their chapters but from their campuses. Not everyone who came had a relationship with Christ. “They heard the gospel from a different perspective,” Myron says. ”Not just about individual salvation, which without question is true, but they also heard about how the cross and resurrection of Christ bears upon issues that activists who are religious and non-religious are concerned with. We stretched people’s paradigms.”

Myron says the focus in the city of New Orleans is now switching from demolition to renovation. And he’s ready to start building as well. Just back from a refreshing couple of weeks of rest and relaxation with family in Colorado, he’s plunging into another semester of student work. “At Tulane,” he says, “they’ve really rolled with the punches, and they’ve been a really resilient chapter.” The chapter at UNO is rebuilding around a small core of recent converts, and partnering with a nearby church. At Loyola, Myron’s launching a completely new outreach. “It’s going to be exciting to see what’s going to happen,” he says. “We’re thankful for God’s grace in looking forward to this semester.”

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A special fund was established to help support InterVarsity’s ministry in the Gulf Coast area. You can still donate online at: https://www.intervarsity.org/donate/.