Mercy Response Part 2: The Sending Church

VUSA: How did your involvement with the Mercy Response Team unfold?

Nathan Anderson: For us, it began back with Katrina. We were a local church [30 minutes from downtown Houston, and about 6 hours east of New Orleans] trying to be involved with what was going on there. Our initial connection was relational--knowing people over there who were affected. And our story is kind of unique in the sense that as a local church, one of the things that God had us give was our pastor at the time [Doug Anderson, who went to work with Mercy Response]. We were willing to go help out a little bit, but we didn't know it was going to lead to the relocation of our pastor, my dad. But it really did seem to be what God was doing. There's a heart in us as a local church to reach out to our community, to do whatever we are able to do as a 130-member church--serve each other, serve our neighbors, and serve those we come in contact with.

VUSA: What happens when an event like Hurricane Ike occurs?

NA: When hurricane Ike hit our area and regional overseers, in coordination with Mercy Response, looked for the most strategic location to base a relief effort in the Houston area. They asked if we would be willing to serve as the Mercy Response base site because of our proximity to Galveston and accessible location.

One cool thing is that the guy we rent our church building from also owns a warehouse connected to our building. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, he was gracious enough to let us use this space to store relief supplies, which we shipped over to Lake Charles and Baton Rouge.

We talked to him for Ike as well, and again he was kind enough to let us use that space rent free. It quickly became a convenient place to organize supplies for Galveston and this area along the bay. [Clear Lake is halfway between Houston and Galveston.] Everything is within 20 minutes of this warehouse space--another indicator that this was what God was setting up.

What happened next?

NA: Initially members of our church were getting each other's homes picked up and our neighbor's homes picked up.

We sat down with Phil Schissler (Mercy Response Director) early on, and he said, "We want to come help you guys do whatever it is God's calling you to do." The team has experience and knows what has worked in the past.

Phil and the team are very sensitive, and this sensitivity means they don't just go with what they've done in the past. Instead they ask, "What is God doing here and now? What is God calling this local church to do, and how do we come alongside that?"

That was refreshing because there wasn't this feel of, "Here's how this thing works. Get in line." It was more of, "What's God doing? Let's figure this out together. Here are some things that you'll need to get the ball rolling--like if we need to start having teams of people come in, we'll need to feed them, and we want to feed them well. What does it look like for you as a local church to call people to come in and begin cooking and preparing meals and serving and helping out?"

So some of the chaos at first resulted from our not having done things on that level. We were just beginning to figure out the administrative processes for feeding a lot of people--organizing volunteers to come help cook for people who are going out to serve.

VUSA: Does the Mercy Response Team help you deal with that strain? Or does the administrative burden fall on the local church?

NA: I don't know how the Mercy Response Team has done it in other places, but as we talked, we felt our church should take on the role of helping to house, feed, and support the volunteers coming in. Instead of sending our people out every day to gut houses and stuff, our people keep the volunteers fueled and refreshed and ready to go out and serve in the community.

This responsibility has fallen on the local church, and our key people volunteer to help administrate that. For instance, a woman in the church named Amy Devlin really took on this role of coordinating the cooking team. She was in contact with the Mercy Response Team, calling in and researching what has and hasn't worked in the past. She put together and administrates our whole system. She coordinates how many meals we need to cook every day for volunteers, how many sack lunches we need to make, how we keep them fueled and ready to go.

VUSA: What happened right after the storm hit?

NA: Ike hit on a Friday night and a Saturday, September 12 and 13. By the next weekend--a week later--people from our church were already going out into the community to start gutting houses and help in other ways, and we were also talking with the Mercy Response Team and Vineyard USA. I think by the next Tuesday--just more than a week after the storm--Phil came to town and we had an all-church meeting where he cast some vision for how the team could come alongside the local church.

By that point, our church already had the warehouse set up and some supplies delivered. We were also mobilizing people in the church to be in housing teams. Within two weeks of the storm, we had a team down from Ohio, if I remember correctly, that was already headed toward New Orleans. That team served in New Orleans for a little bit and then came over to help us out.

VUSA: Tell us about the teams of volunteers. How big were the teams? Where were they from?

NA: We've hosted teams of two to three people and teams of 25. We've had Vineyard and non-Vineyard volunteers. We've had teams from cities like Chattanooga and states like Ohio, California, and Louisiana.

Here's one cool story: We have a woman here from Wisconsin, Diane, who showed up a few hours before that first team from Ohio. She just came on her own. The Lord just kind of led her here, and she has been here ever since. She had experience serving on the Gulf Coast after Katrina. She has an incredibly humble heart and a desire to serve, and she has actually ended up coordinating a lot of what's going on. She helps run the camp with the Mercy Response Team--like a camp manager. So many instances throughout this time--like having Diane come--make it obvious to us that God is orchestrating things.

VUSA: What are you working on now?

NA: Last week we saw a lot of houses gutted. This week we have a team down from Omaha. These guys are not actually a part of the Vineyard. They're with Omaha Rapid Response, and I they do relief work all over the world. I think they have some connection to the Vineyard and some connection to a Catholic church down in Galveston. In a roundabout way they got to us. And they're some big ol' Nebraska boys! This week they're doing a lot of chainsaw work and tree work.

One of the first things God laid in our lap in the early weeks came when there were only three or four women around. They ended up stumbling across the place where Galveston residents were going to get their mail--a makeshift post office in a retail center. And the line was two or three hours long every day. People stood in line just to be able to get their mail. So these women began going out and cooking hot dogs and hamburgers and handing out water. I think they fed up to 500 or 600 people standing in line each day.

So we've been just taking every week as it comes. It seems like each week God has another project-of-the-week. We had a few weeks of steady house-gutting work. This week, since we have these guys from Nebraska, we're tackling a lot of tree trimming and debris-clearing work.

Last Saturday, we went to Galveston with a team of people from our church. We had gathered a lot of clothes--mostly collected over the last year or two for our clothing closet. The clothes filled a really large van with more left over. We took these to a local church in Galveston that was wanting to hand out clothes down there. Our team showed up with the clothes and began setting up clotheslines and hanging clothes up. Within two hours, about half of the clothes were gone--before we had even put signs out. And once we had signs, the rest went within another couple of hours.

It just seems like--with project after project--we just stumble onto what God is doing and go with it. It's a very fluid thing. As the line goes around here, "Blessed are the flexible, for they shall bend and not break."

It has been awesome to see [this flexibility] in the church. It could be very frustrating for those who organize meals for the volunteers, because the turnout is never quite what they expect it will be and they always have to adapt. But it's great to see our people keep the bigger picture in mind. It's really about serving. Having a heart to serve others helps them through some things that could be really frustrating logistically. It helps them just kind of surf it through.

VUSA: What affect has all this had on your local congregation?

NA: I think--especially since Katrina and our church's involvement with the response to that--God has really been working in us, as a church, to be more and more focused on serving others and helping others. So this didn't come as a huge upheaval or disruption to our way of doing church or our way of life. It actually fit right in with what we felt God was already calling us to be and to do in the first place.

So once it set it wasn't a huge shock. It was more like, "Ah, this is what we've been preparing for. We're ready. Let's go." As a church, we're still really eager to get together. People are eager to help the teams, eager to go out and serve. And there hasn't been a lot of, "When do we get back to life as normal?" It feels like, well, this is normal--except it's not!

We're 20 minutes or so from Galveston. But we're within 10 or 15 minutes from the Galveston Bay Area , too, where homes there were equally affected. Some of our small groups meet over there. It has been amazing to see that the people in our church most affected by the storm are among those helping out the most. They should be the ones needing the most help, yet they are some of the ones taking the lead and helping serve the teams coming in.

I don't want to overspiritualize this, but in hindsight, it seems like God was preparing us, getting us ready. Not that we know God is saying, "Hey, here it comes. Get ready for the next disaster here." No. There was none of that kind of talk before the storm or anything. But as we look back on what he's been doing--in our hearts and even in our actions--over the last three, four, or even five years, we see that he has been preparing us to be the type of church that wouldn't be shaken or derailed by something like this. It's more like, "This is who we are. Let's go."

VUSA: Do you get any sense, as you look ahead, of opportunities ahead for the long term, beyond just a few weeks?

NA: There's nothing I see specifically, but there are a lot of things I would hope for--like an improved relationship between our church and the city we're in. Maybe this would be an avenue to a greater connection there. Maybe it would be good news to our city--and the surrounding cities and communities--that we are a church that serves the area instead of being a drain on the community or a facility that doesn't pay taxes.

VUSA: What are the things that you're going to take away from this experience?

NA: I love that there are more and more opportunities to be the church instead of just going to church, which again is something that God's been working in us for some time now. I remember Phil asking at the beginning, "Are you sure you want to go forward? It'll change your church." I was thinking to myself, Well, if anything's going to change our church, I hope it's something like this. In that sense, I think we were just ready for it--as ready as you can be.

Talk to me two months from now to see if I'm not ready for things to get back to the way they used to be! But right now, we have an opportunity to serve the Houston and Galveston areas and also really serve people in the Vineyard and in even other churches as they come to serve in this area. All of those opportunities--to get to be part of a church--have me incredibly excited.

We're just looking for what the Father's doing and trying to get in on it and play. It's not that you'd ever wish for a disaster or anything like that, but you get to join in with God in a situation that really is totally upside down. We get to come together and meet people from all over and people in our community we would have never met otherwise--from relief workers to those whose homes are being rebuilt. I'm hearing from the congregation things like, "What a privilege to get to join with God in something like this."

VUSA: As people read this online, they may want to help. Should people contact you directly, or is it better to go through Mercy Response?

NA: I'd say Mercy Response for sure. It's exciting that since Katrina, God has given us opportunity after opportunity as a movement--through Vineyard USA and as local churches--to respond and to serve people in very tangible ways. It's great to see a segment of the Vineyard like the Mercy Response Team that can help mobilize us as a movement to serve each other and to serve alongside each other as we serve others.

That whole aspect--getting to meet brothers and sisters in the Vineyard and those outside the Vineyard who are brothers and sisters in Christ--has me really excited. I hope that will continue to grow and continue to be a focus for the Vineyard.