Mercy Response Part 3: The Receiving Church

Ken and Jodi Hanning planted a church Galveston, Texas, just months before Hurricane Ike devastated the island in September 2008. With help from the Vineyard Mercy Response Team, the Hannings are serving the needy in their fledgling congregation and their community - even as they rethink their church planting strategies.

Vineyard USA: Tell us a little about how you came to be planting a church in Galveston.

Ken Hanning: My first job in the ministry - after years in human resources - was with Young Life in Houston. During that season, I met Alan Allen, the pastor of the Vineyard Church in Pearland, and asked him to be my mentor. Near the end of my time with Young Life, I started working for him, getting youth groups off the ground.

I worked for the church for about three and a half years. And then my wife, Jodi, and I started praying about what to do next. I loved working with youth, but I didn't want to do it forever. Around this time, Alan said, "I've always seen you as a church planter. You have a knack for gathering people to an idea."

So we started praying about that. I begged my wife to agree to move to Colorado Springs, where I knew of a church starting up, but she said no. When I discussed it with Alan, he said that said a group of pastors had been talking about where to plant another Vineyard church and the cities mentioned were College Station, San Antonio, and Galveston.

It just so happened that years before - I think it was during my first year on New Life staff - we had gone to a Pearland versus Galveston high school football game . We were sitting on the visitor's side at the Galveston stadium, and I said to Jodi, "The next time we start something, we should start it down here."

Jodi reminded me of that when I talked with her after my meeting with Alan. So we started praying about that. As we prayed, doors started flying open. For example, we decided to sell the house and move because the kids were all transitioning between schools anyway. In August 2006, we put our house on the market and it sold in nine weeks, which is really quick. So we felt like that was a door opening. We went to look for a house in Galveston, and we found one that we loved almost immediately. So we moved and got our kids settled in, and for the next year I commuted to Pearland.

Around January 2008, the church sent me out to plant, and we were here full-time by March. We started small groups and some people from another church joined us. Our church was full of medical students in their early 20s. Most of the people on the core team that had come with us to plant were in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.

We began to strategize about Sunday mornings, but then in September Hurricane Ike came. Suddenly even small groups didn't work anymore because people's houses weren't available. But the people on the island were still part of our church, and they wanted to know what we'd be doing. So we decided to start meeting on Sunday mornings.

On the first two Sunday mornings, we had to meet outside because the church building that we were supposed to meet in got a bunch of water. Eventually we got all the carpet and the pews and the nastiness ripped out. Now we meet in a concrete building with concrete floors and do terrible versions of Vineyard worship songs.

VUSA: Ike has obviously changed your plans.

KH: It's funny how we make all these plans. I listened to all the tapes about church planting, and I read the Aubrey Malphurs book and took the surveys. I tell Jodi that church planting books are like Cosmopolitan magazine - you take the quiz to find out if you are ready for the next step in your relationship. And then God throws this hurricane our way and all that just goes out the window.

We backed up when we realized the damage of the storm. As the reality of it sunk in, we met with some of our leaders to pray and grieve. Then the focus of the church became more apparent. We had started out asking questions like, "How do we reach our community strategically?" and "How can we be a relevant church?" After Ike, we were asking, "How can we be a church that offers our community a sense of safety?" or even, "Since there is no normalcy here, how can we get people together and coexist in this lack of normalcy and worship God?"

I kept coming back to Romans 12:15: "Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn." At the first Sunday morning meeting after Ike, I read that verse and said, "This is what we're going to do today. Some of you feel guilty because your house is fine. And some of you are devastated because you've lost everything. And so we are going to get into groups and we're going to ask the Lord to deal with that." And that's what we did. And he showed up.

And as I was leaving that day, I thought to myself, That was great. We'll get our small groups back up and get our strategy back in order. But somebody walked up and said, "This was exactly what I needed. Are we going to do it again next week?" And - trying to be all cool, like I had planned it - I said, "As a matter of fact, we are."

I met with my leadership team and said, "This seems to be what people need. They're here. They're working on their houses. They don't have time for weekly small groups, but their Sunday mornings are set aside. So let's just go with it." And they agreed. All the strategic thinking went by the wayside, and we became a place for community, because that's what we need.

We've been helping each other with our houses and with cutting down trees. We encourage one another and cry together. There's crying every Sunday. I could preach a message on Winnie the Pooh and people would still cry. It's going to be several weeks before the crying stops.

We share the church space with two other congregations. One congregation had already been meeting there, and the other congregation's building was devastated. We meet at different times on Sunday mornings. During the week, we work together to clean the building out. They share their coffee with us and we share donuts with them. It's really cool.

VUSA: It seems like God is working even in the midst of adversity.

KH: The adversity has been the blessing in one sense, but we're still fighting. There's a lot of hopelessness, so as a church we're trying to get the message out that God hasn't left us, that God's blessing us even through this.

VUSA: Is most of the work you're doing aimed at the church family that you were nurturing there, or is it aimed at a wider group?

KH: I think the first two weeks, we were assisting people in the church family, which is around 40 people. About half of our people had no property damage. They were fine. Another dozen or so were in apartment situations or other situations where they didn't lose anything but still had to move. They were able to find something else pretty quickly. And then there were a few people with property that got a lot of damage.

The first two weeks we focused on taking care of those folks. As displaced people [from church] came back to the island from wherever they had evacuated to, they hung out here. Maybe they'd spend the night - the young med students crash on the floors - and then go get their place in order or go get their stuff so they could move. We became like a family.

When we came back after the storm, our home had electricity, which is unbelievable - nobody else on the island had electricity - but we did lose our washer and dryer. The laundry was piling up and Jodi told me that she was going to have to go to somewhere on the mainland to get it done. I said, "Let's ask the Lord for a washer and dryer." So we did.

Then a lady from another Vineyard came up to me at a meeting and asked, "What do the Hannings need?" I told her that we needed a washer and dryer, and in a few days, we had them.

So my wife has been washing laundry for these young folks who stay with us. Some of their clothes got a lot of water damage - and the water is nasty. It reeks. Jodi has become an aficionado of odor removal. She has a washer-dryer ministry. You won't find it in any church planting books. We've become a pragmatic resource for our community, and God has really blessed that.

We were then ready to partner with those on the Mercy Response Team, to pave the way for them, to be their eyes and ears.

VUSA: What did it look like when Mercy Response comes in?

KH: I became familiar with Mercy Response when our regional leadership conference was held in Kenner, Louisiana, about nine months after Katrina. We got to visit New Orleans and see what the team was doing.

When I came back on the island after Ike, it looked a lot like New Orleans. I knew I needed help from Mercy Response, and I knew that first I had to contact my regional overseer. I sent an e-mail to [Southwest Regional Overseer] Brian Anderson telling him what we needed. Then I got on the phone and gathered a bunch of pastors, and they agreed to point their efforts and resources toward Vineyard Mercy Response.

Mercy Response set up camp up in Clear Lake, which was ideal. And then we started giving them names - a list of people who needed help and what they needed. When teams arrived, they would go to the homes of individuals or families and get to work.

At first I went out to help, too. But I realized that I can't help indefinitely. I still have church stuff to do. That was OK, though, because they will keep working - and they are just so capable. Even if all the people in our church were to work, we wouldn't have the number of people we'd need and we wouldn't have the tools. But the volunteers come in, they get a lot of work done, and they get it done quickly.

My neighbor - a Catholic woman - had three and a half feet of water in her house. Phil Schissler [director of Vineyard Mercy Response] sent a team that had been in New Orleans over to work on her house. In just four hours, they had the whole bottom half gutted. It blew her mind. She just couldn't believe it. One of the women volunteering told her how to make a solution to kill the mold in the walls. I was in her house recently, and you can't even smell mold. It's amazing what they can accomplish in a short period of time.

VUSA: The local church has local knowledge and relationships, so it's like you're making introductions.

KH: Exactly. And this networking has been tearing down denominational walls in Galveston, which are pretty strong. These walls have been up for a long time, and there are many hurt feelings.

Not long ago, I got a phone call from someone at Omaha Rapid Response, a non-denominational relief organization from Nebraska. He had gotten my number from someone at St. Patrick's Catholic Church - a man I had met after the storm - who told the guy in Omaha that we were doing great work. Stuff like that is not an everyday occurrence in Galveston, which some say is 80 to 90 percent unchurched.

So now the Catholic church has groups who call them get in touch with us, and we are reaching out to them, too. For example, we gutted a house for a woman who needed a new water heater, a new washer, and a new dryer. I called the Catholic church and asked for help. Someone called me back two days later and said, "We have them. In fact, we have two water heaters and two washer-dryers." Mercy Response helped us get them installed.

Mercy Response has been a vehicle for gathering people who want to help. That has been the most impressive thing for me - the way this has brought down denominational walls.

VUSA: This has happened while your young church is in such a crucial stage. How does all this change your vision for the church? Can you keep the original five-year plan?

KH: That's a complex question. In one sense, the storm doesn't change what we came here to do. Our mission statement is pretty simple: "Love God. Love others. Serve our community." That won't change. But strategy probably will change. We had planned to grow small groups in individual neighborhoods, because Galveston's a very eclectic community. But that goes out the window because now some of the neighborhoods are gone. So we have to ask, "What is the neighborhood?"

When we first told people that we were planting a church, they would ask why, and we would answer, "We feel like God called us here to start a church and serve the community." Some of our friends here aren't believers. The church has been irrelevant to them. So we were asking ourselves how to serve a community that doesn't want to be served. People didn't care. They didn't want us here.

Now everybody's saying things like, "We've got to help each other. We've got to love each other. You guys are great. We appreciate you." We've become "the church that guys people's houses." In a sense, we are who we've always been, and now we get a picture of what that looks like. We had been trying to be so specific and relevant and strategic, and now all of that is gone.

But we're also learning more about what it means to serve. We - all of us, not just people in our church - have become more concerned about one another's dignity. Here's an example: We were gutting the house of a woman in my neighborhood who is 85. She was very concerned about people seeing her house because she's elderly, and it wasn't as nice as she would have had it 20 years ago. I could see volunteers stop and think, "We're here to do a job, but how can do it and preserve her dignity?" How do we honor people who are made in God's image when their stuff - their underwear and everything - is out on the curb? Some groups emphasize having that stuff in the right piles, but we're trying to see past the destruction and love these people.

God is giving us a clear picture of his care for humanity, of how much he cares about all of us. The attitude in Galveston prior to this was "Live and let live. Do whatever you want. Have a good time." But we are seeing a sense of gratefulness and seeing people turning toward God.