As part of a global community, we need to lock arms with other agencies — faith-based, as well as the ecumenical, as well as the secular community — in providing health care kits, housing, food opportunities, and above all, many prioritized concerns in a compassionate, caring way.

What I would say to American Baptists across the country, by way of affirmation and as a challenge to our partners and our family and the larger faith-based community, is to reach out and find out how we can use existing organizational structures to tie in, and plug our work into those — without competing or asking regional or national offices to create specific kinds of models. We want to be that facilitating process to serve as a clearinghouse for uniting and linking local entities with our national corporate entities.

We do not presently know of any specific location of an American Baptist church building that has been destroyed or demolished, but we do know of congregations that have been displaced and are in transition. They are part of that fluid paradigm shift that is going on every 12 to 24 hours.

We’re thankful and appreciative of those who’ve been a part of the advance team that has gone from Nebraska to Lake Charles in Louisiana. [We want] to be sensitive to the many opportunities for service as people now are being relocated from the Gulf Coast area to the East, and to the Midwest, and even to the far West. These are the kinds of concerns, because the buildings are just a place where the people have gathered, but the church is really about opportunities to do ministry and mission together now.