Go there, be there, care. Leaders are often called to help people out of their own helplessness.
larger than one church, smaller than a government agency. More than a million evacuees were fleeing the city in advance of the high winds, 10 inches of rain, and 15 feet of water. Cooking for Christ, the church’s food ministry, produced hundreds of meals for people who stopped in the church’s parking lot. Volunteers walked down the gridlocked freeway passing out meals to stranded motorists. Within three days, Rizzo and others had gotten more than 400 churches mobilized. His perspective: It’s amazing what can happen when no one gets the credit. The tools were basic: food, clothing, chainsaws, medical equipment, generators. The motive was simple: Christ-followers cannot be idle in the face of suffering. The response was fast. When a hurricane hits Everybody knew it was coming. Satellites took hour-by-hour snapshots of the spiral monster in the Gulf of Mexico. It fed on the energy of warm currents, it grew, it intensified. It drove toward the coast. The best scientific minds tried to estimate the surge of water coming and the winds of Hurricane Katrina—and where she would make landfall. When the levees broke, the city broke. What happened next was an astonishing series of leadership miscalculations. The municipal government of New Orleans was unprepared. The state government of Louisiana assumed too much of the local government. The federal government assumed it had time after the disaster hit to figure out what to do. There were problems of miscommunication. Someone came up with a ridiculous plan to have refugees head to the football stadium for sanctuary, which resulted in 25,000 people being left there for days without food, water, or medical assistance. And then the dark side of human nature took advantage of the void with looting, shootings, and random mayhem. Government leaders used the microphone for rhetoric and then blaming. All the while this natural disaster busted the fragile structures of government, a remarkable movement of individual saviors began. We did not see it on the television cameras right away, but hundreds of churches in the region sprang into action. Like the jazz music that is the soul of New Orleans, churches and small organizations improvised, doing what they could as circumstances changed with every passing hour. And it was remarkable how much they could do. Long before temporary housing was set up by the government, Christian groups were sheltering refugees. Food was distributed—homemade in church basement kitchens. Pastor Dino Rizzo of Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge had already been working for days mobilizing the members of his congregation for emergency care. They ordered enough food for 8,000 people, got on the phone, sent out emails getting hundreds of volunteers ready, and encouraged other congregations to get ready to work. A small network of like-minded and like-hearted people were ready—
Being ready Responding to crisis is one of the greatest opportunities for authentic and effective spiritual influence. Many people are ready to give up on finding spiritual truth and integrity. Long ago they tuned out religious rhetoric, and they wonder whether people with secular values are more concerned about real life than those with spiritual values. But here is the opportunity: When believers see themselves as first responders to crisis and allocate their resources and energies in that direction, they will be used by God in decisive ways. And the response must be genuine, not because it looks good for PR or with the idea that their acts of mercy are a method to prove the gospel. There is a better way, a simpler way. Be ready—for whatever may happen. Don’t view crises as interruptions of the work; they are the work. Mobilize people. Encourage them to act with compassion. Crises focus our attention and force us to move to the margin everything that is marginal in life. If leaders see crises as interruptions to the work they are trying to get done, then they miss the most important work that can be done. Whether the setting is a church, a business, a school, or a nonprofit organization, an unexpected crisis is an opportunity to minister to the spirit of those who belong to that community. If leaders cultivate a culture of service and generosity, then when the crisis comes, people are ready to move. Most important, in our better moments of spiritual influence, we are helping each other in the hard training for what lies ahead in life. If we start to get ready to deal with crisis when the crisis hits, we’re too late.
Mel Lawrenz trains an international network of Christian leaders, ministry pioneers, and thought-leaders. This article was adapted from chapter 9 (“Speak into Crises”) of Spiritual Influence: The Hidden Power Behind Leadership by Melvin Lawrenz, just released by Zondervan. Reproduced here by kind permission of the publisher (Zondervan. com).
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