Taken from: Citizen Magazine

Lessons from the ashes

[How do churches respond to destruction and terror? Ask the people of ground zero in New York...and Oklahoma City...and Columbine.]

by Frederica Mathewes-Green with Gary Schneeberger

When the Rev. Richard Del Rio saw the second plane fly into second tower of the World Trade Center, a mile away from his church, Abounding Grace Ministries, he put on his clergy collar and hopped on his motorcycle.

"He got there about 10 in the morning and stayed until 3 or 4 the next morning," recalls his son, Jeremy Del Rio, youth pastor at the family's nondenominational church. "My father was the only identifiable clergyman" on the east side of the site.

"He said that for the first time in his life he had nothing to say, just had no answers for anybody," Jeremy adds, speaking for his father. "And so he resolved to be a symbol that God was still there, that God was present in the midst of chaos."

Hundreds hungered for that symbol in the frenzied hours that followed. Rescue workers ran up to him asking for prayer or for assurance that their sins were forgiven before they entered crumbling buildings. Some led him to newly uncovered body parts and asked him to say a final blessing. "All these guys were running up to him, and it was like fish jumping into the boat-all of them wanting some connection to something beyond this devastated circumstance."

Of course, there was plenty of other work for Del Rio-helping rescue vehicles get through the crowds and assisting people in wheelchairs. But those were things any volunteer could do. What set Del Rio apart was his authority as a pastor, a representative of the body of Christ.

The decisions he faced in the hours after the attack are the same decisions we all face today. What's the church's role-and its responsibility-in a crisis? What should we do as the months go by and people's needs change? What should we do right now to help neighbors and strangers alike cope the next time disaster strikes?

PRAY

"The work of the church begins immediately, because we can never minimize the impact and the power of prayer," says the Rev. David Paap, program director of Stephen Ministries, who speaks from experience. Stephen Ministries, headquartered in St. Louis, has trained lay counselors nationwide for decades, and they've worked amid the ruins of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the Columbine High School massacre. This labor of prayer is "spiritual and therefore invisible," says Paap, but it is nevertheless powerful, "providing protective care over the rescue workers and those who are providing comfort to grieving people."

BE THERE, BUT DON'T BE PUSHY

"The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much," wrote St. James (James 5:16, KJV). But as Richard Del Rio found, the visible presence of praying Christians also has a powerful effect, even if they don't say much.

"We cannot minimize the importance of physical presence," Paap says. "When someone is in shock, in that initial phase of loss, they don't need to be bombarded with a lot of words."

In fact, too much helpfulness can feel like prying, especially from well-meaning strangers and especially when wounds are deep and fresh. The Rev. Brian Boone, pastor of Foothills Bible Church in Littleton, Colo., witnessed this phenomenon after the Columbine ambush-which claimed a member of his congregation.

"For the first few days after the tragedy we were overwhelmed with too many people wanting to help too quickly," Boone remembers. "Our kids weren't ready to talk; they just wanted to be together and pray, and to be with people they knew were safe and who loved them."

STAY WITH IT

Pastor Greg Dobbins of Oakcrest Church of Christ in Oklahoma City has shepherded his flock through two disasters: the 1995 Murrah bombing and a devastating tornado in 1999. "There are people who immediately break down when a crisis occurs," he says, "but many are the type that it doesn't hit them till later on. Just keep watching those folks because you don't know when it's going to happen. We had fresh things coming up even a year and a half after the tornado." Sometimes, he adds, it's not the experience of the event, but the persistent memories of the event, that cause the distress.

A disaster also can expose unrelated personal problems, struggles that may have been ignored or dormant for years. "Here's a big surprise most churches wouldn't think of," Boone says. "A tragedy like this stirs up all the other stuff in people's lives. After Columbine, we had a flurry of phone calls from people who said they needed to see a pastor right away, and it wasn't necessarily the shootings they needed to talk about."

Ken Isaacs directs the Billy Graham New York Prayer Center, which was established within a week of the attacks to offer emotional and spiritual support to the grieving. "My concern is that, as the national and international media move away from New York, the people living here with the suffering and heartbreak are going to start developing other emotions. They'll still be carrying burdens, and they'll wonder where all those flag-waving Americans went. So we're looking at the need for support down the road."

Jeremy Del Rio agrees. "So far the rescue workers haven't had a minute to process the work they're doing. By Christmastime, they're going to be processing the fact that they're missing 300 of their buddies, and we have to be concerned about depression and even suicide. We're going to need a continuing support structure for them."

Paap says some people who don't yet recognize the impact of the attack soon will. "The mangled concrete and steel is really a massive cemetery," he says. "The smell, the sight and the whole situation is having a tremendous unconscious impact. It's going to require care for many months to come."

CARE FOR CAREGIVERS

Pastors and counselors, as well as rescue workers, need support, too. "Post-Columbine, about July, we gave all our pastors some time off," says Boone. "They'd been running tough schedules and handling critical needs, and we wanted them to have some down time. It was a small thing, but our pastoral staff felt really cared for."

Paap describes another example of taking the lead in caring for a caregiver. Following a rash of teen suicides in Houston, the senior pastor of a Methodist church participated in many of the funerals and just as many media interviews. One morning he noticed a man in a car outside his home and, presuming he was a reporter, went out to talk with him. It actually was a Stephen Minister, who said, "Pastor, I've been concerned about you because of all you've had to bear. I would be happy to have a cup of coffee with you this morning, and listen to you and pray for you." The pastor was astounded: "In all my years of pastoring I have never had that happen. It really changed the way I think about pastoring."

BE READY TO WITNESS

And New Yorkers may be more in need of pastoring than ever before, says Eric Metaxas, a Manhattan writer who's worked with VeggieTales. "I sense an openness now that is entirely unprecedented, but I worry that the church will miss it. It's as if we've been so cowed by the closed hearts in the past that we can't believe things are any different. But they are; there's a deep and widespread fear and hunger in New York, and people are searching for answers. If people put up signs for neighborhood Bible studies on 'Where is God in this tragedy?' or 'Making sense of suffering and evil,' people would show up who never would have shown up before. The church needs to see this hunger and respond quickly."

That's what 50 evangelical pastors who formed the Ground Zero Clergy Task Force have done. The group, co-founded by Richard Del Rio, offers prayer and counseling at the disaster site, hospitals, police and fire stations and elsewhere. The successes members have enjoyed so far hearten them as they face the uncertainty of the months to come.

A few nights after the tragedy, for instance, Jeremy Del Rio and two other pastors on the task force struck up a conversation with a fire captain and his deputy. "We asked if they would like prayer, and they said, 'Please, we need all the prayer we can get.' " As the pastors prayed, the firemen's radios began to squawk, and the pastors paused so the men could hear the call. Instead, one of the firemen put his hand over his radio and asked them to continue praying. "That doesn't happen too often," Del Rio says.

But it can happen more often now that the lingering anxieties from the events of Sept. 11 have softened so many Americans-even those thousands of miles from ground zero-to the comforting reality of God's love.

"We have had families who have come to church and come to know Christ as a result of the Columbine tragedy," says Littleton's Pastor Boone-and Oklahoma City's Dobbins tells similar stories. "I don't know if I would call it a revival," Boone adds. "I don't know if it was really on that scale-but there are people that were just shaken to what really matters in life, and they're still here."

PREPARING NOW FOR THE NEXT TIME

. . . IN THE CHURCH

Boone found that, immediately after Columbine, people wanted care from those they already knew and with whom they felt safe. Small groups already in place turned out to be the most helpful resource for kids who wanted to talk.

Churches should assess now whether they have adequate resources that could be called on in emergencies. Healthy small groups, well-organized prayer networks and trained lay counselors like Stephen Ministers are just as important to a church as a fire extinguisher.

. . . WITH THE CITY

" 'Where have these people been for the last 10 years?' " is a question Bill Devlin, president of Urban Family Council of Philadelphia and New York, thinks citizens will ask church members who show up just for an emergency. Before a crisis, "the pastor should know the newspaper editor and the elected officials and invite them to church."

Devlin recommends that church members and pastors receive counselor training and disaster-relief certification. Then, when tragedy strikes, congregations immediately can offer help where it is most needed.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

A disaster of this magnitude is new to Americans, but Christians who have suffered in other lands can lend some perspective. The Rev. George Calciu, who spent years in Romania's communist prisons, now pastors Holy Cross Church in Alexandria, Va. The evening of the attacks he watched members of Congress sing "God Bless America."

"I was at first very moved," he says. "And then I began to think, in how many of their votes and actions do these men and women work to cast away the blessing of God?"

As Christians, we are thrilled merely to hear God's name spoken in the public sphere. But the danger is that sincere-sounding talk may be nothing more than spray-on piety, according to the Rev. Rafeek Mufarrij, who grew up in Beirut and now pastors St. Mary Church in Hunt Valley, Md.

"In America, people treat God as if they have Him in a genie bottle. When there's trouble, they let Him out so He can use his power to fix things. Other times they won't let people say His name."

So this becomes the greatest challenge to the church: perceiving where there is genuine openness and speaking a gentle word that can bear fruit; and where there is mere superficiality, speaking a word of clarity or even challenge.

As time passes and events further unfold, there will be many more opportunities for Christians to bear public witness to our faith.