When Hurricane Katrina forced more than 1.5 million New
Orleans residents to evacuate the city in late August, Red Cross
volunteers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, weren’t ready for the disaster,
and FEMA agents hadn’t yet been deployed. Evacuees who headed north on
Interstate 10 needed an instant miracle.
Many of them found it at a church called Miracle Place.
The church’s name is more appropriate today than ever. More
than 1,000 people have found food and shelter at the church, located in
the Baton Rouge suburb of Baker, Louisiana. As of yesterday, 537
evacuees were living in Miracle Place’s unusual facility, which was
once a strip mall.
Immediately after the storm hit, the church installed a
laundromat, 20 showers, a sleeping area with 150 bunk beds, a food
pantry and a clothing area for weary storm victims who had to flee
their flooded homes for higher ground. People who lost all their
possessions found everything they needed here—even medicines, free
phone calls and job placement services.
“FEMA was not prepared for this, but the faith-based
community opened their arms to these people,” says Ricky Sinclair, 41,
who started Miracle Place in his home four years ago with a
congregation of 12. The church had grown to 1,000 before Katrina struck.
Today, it looks like the storm will bring more growth.
“We have a revival going on now,” Sinclair told me
yesterday, noting that 250 evacuees came to his altar on the first
Sunday after the disaster—all making decisions to follow Christ. He
preached a sermon from Acts 27 about the fierce Mediterranean storm
that destroyed the apostle Paul’s ship on his way to Rome.
Sinclair told his congregation that day: “ Storms will come,
but God can see you through them.”
Miracle Place has helped more than 300 evacuees resettle in
homes and new jobs in Baton Rouge, and some of the evacuees have told
Sinclair that they don’t intend ever to return to New Orleans.
“They told me, ‘Pastor, no one ever loved us like you do.
You are our pastor. We are making this our home,’” says Sinclair, who
is affiliated with the International Pentecostal Holiness Church.
Sinclair remains surprisingly optimistic about the disaster
that hit his state—in spite of news this past weekend that nearby Lake
Charles, Louisiana, was under 6 to 12 feet of water after being
drenched by Hurricane Rita. Teams of volunteers from Miracle Place and
other area churches are now taking relief supplies to that city.
So far, the church has distributed 3.5 million pounds of food, water
and other supplies.
“This is the church’s finest hour,” Sinclair says,
dismissing notions that Katrina was the judgment of God. “Sometimes bad
things happen. But I tell these evacuees, ‘God is doing a new thing in
your life. He delivered you out of Egypt.’”
Sinclair took a big risk three years ago when he bought the
abandoned, 122,000-square-foot shopping center for $600,000—money his
church didn’t have at the time. He turned the Super Fresh grocery store
into a worship center, installed a youth ministry in another store and
then began dreaming about ways to use the facility to bless his
community.
This humble pastor never prayed for a storm. But when
Katrina obliterated the Gulf Coast and triggered the largest
displacement of people in American history, Sinclair and many other
unknown local heroes rolled up their sleeves and made certain this
disaster had a happy ending.
