Feature Article: St. Thomas The Apostle

Gulf Parish Emerges from Katrina's Wrath

Evacuate your workplace... evacuate your homes... one can hardly comprehend the trauma of such an exodus. But parish secretary Patsy Bishop had a plan for survival when she left her office at St. Thomas the Apostle in Long Beach, Mississippi that day in late August. "I backed up all my documents, my financial data, and my ParishSOFT data to an external hard drive. I took it with me when I left the office for the last time," said Bishop. "But I did forget the power cords, the software, and my Diocesan Directory."

"All of our paper records are just gone," she calmly states. "Every marriage in progress folder is lost. All of our forms are gone. Every checkbook - gone! I didn't even have our account number." With the banks inundated with customers in the same situation, parish accounts were inaccessible for days. But it couldn't be helped. In those frantic and frightening hours before the storm, there simply wasn't time to remember everything.

Working from a temporary office in her bedroom at home, Patsy Bishop is putting the pieces of St. Thomas the Apostle back together. She still has no land line phone service, although it has been more than a month since Hurricane Katrina stormed up the Mississippi coast. Katrina made rubble of their gulfside church, parish life center, and school. Strong gusts shredded church and school records and scattered them without mercy.

St. Thomas is undergoing the greatest ministry challenge it has ever seen and emerging victorious. "Our parish has come together in an incredible way. It's just been wonderful," says Bishop. "We've been holding services in a Lutheran church and reconnecting each day with our families - some of whom we haven't seen in weeks." Through just word of mouth and a website posting for Volunteers Needed, St. Thomas is now a living demonstration of stewardship.

Volunteers from across the country and the Naval Construction Battalion Center in nearby Gulfport have worked around the clock, seven days a week, to construct a temporary church and school in a former skating rink about 2 1/2 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico - out of reach of Katrina's wrath. "The first five to six blocks of Long Beach, from the coast inland, were gutted," explains Bishop. "The K of C bought the rink property and loaned it to the church. It's just been overwhelming - our volunteers are a Godsend."

The result of their labors are incredible. The children of St. Thomas the Apostle returned to school on Monday October 3, just 35 days after Katrina obliterated their classrooms. ParishSOFT has provided Patsy Bishop with a new set of ParishSOFT software CDs, so she can restore her backup database of family and member data, sacramental records, religious education program data, ministry assignments, and financial records. But it will be at least another three weeks before anyone can return to a physical parish office.

Unfortunately, not all churches were so prepared. Some evacuated without a database backup or records of any kind. Their recovery will include not just new building construction, but reconstruction of their databases as well. Countless sacramental records, formerly stored at church offices, are lost forever.

The people of St. Thomas are returning to the Long Beach area to regroup and rebuild. Parishioners may find comfort in knowing that their records have survived. Their church still knows who they are, when their children were baptized, and whether their sons and daughters are scheduled to altar serve at their temporary church in December.

Although St. Thomas lost their church buildings to Katrina, they have discovered a new sense of community - a spirit that was really there all the time - one that no hurricane could ever demolish. Patsy Bishop lost nearly everything at her parish, yet she expresses nothing but gratitude for the overwhelming response that has risen from the rubble.

Katrina, despite her wrath, could not disrupt the mission and spirit of this parish. St. Thomas the Apostle moves forward, with an inspiring faith, love, and sense of community.

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