Thoughts on my 15th anniversary in New Orleans

First Baptist New Orleans moved into the current church facility seven years ago this coming Sunday. The only place I ever worshiped longer than I have worshiped in our new facility is down at the old church on St. Charles and Napoleon. Together these two houses of worship have been my preaching point and pastoral assignment for 15 years.
These 15 years have been exhilarating and tumultuous. Relocation was itself a tremendous undertaking that required enormous financial and human resources. The emotional cost of relocation was perhaps its greatest price tag.
We had scarcely settled into the new facility—less than 15 months of occupancy—when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, and our city, including our church neighborhood, was flooded and plunged into darkness. We returned to worship at the new facility seven weeks after the storm. We used a large generator to run the lights and fans until electrical power was restored to our facility three months later. We often worked from our kitchen tables until telephone and internet services were restored almost one year after the storm.
The annual hurricane season stirs up for many of us a host of unsettling memories. We lost our friends, our businesses, our homes, and our way of life in that terrible flood. We choked on the dust from ten thousand demolitions and gagged on the rancor of rotten meat from every freezer at the curb. We sank exhausted into borrowed beds week after week, commuted a hundred miles to work and school, and led and fed waves of volunteers who donned hazmat suits and helped us clean up the awful mess.
We set up structures and initiatives in the wake of Katrina that endured for the years of clean-up but are rendered obsolete by progress. We transitioned from normal to chaos to disaster relief to clean-up to rebuild. And now we are transitioning again to an emerging new normal.
This emerging era in New Orleans is what I want to talk about today. I want to do so using a metaphor that I often used after the storm—the open door. Before Katrina all the doors were closed. After Katrina, all the doors were open.
The crisis opened all doors. Some of those doors are closed now that the emergency is past and life is returning to normal.
Rev. 3:7-13: “To the angel of the church in Philadelphia write:
These are the words of him who is holy and true, who holds the key of David. What he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open. 8 I know your deeds. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.