After shuttle fell, Texas Baptists served up love

February 10, 2003

After shuttle fell, Texas Baptists served up love
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___DALLAS--Volunteers with Texas Baptist Men served 1,500 meals on Sunday, Feb. 2, to law enforcement officers and others scouring the woods and pastures of Nacogdoches County for debris from the Columbia space shuttle.
___Meanwhile, chaplains provided comfort to searchers throughout East Texas who continued to discover not only metal fragments of the shuttle, but also body parts of the seven-member crew. And churches ministered to the grieving families of NASA personnel in the Houston area.
___A 14-member strike team from North Texas left Dallas at midnight Saturday, Feb. 1. The American Red Cross asked Texas Baptist Men, an affiliate of the Baptist Ge

BRAD HAILE, associate pastor at First Baptist Church of Nacogdoches, stands near a piece of shuttle debris that landed in the yard of a neighbor of longtime Royal Amabassador leader Pot Mercer in Nacogdoches. Haile stands 6-feet 4-inches tall, giving perspective to the large chunk of metal thrust deep into the ground.

neral Convention of Texas, to provide emergency food service for search teams in East Texas.
___The Dallas-area volunteers set up the Texas Baptist disaster relief mobile unit--a self-contained field kitchen in a specially equipped 18-wheel tractor-trailer rig--and a food trailer with an initial supply of 3,000 meals on the grounds of the Nacogdoches County Expo Center.
___The Expo Center served as a staging area where state highway patrol, Texas Rangers, sheriff's deputies and other law officers received assignments for the widespread search.
___"There's debris all over the ground here in Nacogdoches," said Gary Smith of Midway Road Baptist Church in Dallas, on-site coordinator for disaster relief. He described one piece of metal next to the home of Pot Mercer, a longtime Royal Ambassador leader in the area.
___"It looks like a car spring," Smith explained. "It was about three inches wide and three feet long above the ground, but I don't know how much was embedded in the ground."
___A nine-member Texas Baptist Men volunteer team from East Texas joined the Dallas-area strike team on Sunday, and at least another half-dozen Baptist volunteers from East Texas were slated to arrive Monday. Texas Baptist Men from the Hill Country are bringing a 30-foot shower trailer to the site to provide a place for volunteers to bathe and wash clothes.
___Seven chaplains with Victim Relief Ministries, sponsored in part by Texas Baptist Men, also set up their trailer at the Expo Center as a "ministry of presence" for the searchers, said coordinator Mike Brittain of Diana.
___"When the Highway Patrol come to the Expo Center for their assignments or to the disaster relief unit to eat, we're there just to visit with them, talk to them and make sure they're OK," Brittain said.
___The chaplains held a worship service for the law officers and other searchers Sunday evening in the Expo Center rodeo arena. Several troopers joined them Monday for a morning devotional as well.
___Fred Raney, pastor of First Baptist Church in Hemphill, worked alongside searchers in the areas around the dense Angelina and Sabine national forests, near the Louisiana border.
___Raney, who serves with the Hemphill Volunteer Fire Department, served as a chaplain to those charged with the grim task of recovering body parts, according to Jerry Redkey, director of missions for Sabine Neches Baptist Area.
___In Douglass, the local fire department and Boy Scouts found more than two dozen pieces of debris had rained down on property surrounding First Baptist Church, according to Betty McGuire, wife of Pastor Pete McGuire. About half the church parking lot was unavailable for the slightly larger than usual crowd of 55 who attended services Sunday.
___In addition, television crews from New York City, Salt Lake City and Mexico City videotaped services. People from North Carolina and Iowa also stopped by the adjacent parsonage to discuss the debris.
___The tragedy also deeply affected others far from the 100-mile-long debris field, particularly the close-knit community near the Johnson Space Center in Houston. University Baptist Church of Clear Lake counts seven astronaut families among its members, as well as many other NASA employees.
___None of the Columbia astronauts were members of that church, but the tragedy hit the congregation hard, according to Pastor Robert Creech. "The NASA family is a pretty tight-knit group," he said.
___The incident also revived vivid, painful memories of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion, which killed Commander Dick Scobee and six others. Scobee's wife, June, was a member of University Baptist Church at that time.
___During Sunday morning worship Feb. 2, Creech led his congregation in a special prayer time for all those affected by the Columbia's demise. Photographs of the Columbia crew were projected onto screens in the sanctuary during the prayer.
___One family in the Clearlake congregation is fulfilling a unique role in the days after the Columbia's loss, serving as escorts for the family of Commander Rick Hubbard.
___University Baptist Church will open its doors in ministry to another group of NASA-related employees on Tuesday, Feb. 4. The church is located across the street from one of the primary office buildings of Lockheed Martin, a major contractor for NASA. Lockheed employees will not be able to enter Johnson Space Center for NASA's memorial service Feb. 4. But they will be able to watch it on large projection screens in the sanctuary of University Baptist Church.
___Creech knows the initial grief and the memorial service are just the beginning of what could become a longer-term ministry to Houston's space industry family. He and other church leaders are making plans to address grief, anxiety and possible economic repercussions in the area.
___"Right now," he said, "we're kind of loving on people for awhile."

___With reporting by Mark Wingfield and George Henson
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