The Megachurch in Disasters

Rev. Joel Osteen and his megachurch are getting a lot of noise about not opening the church during the Hurricane Harvey flooding in Houston.

I don’t really care for Joel Osteen.  I have no reason to hope that something bad happens to him.  If he were coming down the street, I’d greet him like I greet everybody.  But if he were coming down the sidewalk on the other side, I wouldn’t bother crossing the street just to meet him.

It’s that smile.  In the original Star Trek, a Klingon commander said he didn’t trust anybody who smiles that much.  

And it’s that “prosperity gospel,” which seems a bit shaky scripturally. (1)   It seems rather self-serving that God wants me to have all this money.  And disappointing when it doesn’t work.

And now the good Reverend is getting heat for not opening up his “megachurch” in Houston for victims of Hurricane Harvey.(2)  
The internet is aflame.  Anyway, that’s what everyone says.  There was a cute, catchy article in the Washington that the only thing that the megachurch shelters is people from paying taxes.  Whether that’s accurate is not nearly so important than I didn’t think of that line.

I have two concerns about the criticism.

First, have the noisemakers done anything other than make noise against Osteen?  

It’s awfully easy to say “You should be doing thus-and-so.”  In this case, open up the church.  How many people does the Washington Post house in an emergency?  What about the last sub-zero day in Washington, how many folks slept on cots in the newsroom?  How about us as indivduals?   The Red Cross is accepting donations.  Wouldn’t it be more honest to criticize Osteen only after you pitch the ARC10 bucks?

Second, what resources does the church actually have?

Well, there’s money of course.  Picking on someone rich ignores the significance of the Widow’s Mite.  From each a portion is expected and fair - but from everyone in accordance with their means.

There’s the “megachurch” building.  What’s shown on TV is HUGE - theater seating for maybe 10,000 adoring church members.  It’s got to be 150,000 square feet.   Couldn’t you store refugees in there?

Well, it’s not like a warehouse.  It’s REALLY high and unless they’re going to erect scaffolding, only the lower 7 feet of the floor plan can be used.  What is there?   Well, it’s 2/3 filled up with theater seating for maybe 10,000 adoring church member.  Look, listening to The Sound of Music in a theater seat is bad enough.   Try living there.

There’s the rest of the building.  Never been there.  I assume it has some purpose which in many cases would be inconsistent with housing refugees.  Sorta like the newsroom at the Washington Post.

What resources other than space would the church (or the Washington Post or your house) have to provide?

Water - To drink, for sanitation, at least one gallon per person per day.  Water, normally no problem.  Uh-oh, severe flooding shuts the water service down.  So you depend on what you have stored and what you can get by truck.  For every thousand people you house, you have to have 4-1/6 tons of water every day.

Food - 1500 calories per person per day, with some special needs (e.g., diabetics) thrown into the mix.  There will be no electricity, so it has to be food that will withstand room temperatures for long periods.  It also has to be refreshed from time to time, even freeze-dried items.  The people in the Greenbrier in West Virginia - where the emergency congressional bunker was located - knew that when items from cans started showing up in the employee’s kitchens that the Government was replacing the emergency food supply.

Electricity?  We got along for a 100,000 years without electricity.   But we are so used to being at the end of (fragile) power grid, when the electric goes off, we freak.  

We have an example for how a facility roughly like the big church works for a hurricane, Hurricane Katrina.   The City housed people in the Superdome, the NFL stadium.  The toilets quit working, they ran out of water and food was scarce.  Also, kids were going crazy because their electric toys to which they were addicted didn’t work.

I wonder if the Osteen church has buses?  I note below that a lot of people gambled that the storm wouldn’t be as bad and they lost.  The truly poor couldn’t gamble.  Had they had a “let’s get the hell out of here” mentality, they didn’t have the means.  So I can see churches, bus companies, RV owners, van owners having a moral duty to help people who are sufficiently cautious to get out of Dodge.  

To do emergency planning, you have to do it before the emergency.  And then, you have to have ONE person/heirarchy making decisions.  In the 1985 West Virginia Floods, the State emergency people were ineffective, until Gov. Moore stepped in and ran it like a King.

In a widespread emergency, someone needs to activate the specific-type emergency plan for the region and extend it however far geographically as it needs to go.  (Wow, this is dry stuff.  Emergency planning is dry.  Until the hurricane.  Or the TRULY sudden emergency, an earthquake.)  

After all, a disaster is not defined as something which has to kill a lot of people.  It’s an emergency that the normal response assets in a community cannot deal with.  A serious school bus wreck in Barbour County, West Virginia, would be a disaster.  We don’t have enough rescue companies or ambulances to respond and take care of everyone.  The same school bus wreck in New York City would be a bad school bus wreck, not a disaster.  The World Trade Center was a disaster.  

By the way, Flight 93 wasn’t a disaster.  The people in Flight 93 were killed on impact.  That’s a great big huge tragedy.  It’s not a disaster.  A few fire trucks, police to mark off the scene, and the NTSB are all that they needed.

Houston is a disaster, no doubt.  But don’t go picking on one megachurch as being the bad guy.   In helping others, most of us are bad guys.
  



(1) I probably approach about the mean among the readers, so don’t take the “shaky scripturally” as the voice of authority.

(2) I hesitate a little to use “victims” about everybody inconvenienced.  What some of them were are people who miscalculated that a hurricane that they knew 2 days in advance was coming with a lot of rain.  It’s not like an earthquake where one minute you’re normal and the next minute things have gone to hell.