Crisis and Emergency Management and Preparedness for the African-American Church Community: Biblical Application from a Theological Perspective

By George O'Neil Urquhart

In these challenging times, the resident population served by the predominantly African-American church demands and deserves specific attention in order to preserve the uniquely cohesive nature of the African-American community. While this work is specifically focused on one local church community, there is a shared hope among church members, clergy, civic and lay professionals, and the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology that this project will serve as a model for success beyond its local audience.
This work was conceived to help mitigate growing environmental and social concerns beyond traditional emergencies--such as floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, severe weather, and power outages--imposed upon communities already strained by economic and social inequities. This book is designed to provide guidance on crisis and emergency preparedness by offering an example of how a church or similar institution may undertake the task of setting up an appropriate emergency planning structure for its congregation and community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jul 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630873998

George O'Neil Urquhart

George Urquhart holds a DMin from the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University. He is the pastor of the Plank Road Baptist Church and is Special Programs and Project Manager with the Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Emergency Management. He is the author of a publication titled Personal Liability and the Willingness of Public Officials to Serve (1980). Pastor Urquhart and his wife Jeanetter Maxcean reside in a farm community near Waverly, VA.

Book preview

Introduction

The Word Is Out: It Is No Secret

During my career and while surveying the community and environment from a disaster preparedness perspective, I sense an urgent need and detect a tremendous gap in the area of resources and skills among and within certain enterprises and institutions, and especially among and within most churches, where seemingly they are grossly unprepared to deal with a major emergency or disaster. We must heed the call to action and respond with appropriate action and wisdom of the heart. This is part of our being human. A psychiatrist once noted that being human means being confronted continually with situations, each of which is at once a chance and a challenge, giving us a ‘chance’ to fulfill ourselves by meeting the ‘challenge’ to fulfill its meaning. Each situation is a call, first to listen, and then to respond.¹ Thus, one must always listen attentively and patiently to the voice within and respond accordingly.

Statement of the Problem

The project primarily deals with the subject of Crisis and Emergency Management and Preparedness for the African American Church Community. It is without question that all communities, including our churches, are vulnerable to any number of risks and threats—from natural disasters, human-made incidents, pandemic disease outbreaks, violence resulting from terrorism from abroad as well as homegrown within our neighborhoods, and the growing menace of localized cultural and social disorders. We need to be prepared, and the time is now! In this document, I will address emergency preparedness for all hazards (see the Glossary definition for disaster).

Problem Resolution

The specific focus and outcomes of this project will be to (1) highlight the risks that may affect Providence Park Baptist Church, the target community; (2) engage a planning model that focuses on awakening or awareness, encouragement, and equipping as a means of preparing the community for disasters and emergencies; and (3) develop an emergency plan for the target church.

The resident population served by the predominantly African American church demands and deserves specific attention to preserve the uniquely cohesive nature of the African American community, especially in these times of great challenge, stress, and vulnerability. While the project may ultimately have some validity beyond the specific confines of the target community, there is a shared hope among the immediate audience that the success of the endeavor may help mitigate growing environmental and social concerns beyond traditional emergencies—floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, severe weather, power outages—imposed on communities already strained by economic and social inequities.

Passion for Emergency Preparedness Ministry

My passion for this project was born out of a conversation I had with an emergency management colleague in 1984. The focus of the dialogue centered on the question: to what extent does human behavior contribute to natural disasters? We sought to make sense out of the question by looking at the physical makeup of the human anatomy, that is, from our understanding that persons give off positive energy and negative energy depending on one’s mood or the condition of the heart, the center of emotion. Human emotions and intentions, we concluded, combine to produce the motivating force that drives or manifests outward action, and by so doing creates energy and tension. That energy gives off heat and, thus influences one’s space and his or her surroundings. The environment created becomes positively or negatively charged depending on the motivating force. When energies collide—positive or negative—they create a stable or unstable environment. Stated in another way, the energy field of one person will be one such that another person either will be attracted to or will resist with an equal amount of energy—similar to the effect produced by a zone of good karma or bad karma. Tensions are created when individuals are at odds. Taken to another level or viewed from another perspective, positive and negative energies, when released in the environment, create static and form a mass that, when joined with the natural elements or forces of nature, create clouds. From our physics classes we knew that clouds have the potential to produce thunder, lightning, rain, or other forms of precipitation. Depending on the energy field or source, the atmospheric mass produced could be relatively small compared with normal cloud formations. What happens after that is anyone’s opinion. We knew that we were in unchartered waters by having such a conversation, however plausible the argument appeared to be. That line of reasoning was about the extent of a range of related questions that would pique our interest more than once. The notion that human behavior has the ability to affect the course of nature continues to engage my senses with uncanny inquisitiveness.

Being a person of faith then as now, and as to be expected during the course of my sojourn in the field of theology at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University, I became very interested in the study of theodicy, that is, a search to answer the foregoing question or determine to what extent God deals with the presence of evil and ungodly acts in the universe. Often during my career in public safety and emergency management, and being confronted with the human dimensions of tragedy caused by hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and so forth, I was often asked and wanted to supply a reasoned answer to the question of why a given devastation occurred. As will be discussed later in chapter 3, it has been discovered that human behavior—though not without some suspicion—is a major contributor to the condition of the earth’s natural order of being by virtue of human enterprise in a business and industrial global world climate. While that finding may have some validity and may shed light on a subject that may elude the most ardent researcher, I knew it was an idea that would take me on a tangent far away from a pragmatic approach to emergency management and preparedness. Whatever the reasoning or source of disasters and emergencies, I knew that the appropriate and expedient thing to do was to embrace a practice as consistent as possible with the purpose of God working in and through the various ambiguities of human