Pastor fills in the gaps in New Orleans

By Donna Mulder

It was April 19, 1997, when Grand Forks, North Dakota, was hit by a flood that devastated nearly the entire community. The home of the Rev. Phil Blom, along with those belonging to his parents and two sisters, their church, and the school where his wife taught were completely flooded.

“We were devastated,” Blom says. “We didn’t have within ourselves the capacity to see the bottom, much less pull ourselves up.”

They clung to God’s Word, particularly 1Peter 5:10, which reads: “And the God of all grace, who called you to eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will Himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.”

And the most miraculous thing began to happen. People, the hands and feet of Jesus as Blom called them, started arriving in Grand Forks. “We didn’t have a phone to call or a computer to email anyone, but people just started showing up,” Blom says. “And they literally pulled us from the muck. It was through them that we experienced a transformation in our lives from being overburdened to being overwhelmed.”

Blom’s constant prayer those days forward became “help us remember the blessings.”

Blom’s experience in Grand Forks has become an incredibly important story in New Orleans. Blom, who lives in Neenah, Wisconsin, went to New Orleans in January of 2006 to minister to churches and people where he could.

He planned to stay a few weeks. He’s still there.

“My wife, Sue, and I have made plans for me to wind down and come home six times over the past 16 months, but there was work to be done, and I needed to stay.  The plan this time is for June,” says Blom, who has tried to spend a week a month at home in Wisconsin since he began serving in New Orleans.  “Sue is the wind beneath my wings. She is the one making it possible for me to serve where I am.”

Blom’s first connection in New Orleans was with a pastor and his family. Blom wired him a few dollars to help him get started, and he called him every day or two to provide desperately needed support. Eventually, the pastor resettled into a new home, which has also become Blom’s home-away-from-home in New Orleans.

“I went there to care for the caregivers (the pastors) so they could continue to minister to those in need,” Blom says. “It was the same support that was helpful to my colleagues and me in Grand Forks when we were so overwhelmed that we couldn’t help others much less ourselves.”

That care has included preaching at various churches—giving pastors a Sunday off—and serving as a link to help connect volunteers with churches in the rebuilding process. “I became the person standing in the gap to get them connected,” says Blom, who has become known in the area as “Phil-in-the-gaps.” He’s also given tours, helped find building materials and just answered lots of questions.

While he assisted many churches, Blom’s primary focus has been on Grace Lutheran, located in Lakeview. Before Katrina, Sunday attendance at Grace averaged around 300. Today, about 50 percent of those members have returned.

When Blom arrived there, church members were in the beginning stages of gutting out the church’s interior and scrubbing out the mold from top to bottom. The Blom Memorial for Mission—a mission-focused arm of the Blom family established as a tribute to Blom’s parents, now deceased—was the first group to come help, but many others followed.

“I kept loose track of just the churches that worked with us, and the number of volunteers well exceeded 500,” Blom says. “We had at least 12,970 volunteer hours in 2006.”

During the early stages of the rebuilding, Grace church members met weekly in a funeral home chapel. Their first time back together in their church building was Easter Sunday 2006. Nearly half of the congregation was there to celebrate. Much work remained, but they were home, Blom says.

Blom became interim pastor at Grace in September when the pastor left. New pastoral leadership at Grace starts this month, and Blom will begin to wind down his responsibilities overall in New Orleans.

People in New Orleans have an overwhelmingly positive view of the church, he says. “It’s been a source of enormous inspiration and hope for the people there,” he says. Where other entities have failed, he says, the church community across the country has been there to help, support and encourage.

Blom says the goal early on was to do enough work to show progress on a regular basis, which would create hope. Every Sunday he would read letters of hope from churches, Sunday schools and individuals who were praying for the people of New Orleans.

“It was one source of our spiritual recovery,” he says, adding that spiritual recovery is the most important recovery. “Restoration is not built on physical realities. It is built on the spiritual recovery—the hope that undergirds everything.”

And Blom’s prayer was that all of the churches, and especially Grace, would be restored without debt. “If there’s debt and only 50 percent of the people return to service the debt, it would be difficult to keep the doors open,” he says. “And that would affect the Lutheran impact in New Orleans.”

Reliving his experiences in the Grand Forks flood while working in New Orleans hasn’t been easy for Blom. “I expected it to hit me hard when I arrived there, but it was more intense than I had thought,” he says. “The post-traumatic stress hit me hardest when I walked into Grace and I smelled the flood. It has an incredible smell.”

Picture every house in your city filled with mold, Blom says. Then consider that every house has at least one refrigerator and freezer destroyed, and all the contents are sitting on the curb. Combine those smells, and you have the smells of flood.