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"Your being there may be what makes the difference" in these evacuees' lives, Gibbie McMillan of Southern Baptist disaster relief told Operation Compassion trainees. "You've got to get them to focus on one day at a time. If you've lost hope, you've lost it all. We're trying to show these people there is hope."

Many evacuees will never return to New Orleans because they have nothing to which to return. "This to me is a refugee movement equivalent to the boat people of Vietnam," says Gary Moore, Second Baptist's senior associate pastor and spokesman for Operation Compassion. "It's going to be long term."

Needs abound: helping evacuees contact loved ones and find jobs; finding long-term housing; enrolling children in school; and praying with and counseling the grieving and dispossessed. Christian leaders also expect opportunities for evangelism, which may occur naturally as relationships are built.

Churches across greater Houston are "adopting" hotels, where many evacuees have run out of money. Individual Christians, home Bible groups, and Sunday school classes are also sponsoring families, outfitting unfurnished apartments, collecting toys, and assembling personal hygiene kits.

Two days after the hurricane, Carl Davis, pastor of the predominantly black New Life Tabernacle Church of God in Christ, devoted its Wednesday night service to organizing a response to the crisis. An offering that night raised $2,200 and New Life allotted $10,000 more to help evacuees.

New Life volunteers photocopied flyers inviting evacuees to call the church. Ten teams of New Life members passed out the flyers at hotels. The first day, New Life received 1,000 calls from people needing everything from a place to stay to a funeral for an evacuee who died.

The church of 1,400 met those two requests: It paired a young woman with a church member, and one New Life youth pastor who is also a mortician arranged to embalm a deceased woman while the church agreed to provide for the funeral and burial.

The church shuttled evacuees to its campus in two vans, where in the first two hours members served 96 hot lunches in the old sanctuary where shoes and clothing, sorted by size, lay in stacks in chairs and across the floor. Down the hall Davis's wife, Harolyn, helped members set up a mini-convenience-store giveaway of toys, towels, toiletries, gift cards, convenience foods, and over-the-counter drugs.

"We have to show we care," Carl Davis says. New Life will sponsor five families for six months in apartments renting for $500 per month.

A team from Calvary Chapel in Albuquerque, led by administrative pastor Bob Church, invited 500 families to New Mexico, where churches pledged to sponsor them. By the time Calvary's team left Houston on Labor Day, it had bought New Life Tabernacle more supplies for evacuees. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is sending 6,000 evacuees to Albuquerque.

"It'll be a mini-Houston," Church says.

Larger Houston churches are gathering resources, too. The response of 4,200-member First Presbyterian Church includes pairing the displaced with jobs and long-term housing, plus funding and providing 720 volunteers for two days of Astrodome meals.

Televangelist and author Joel Osteen asked those attending a speaking event in Atlanta the weekend after the disaster to bring non-perishable goods, which he then gave to Houston's relief effort. Osteen's nondenominational congregation, the 30,000-member Lakewood Church, is giving 15,000 Bibles to the evacuees and has pledged $1 million of the $5 million needed to feed people in two Houston shelters.

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September (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49