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On a bright Saturday morning in February, pastor, politician, and entrepreneur Leonard Lucas brunches with a trucker headhunter named Joe at the Marriott in downtown New Orleans. Joe's business needs truck drivers by the dozens in the city's post-Hurricane Katrina economy, minimal experience necessary. The pay is fabulous: $2,000 a week.

Lucas aims to link his headhunter buddy with 500 native New Orleans residents and their church leaders, scattered cross-country and yearning for home. They can't return without a regular paycheck.

Lucas believes New Orleans is going to be rebuilt. "Who's going to do it?" he asks, wearing his now—trademark blue sweat suit. "The whole fabric of our city has been destroyed. Who better to reweave it than its churches? God sent the storm to bless us, not curse us. As a church, we have to fight for the soul of our city."

The battle for the soul of New Orleans is on. Lucas is one foot soldier among a fast-forming network of Christians (pastors, businesspeople, and government leaders) working for lasting transformation. This network includes Houston-based disaster pastor Jerry Davis. His mobile relief ministry rolled into town on the September morning that the evacuated city reopened. It includes New Orleans Christian businesswoman Shelia Dixon. It also includes local pastors, such as Bruce Davenport of St. John #5 Baptist, the only church operating in its part of the Seventh Ward. Katrina wiped out St. John #5's extensive tutoring, housing, drug rehab, unwed mothers, computer skills, and HIV/AIDS programs.

Countless other New Orleans pastors remain out of pocket nationwide, shepherding fragments of their flocks. More than 250,000 people still have not returned to New Orleans (there were 464,000 pre-Katrina). Bringing pastors back to New Orleans is central to the city's restoration, Lucas says. Both church leaders and laypeople need a steady paycheck.

Billions of federal dollars are flowing into the local economy for debris removal and reconstruction. More than 60,000 New Orleans homes had severe or major storm damage. Jobs requiring minimal skills abound, ranging from hauling off flood-damaged cars and mucking out businesses to rebuilding houses.

Lucas and Davis endorse a bold game plan: Encourage a local pastor to return to New Orleans from the Katrina diaspora. Local leaders help that pastor find a short-term job to pay the rent and also help him bring back other ready-to-work church members.

Just 10 tithing church members plugged into good wages can jumpstart a congregation that's been non-operational since Katrina. That pastor in time could quit his "day job" and return to full-time ministry. "The idea is to help get people jobs so their pastor can do the work of the ministry," Davis said.

Other plans to help churches have stalled. The Bush-Clinton Katrina fund earmarked $20 million for church rebuilding. By late March, the fund had not disbursed a single dollar, despite applications from 2,000 pastors.

But Davis believes if churches across America can get involved, the outreach to New Orleans congregations could show dramatic results.

For generations the face of New Orleans has been sin, sensuality, and Mardi Gras celebrations. Alongside these tempting confections, much of its population stewed in a gumbo of dysfunction. Deep poverty especially gripped the African American community.

The murder rate in New Orleans has been more than seven times the national average. Census figures revealed that 28 percent of New Orleans residents lived in poverty. Only 24 percent of Lower Ninth Ward residents had a high-school diploma or its equivalent. The working poor in New Orleans faced a lifetime in dead-end, minimum-wage service jobs. Such jobs paid so badly that a two-income household still could not make enough to feed and shelter a typical family of four without public assistance.

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May 2006, Vol. 50, No. 5