Pastor who left New Orleans
now helps evacuees in Texas

 

By Claudia M. Williams
Staff Writer
When Pastor Germaine Tropez Mathis left her home in New Orleans in August as Hurricane Katrina approached, she didn’t suspect she would end up serving a San Antonio-area congregation.
As temporary associate pastor of Windcrest UMC, the Louisiana Conference clergy member tends to people who came to San Antonio because of the storm.
Some 770,000 Louisiana residents were displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
After the winds and rain had stopped, Mathis and her husband, Lawrence, were safe in San Antonio. Her east New Orleans home was under water.
Then the former associate pastor of Cornerstone UMC, New Orleans, saw a man who had lost everything in the flood join the Windcrest church. Her role became clear—to help people displaced from Louisiana rebuild their lives in San Antonio.
“The person who joined Windcrest was completely alone,” she said. “He had come to San Antonio on a bus and was deposited here.”
As she asked around the community, she found many, many more like him.
“As pastors we have to put our fingers on the pulse of what’s happening in the community,” Mathis said. “There are people out there suffering. They need our help as a community.”
She said she relates to those in need not only as a pastor but as “someone from Katrina who looked for help from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and encountered red tape.”
Mathis said she wants to put together a support group of people forced out by the hurricane. Members can share not only their experiences but also how to get help.
“For example,” she said, “if you get a denial from the Small Business Administration, FEMA might respond with a grant. We don’t know about that. There are too many people out here without assistance. There are not enough people to review and resolve actual cases. Every day someone comes up to me who knows of a person.”
At 54, Mathis has a background in nursing. She is a first-year probationary elder in the Louisiana Conference. She had been a home-care nurse.
“It almost comes naturally to talk to people about their medical background and give them some help from both a medical and spiritual perspective,” Mathis said.
Mathis went back to the Louisiana Conference in January to find out how the church was deploying pastors and to let leaders know where she was.
Shortly thereafter she spoke with the Rev. Austin Frederick, assistant to the Episcopal Office in San Antonio. He placed her at Windcrest “that very day,” she said.
“Pastor Greg Hackett introduced me Jan. 29 as a visiting pastor from New Orleans,” Mathis said. Also on that day, her husband joined the church.
In addition to caring for Katrina’s evacuees, her responsibilities at Windcrest are adult discipleship and family ministry.