Journey to Haiti: Congregation Being Changed as Much as Shattered Church

Editor’s note: Since May 2010, some 50 members of Journey Community Church have visited an adopted sister church in Carrefour, Haiti—a poor district of Port-au-Prince—as part of a larger relief effort coordinated by Adventures in Missions.  Launched by Pastor Ed Noble, Journey’s outreach to Carrefour’s Church of God Mission by Faith and its pastor, Clehomme Edouard, “is so much bigger than the earthquake,” says a witness. Here is their story.

Dani-Jo Hill was one of 18 people traveling to Haiti for the latest of five mission trips sponsored by Journey Community Church.

While still in the United States, she met a Haitian and asked him, “What can we do to help?”

He said: “Build relationships and make them last. You can give as much money as you want, but eventually it will run out. Relationships last.”

The encounters commenced several months removed from the earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010. Mark Ostreicher, a national youth ministry leader who attends Journey, was getting involved with a Haitian relief effort called Church to Church. Ostreicher brought Journey’s pastor, Ed Noble, to Haiti in May.

Noble got the gospel while visiting Church of God Mission by Faith, led by Pastor  Clehomme Edouard. A larger team of ministry leaders followed in July, and teams from Journey have made four other trips, the latest in March. Return visits are planned for May 19-25 and July 5-13.

The May trip will feature several musicians from Journey traveling to hold a concert with their Haitian Church to Church partners. In July, a Journey high school group makes its first trip.

The Haiti mission has been funded entirely apart from the budget of the Center Drive church. Travelers raise their own funds (an all-inclusive $1,200 pays for all but incidentals).

Money appropriated to the Haiti mission has been collected from separate offerings and fundraising efforts. The biggest outlay has been for the medical clinic that Edouard had been envisioning—rehabbing a house and stocking it with medicine.

Ask Daniel Merk-Benetiz if Haiti has changed things around Journey, which he has attended since 1998.

“It’s almost like they caught some disease and brought it back, this outbreak of generosity,” he says.

Ask Michael and Beckie Perez: Do surprises happen in Haiti?

The couple got married on a whim during the last trip down there in March. “I think she got there and she was wrecked by the orphanage and the suffering,” Michael Perez said. “It just really touched her, and so I think she thought this is a great place for us to get married.”

“I had never seen anything like it,” Beckie Perez said of her arrival in Port-au-Prince. “I couldn’t have imagined it would be like that. As soon as we got off the plane we were walking out to the bus and I started crying right away. Looking around it’s like crazy. Nothing like growing up in San Diego.

“And then driving along the streets. It was just trash and tents and buildings that were crumbled, and kids playing in trash, and kids that were naked. As a parent it’s really hard seeing those things because you put your own kid in those situations.”

Ask Mark Bowling. Do the memories bring a tear to his eye?

He was trying to sneak off without having to say goodbye to the orphans, for he’s not good with goodbyes. One of them heard he was leaving and quickly ran to his room before coming back with a note. “Dear Mark: I love you, Mark. I have no father and mother. I love you as my father.”

You could even ask many of the people around Journey, those who have not gone to Haiti. Chances are they have sensed something different about a place that traditionally majored on preaching and evangelism. Things are shifting.

“Before Haiti, in my own life I’m trying to invite people and say, ‘Hey you should come to journey,’ ” Merk-Benitez said. “There’s an attractiveness to Haiti, beyond me reaching out to friends, ‘Hey your life is screwed up; you should come to Journey.’ We went to Haiti, opened a medical clinic. That changes people’s minds.

“Beyond this place, that tells me I’m a sinner or I need to be fixed. It changes the stigma to a place of good works being poured out. So in my personal life I’ve seen it; it’s been this great conversation piece, to try to break down these walls.”

Joe Prosapio has been attending Journey for 10 years. As he tells it, Journey has experienced a dramatic shift over the past six months.

 “More active? I wouldn’t even say over the last couple years. I’d say over the last six months, to be honest with you,” he said. “But it wasn’t like I felt something was missing. I was kind of in it and getting fulfilled. But it was one of those things where once they kind of unveiled stuff to you, it’s like, ‘Yeah, that is kind of how we are. We are kind of safe.’

“A couple of weeks ago Ed [Noble] said, ‘This isn’t the end-all-be-all of the church. You show up on Sunday and this is your church. You need to get out there and get more active. As much as it is on Sunday, that’s how it’s supposed to be every day.’ Oh yeah, we should be doing something. For me it was good to see.”

The seeing happens spontaneously.

One comes face to face with the needs of Haiti, and the hope in the hunger in the children’s eyes, and everything changes. Noble had encountered poverty before, but never anything quite like Haiti. On May 29, 2010, his third day on the trip with Ostreicher, he wrote:

Here’s the heart-wrenching dilemma of Haiti: There are so many urgent needs, where do you start. I’ve never talked to so many hungry desperate people any place I’ve been. … The cameras are off, the world’s attention has largely shifted. The suffering has just begun. As followers of Jesus, we must not be governed by the news cycle.

John Gates was among the leaders who ventured to Haiti several weeks later. One moment foreshadowed many sublime experiences.

Pastor Edouard was hosting a weeknight revival outside the church building.

“They had it set up really cool,” Gates said, “and they had a platform and a lot of folding chairs and instruments, a sound board with a drum set. They had it all out on a platform and had those blue plastic tarps up on the seats, and the stage, not knowing what the weather was going to be like.

“It was kind of sprinkling. Pretty soon it turned into this torrential downpour, wind blowing tarps over the place. In the States, that would cause people scrambling to go home. You have wires and sound equipment. Everyone just scrambles, shoving stuff into the church. We finally managed to get everyone and everything in the church. There was no electricity. It’s dark.

“What started it all is somebody set up one of the drums and their drummer got a rhythm on his drums, a floor tom or something. People started humming. Singing. Short story, in a few minutes that place is rocking. People singing and dancing. It’s hard to put into words what that was like.

“The theme in Haiti that whole week was the resilience in the people—they carry that no matter what. That was one tiny little glimpse into that culture.”

In a video produced after that trip, one of the Journey pastors, Jason Denison, referred to the rainy revival as “a new level of spirit.”

“I have never met as irrepressible a culture as theirs,” said Susan Popp Prosapio, who visited Haiti in March with her husband, Joe, and whose mural painting in the medical clinic was one of the recent trip’s highlights.

“As heartbreaking and awful as the destruction is, their spirit is the opposite—joyful, pragmatic and optimistic. They simply cannot be subdued by their surroundings. There is a lot to admire, and learn, from that.”

How does one learn such a thing?

There is a common refrain, that “your heart gets broken,” in the words of Andy Blank and others. Or you get “wrecked” (Perez) from the presence of the children, the eyes and the smiles. Or the stories and friendship of the adults.

A favorite of the Journey contingent is Edouard’s translator, Samuel Christalin, a 29-year-old man who lives in a tent in his parents’ back yard and considers himself middle class.

Blank recounts Christalin’s earthquake story:

He’s in seminary going to a school at Port-au-Prince, and he lives in Carrefour. So he would normally take a tap tap (the bus) back and forth. So he’s in class. He walks out of class to go to the bathroom, and when the earthquake is going on he happened to be standing at a urinal. He said everything’s shaking, going crazy. He couldn’t get out of the door and then he realized he locked it. He gets out. He’s running down the hallway, all the glass is, like, bowing—the glass doors. He gets outside. The building collapsed. He hears other students inside. There’s two students he knew who died inside. Nobody could get to them because the rubble is too heavy for them. Five o’clock when this happened.

Six o’clock he decided he had to get home. And cell phones don’t work anymore because the whole infrastructure has gone. There’s no transportation, there’s no electricity. And there’s fires. And what’s happening is as he’s walking through Port-au-Prince, everyone’s running out of their houses pulling the bodies out and putting them in the street because they don’t know what else to do. So he’s pulling the bodies out into the street and there’s people walking around with no arms, and there’s just blood and dust everywhere.

There’s people yelling and screaming. They’re pulling out these bodies and he says it got very dark because there’s no electricity, no lights. He said at one point, ‘I was walking along and I didn’t know what I was walking on. It was dead bodies.’

He says when he got to his community, his family wasn’t there. His house was still standing but nobody in his family was there. He went to his grandmother’s house. His grandmother’s house was collapsed. He went back over here and he found his dad and between the two of them had talked to his neighbors and had realized the family had moved.

The mom and brothers and sisters had gone up the hill because they were afraid of a tsunami, so what a lot of them had been doing is fleeing to the higher parts. So he and his dad go back over, try to dig up grandma—can’t. So the next day or two everybody’s kind of wandering around, wondering what to do. He says, ‘Finally we went over to grandma’s house, pulled her body, and we knew where she was because we could smell her.

‘So we pull out her dead body and the morgues are full, everything’s full. Disposing of the bodies, pull them out to the corner and the dump trucks are taking them and dropping them in these mass graves.’ … And so he and his family were fine except for grandma.

A year and a half later, the family is still sleeping with their beds out in tents behind the house, afraid of another earthquake and collapsed buildings. Better sleep outside.

And then there is the story of Samuel’s fiancé. Said Blank:

She went to school and was on the fourth floor of the building. And at 4:30 she was in the back of her class and she suddenly got this weird hunger. Like, that doesn’t ever happen. She’s like, ‘That’s weird.’ She goes up to the principal. I think he might have meant teacher. His girlfriend says, ‘I’m gonna run out and get something to eat.’ He said no. She goes back and she’s like, ‘I gotta go.’ Like this very present need. She’s gotta go eat something.

When the teacher wasn’t looking she snuck out the back door, snuck into the street, went over to a street vendor, bought a hot dog or something like that. Went around and started walking back when the earthquake hit. That building collapsed, all those students and that teacher are all dead. She should have been in that room, but for some reason she had to get outside. And there’s so many of those stories from that earthquake—350,000 people died that day.

Meet Journey’s new friends, people with post-traumatic stress but not a psychotherapist in sight. It’s no wonder there is such an outpouring of compassion around Journey, or that many of the participants struggle with hopelessness and depression of their own after coming back.

A common impulse is to want to sell everything and move to Haiti. One family is donating money to help a woman start a business. More than loose change, it will affect their monthly budget a bit but pay huge dividends for the Haitian family.

“It’s nothing that’s going to break the bank for us,” said a family member, “but will theoretically totally alter this family’s life.”

Another participant is shopping for homes to rent near the Haitian church so Journey members can visit anytime, and so the translator, Samuel, and his soon-to-be wife have a place to live.

This type of involvement is turning the post-quake trauma into a story of redemption. On the plane from the States during the last trip was some medicine donated to stock the shelves at the medical clinic that Journey is funding. Some of the medicine—skin ointment—would treat burn victims.

The next morning, the group went over to the clinic and met a toddler girl who had that very day reached up to the stove to pull down the porridge, seething pot and all coming down on her delicate little body, which was now scorched. Well at least there was some medicine at the burn clinic. Not a day too soon.

By meeting some of the physical needs of Edouard’s congregation, the spiritual lift that Haitians provide La Mesans is being reciprocated.

“Ever since I met with Journey, I feel like a new life is springing up out of me,”  Edouard said. “The thing that enticed me the most was their love, not only toward me and my ministry but to the whole country. They’ve shown their love in things they’ve done for me in less than one year. They really carry me in their heart and are willing to help me with everything. That's amazing."

Edouard, who makes it a point to pray for Journey during his midweek service, recalls something special about Journey’s last visit, in March.

“I just can’t put in words how it was. The mural was fantastic. As for the wedding, everyone is talking about it. They count it as a blessing.”

The wedding is seen symbolically as a token of affection and appreciation, particularly given the legend of Journey in the eyes of the Haitian church. Edouard and an associate visited La Mesa weeks before the wedding and returned with stories of a megachurch accompanied by homes just as lavish.

For a U.S. couple to forgo their right to marry in their homeland amid all those amenities, that was a great honor for the Haitians.

“We got married on Sunday,” Michael Perez said, “and it seemed like everybody in the community showed up. There must have been 300 people. I told Edouard, ‘I don’t want to mess with your service. You do your service and then we’ll do this small thing.’ He announces the wedding at the service. Not only did people stay, they came in from the neighborhood.

“For the next two or three days, Beckie and I were walking down the street and people calling us over and showing pictures on their phones. It’s cool to be a part of that community and a part of what Journey’s trying to do, which is not just be another church that drops off rice and beans but really becomes a part of what’s going on there.”

What’s going on there is becoming what’s going on here, too. The outpouring of compassion is spilling from the Caribbean island all the way t0 San Diego County.

“Your neighbor is 5,000 miles away, and it’s somebody across the street,” Perez said. “I think it’s all the idea of, if you pay attention, God will give you those opportunities to both lead the life we’re called to lead but also give the favor you get in return. God can push you in that direction, if you are open to it.”

Joe Prosapio: “It’s easy to say I’m a Christian [helping] Haiti—look at the wonderful things I’m doing. Can I come back and still show the compassion? It’s easy to be compassionate with orphans on the street. And when I come back to the United States, am I still going to walk that compassionate, kind, forgiving kind of guy? It’s totally harder when you know that person in your office.

“If the people in my office don’t see a difference in me, then this trip was a failure. If my family doesn’t notice, doesn’t say, ‘You know, you’re considerably kinder,’ or whatever. I don’t know if you can do that in a week. Maybe it will take a second trip to be in there deep. But I think it should make a difference.”

The difference, as Hill’s new friend in the connecting airport foretold, is greater than money.

Bowling can attest the same.

“Some had gone down with the medical trip, and I was considering going myself,” he said, recalling a conversation with God. “What’s the purpose, to help the clinic and see what we can do? Don’t you think it be more beneficial to send the money down? I wrestled with that for maybe a week or so.

“God finally tugged my heart and said, ‘Mark, I don’t need your money. I have all the money in the world. I just want you to go down and put your arms around them and say, ‘In the name of Jesus, I love you.’ ”

Those interested in getting involved may email haiti@journeycom.org.