Calvary Church, Pacific Palisades, CA

We are packed out this week! One of the many teams here right now is Calvary Church, Pacific Palisades, CA. They are keeping a blog of their trip that you can view here.

house gutting deadline

Looks like the New Orleans city council unanimously approved an Aug 29th deadline for all residents to gut, remediate and secure their home. Any home that does not meet this deadline will be declared "a public nuisance" and the city will either bulldoze or repair the home...and send a bill to the homeowner. You can read the whole article here.

What kind of impact will this have on our hurricane relief? Stay tuned...we'll be sure to keep you in the loop.

the Katrina cough

Here is a Times-Picayune article that should catch the attention of you who are coming down to gut houses:

"Katrina Cough" Nothing Serious

By the way, congrats to the Times-Picayune (our local newspaper) on winning two Pulizer Prizes. This one didn't catch us New Orleanians by surprise. Their post-Katrina coverage has been nothing short of outstanding. Major props to Berean's own Tim Morris...an editor for the T-P.

the reopening of Fisher elementary

Every summer our church hosts a five day club in Fisher Housing Projects. We rent out Fischer Elementary School and put on a VBS for the inner city children in the area. Ironically, a number of our recent work teams have been able to assist the Algiers Charter Schools Association in reopening that same school.

The day that Highpointe Community Church was at Fisher happened to be the day that a Times-Picayune crew was there to write an article on the school. You can read the article online here.

I also scanned in the article so that you can see the pictures of the Highpointe team that were printed alongside of the article. You can click on the below pictures to see an enlarged version.

the new Berean website

The new Berean website is up and running...so head over to www.bereannola.com and check it out. Let us know what you think.

A new orientation sheet for work teams

Fresh off of the presses, we have an updated orientation sheet for work teams. It focuses on the initial information you'll need upon arriving at our facility. We developed it as a handout to give you when you arrive, but feel free to peruse it before you get here. You can view it here. I'm also adding it to the sidebar.