When the waters released by Hurricane Katrina finally receded, members of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church came back to see their beloved church torn apart and covered in ugly, stinking gray mud.

“It was weeks later before we could get back into the sanctuary and it was totally unbelievable,” said longtime church member Sallie Uhl.

“Everything was helter-skelter. It looked like Hiroshima; everything was gray with mud,” she recalled. “The grand piano was in the narthex; the pews were unmoored from the bolts.”

But while looking at the destruction, Sallie and her husband, Gary, saw something glimmering in the chaos.

“The communion plate was still on the altar. The checks and cash and coins were still in the offertory plate,” she said.

On Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005, the Uhls and other longtime church members had come to church. The Rev. Darryl Tate preached. The next day, Katrina hit.

Gary Uhl said most of the members left New Orleans, but he and Sallie stayed. They survived on the second floor of their house when the storm surge, driven by hurricane winds, broke the levees and flooded the 9th Ward of New Orleans.

Meeting on July 12, 2025, the Uhls and other church members talked about their comeback and the joy they feel worshipping in their church again.

“To understand how Katrina affected St. Luke’s, you have to go way back well before Katrina hit to understand this church was a true church family,” said Lee Happel. “This church was bonded together before Katrina hit so we were predisposed to come back and redo what we once had.”

One unique aspect of the church is a summer musical held every year since 1974 with lots of community support.

“What makes this play a ministry of our church and not just community theater is we make sure there is a place for everyone. If you want to be in the play, then you are in the play,” said the Rev. Colleen Bookter, who has been pastor at the church since 2021.

The summer of 2005, two months before the storm, the cast for the play was over 130 — so large that they had to do two separate productions, she said.

St. Luke’s started having church services in the courtyard about a month after people began returning to New Orleans.

“People would drive by and pull over and come in just because we were having church,” Gary Uhl said. “Those services were so moving.”

Daniel Lund III, now chancellor for The United Methodist Church’s Louisiana Conference and a member of St. Luke’s at the time, was a frequent visitor and preacher for the outdoor services.

“Frankly, St. Luke’s might not have survived had the services not taken place, because so many of St. Luke’s members were from parts of the metropolitan area that did not flood — for example, Metairie,” he said.

“Had those folks not been able to attend St. Luke’s as early as we reopened — which was only a month and a half after the storm — they may have found other churches to join,” Lund said.

Sometimes people attending the services included truckloads of the National Guard, he said.

The church had been having weekly Wednesday night services for years, so they started that back up in the parking lot.

“For $3 you could have a three-course meal — a main course, bread and dessert,” Gary Uhl said. “We had big crawfish boils, jambalaya or sometimes it would just be the MREs (meals ready to eat) supplied by FEMA.”

While church was going on outside, Gary, who is a homebuilder and a licensed residential and commercial contractor, started working on rebuilding the inside.

“It wasn’t me alone with a hammer and nails putting this thing back together. Everybody pitched in and gutted the place, cleaned the floors and scraped mud off the tiles,” he said.

The Louisiana District was advising churches to take their time to see if insurance was going to pay for repairs. They also wanted to wait and see if people would come back to New Orleans.

“But we knew if we did nothing, the church would just sit in the mud and rot,” said Sallie Uhl.

In addition to being a licensed contractor, Gary Uhl also was well versed in the United Methodist Book of Discipline. He referred to the paragraph on “Standards for the Approval of Building Proposals” as a guideline for rebuilding the church.

Churches had to get approval from the district board on location and building before proceeding with repairs. As chairman of that board, he said, “We got approval fairly quickly.”

In the midst of all the muck, the church ran a pledge campaign that generated $100,000, Lund said.

“I knew for $100,000 we could make this church, not shine, but we could get it back and open,” Gary Uhl said.

In the days leading up to worship on Sunday, the church was busy with more than 70 children of all ages and dozens of volunteers having fun in vacation Bible school.

Shelli Butler Parlow was busy getting people to the right places as a “volunteer floater.” She was in Slidell when Katrina hit.

After returning home, she said first you check on your family and your property. “Then you say, ‘God, what is next?’ The first reaction of this church family is ‘How can I help?’

“Coming back it was whatever you can imagine,” she said. “The bayou had just spilled into buildings, houses. There was mud and trees, fish, snakes — I think a few places might have had alligators. It looked like everything just got picked up and floated around.”

Lee Happel’s wife, Bonnie, convinced the church to first work on getting the nursery school back open. She said families would come back if they had a safe place for their children.

From the nursery school to the kitchen and finally the sanctuary, the church came back.

“Everybody pitched in and it was one of the best times this church experienced,” Sallie Uhl said.

Despite Louisiana’s resurrection in the two decades since Katrina, Bookter said the storm still has lingering effects.

“Some members have shared their Katrina stories with me,” she said. “People always share, especially around the times of funerals, that they don’t have pictures of loved ones because of Katrina.

“It really does continue to rob people even years later.” 

Gilbert is a freelance writer in Nashville, Tenn., who covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for UM News in 2005.

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