A Community Grieves - Rehab Clients Grasping Loss Of Pastor
Submitted By N.O.V.A. July 2005
Times Picayune 	12-27-1997


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The "clients," men and women struggling to get free of crack and alcohol, washed
cars in the church parking lot as usual Friday, or talked out their demons in the
regular group therapy sessions near the church sanctuary where a banner read,
"Crack Cocaine: the New Slavery."

But some wore small black ribbons on their chests.

And the doors into Galilee Baptist Church bore notices announcing the death of the
Rev. Thomas Taylor, the Baptist minister who pulled hundreds of addicts off the
streets of a ravaged 9th Ward neighborhood and placed them in a faith-based
rehabilitation program he invented nearly eight years ago.

Taylor, 62, entered Pendleton Memorial Methodist Hospital with difficulty
breathing early Wednesday. He died, apparently of congestive heart failure,
Thursday about 4 a.m., Deacon Percy Jackson said.

"Many of us are still in shock. No one expected this," Deacon Ivory Brumfield
said.

Brumfield and other staff members spent much of the day Friday assuring clients
the program would continue unchanged without Taylor. Yet every other sentence also
seemed to describe the ways he was the heart and soul of the work.

On the surface the routine at the corner of Louisa Street and North Claiborne
Avenue went as usual Friday.

Eighty to 100 men and women living separately in church-owned housing rose early,
breakfasted, prayed as a community and began the day's work of washing cars, doing
chores or going to group therapy.

But Taylor's death dominated the day.

He was for many, they said, a spiritual father, a rescuer in a battle still not
won.

"He was a man who stood on God's word and who loved you dearly," said Demetrius
Solomon, a member of the Galilee congregation who said she felt compelled to sit
in with the recovering addicts Friday to discuss his death, the only topic on the
floor.

"He went into the streets. He reached out to dope addicts and prostitutes and
sinners. We don't have many people like that," she said.

The Galilee Baptist Church that Taylor took over in 1981 was a little congregation
of about 65 members. He had hardly begun to nourish it when crack cocaine hit the
neighborhood like a scourge.

He believed, he said later, that churches had more at stake - and more to offer -
than more-distant social service agencies, so he threw Galilee into what he saw as
a pitched battle with evil for control of Galilee's immediate neighborhood.

Without benefit of formal training in psychology or social work, Taylor prevailed
upon the Galilee congregation eight years ago to open a drug rehabilitation
program founded entirely on faith.

Taylor believed that Christians living in community could defeat addiction through
prayer, mutual support and Bible study.

Galilee bought a house across the street where the first clients lived. More
clients came, and more purchases followed.

At first, word of the program spread by word of mouth. Then courts took note and
began sending defendants there. A number of public social service agencies lent
support - so long, Taylor insisted, that they did not demand that he dilute his
God-first rehabilitation approach.

At times Taylor claimed a 70 percent success rate, though it was not clear how
that was measured.

By 1997, Galilee's therapy program, called Christian Community Youth Against
Drugs, owned most of the houses in the 1500 block of Louisa. On weekdays the
church parking lot was home to a small car-washing and detailing business staffed
by recovering addicts.

Meantime, Taylor and his staff preached personal dignity, sexual abstinence
outside of marriage and the power of God's word.

Other communities heard of the work. Not long ago Galilee showed interested
churches in Freeport, Ill., and Terre Haute, Ind., how to run similar programs.

Addicts accepted into the program agreed to live by its strict rules, including
random drug tests. There was no set length for the program; some clients stayed 90
days, others nine months, Jackson said.

Taylor was everywhere. "He knew exactly who every client was - what every client's
progress was," said Deidre Hayes, a staff social worker.

When a client felt ready to return to a full-time job and life among drug dealers
in the old neighborhood, a case worker would write a recommendation for Taylor,
but the final decision was his.

"He'd want to see some sense of spiritual growth," she said.

Many clients were home on Christmas passes Thursday, the day he died, and
assembled Friday morning for the first time since his death.

The staff assured them the program will continue, but the prospect of Taylor's
funeral in the physical and spiritual heart of their community looms large. The
date has not been set.

"Things are OK now," Hayes said. "They'll get worse soon. And then they'll get
better."

At the Friday therapy session many clients sought to pay tribute to Taylor, to
assess his life and what his death might mean to their struggle to live clean and
sober.

They mingled hope with weary experience: Many said they were in their second or
third rehab program.

Many said they felt Taylor was irreplaceable, yet they felt sure God would replace
him. They said they felt sadness at his death, but comfort in his destiny.

A few wept.

"He enabled me to give my mother one last present, a clean and sober daughter,"
Beatrice Blackman, 53, said.

Isaac Rankin, addicted to crack, alcohol and heroin, said he found his thanks in
the Gospel of John, 15:3: "You are already clean because of the word I have spoken
to you."

"We cannot fill his shoes," Jackson said. "But he trained us well. We are not to
compromise. We are not to put God's word off to the side. We are to put it first."

Author: BRUCE NOLAN Staff writer