Veteran Katrina worker leaves New Orleans

By ENS staff, March 10, 2010 [Episcopal News Service] Episcopal Community Services in the Diocese of Louisiana has announced that Courtney Cowart, its director of advocacy and community affairs, is leaving at the end of the month to follow what the agency called "a strong call to return to her vocation as a theological educator of the next generation of lay and ordained church leaders."

ECS said Cowart would be exploring new opportunities in the fields of theological formation and ministry innovation.

Cowart came to the diocese in December 2005, just months after the devastation wrought by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, from New York City where she had been adjunct faculty in Christian spirituality at General Theological Seminary. She served as the founding strategic director for the diocese's Office of Disaster Response, building on her experience at St. Paul's Chapel in New York following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and with Episcopal Relief & Development's immediate Katrina response in September 2005.

A letter from ECS Executive Director Nell Bolton said that Cowart's ministry had come "full circle" in the last year "with the development of new experiential learning programs to train church leaders in key aspects of the ministry model that has transformed" the Diocese of Louisiana. In January, she led ECS and its partners in the launch of "Building the Beloved Community," a for-credit leadership course for Episcopal Church seminarians.

Cowart said in the letter that she will leave New Orleans "deeply connected to that yearning of the human soul for the community in which the world was first created."

"Sharing in your rebuilding of your beloved city has given me a glimpse of that heavenly city, the New Jerusalem, and in that glimpse of the glory of God," she wrote.

In the same letter, recently retired Louisiana Bishop Charles Jenkins called Cowart a "heroine for our time" for taking on the suffering of the diocese.

"Her untiring efforts on the part of those falling through the cracks of an often-times scandalous recovery are a tribute to Courtney's commitment as a Christian," he wrote.