Dr. John Long LaNoue, Sr.

From Beaumont to a calling

John Long LaNoue, Sr. grew up poor in Beaumont, Texas. His father — a hard-drinking boilermaker — left the family when John was four years old. At sixteen, John was led to faith by two laymen from a local church, an encounter that would shape every chapter of the life that followed. He has often said he never forgot that two ordinary men, not professionals, were the ones who reached him.

He went on to earn his undergraduate degree at Stephen F. Austin State University, his Master of Divinity at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and his doctorate at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary (now Gateway Seminary) in Mill Valley, California. His 1989 doctoral project on Baptist youth leadership training is catalogued in WorldCat (OCLC 22715547).

The first mobile unit (1971–72)

While serving as Baptist Student Union director at Kilgore College, Dr. John watched a Bible-class student wrestle with how the church could meaningfully respond to disaster. The answer came in his own Mesquite, Texas driveway. Working with volunteers and funded by a $25,000 designated gift from the 1971 Mary Hill Davis Texas State Mission Offering, he converted a used 18-wheeler into the first Baptist disaster-relief mobile feeding unit. He also built one of the first mobile medical clinics deployed along the Rio Grande — repurposing an old school bus.

The unit's maiden voyage came in 1972, when a flash flood tore through Seguin and New Braunfels along the Guadalupe River. Seventeen people drowned and damages topped $17 million. With his nine-year-old son alongside him, Dr. John set up on the Seguin courthouse square and served more than 2,500 hot meals. In 1974 the same unit deployed internationally — responding to Hurricane Fifi in Honduras.

"One converted 18-wheeler, one $25,000 mission offering, one flash flood — and a national movement was born."

What began with one converted 18-wheeler is now a national infrastructure of roughly 1,550 mobile units and more than 65,000 trained volunteers, making Southern Baptist Disaster Relief the third-largest disaster-response organization in the United States.

Closed countries, open doors

Dr. John's ministry has repeatedly carried him into places few Americans were permitted to go.

• He led one of the first American Christian teams to enter Iran following the Islamic Revolution, working in the Dolanov Valley with displaced Kurdish refugees.
• In 1997 he spent three months in North Korea as part of a five-person NGO team monitoring food distribution during the famine — among the first U.S. groups to spend extended time there in more than forty years. North Korean officials affectionately called him "Halabaji" — Korean for "Grandfather John."
• Following the September 11 attacks, he served at Ground Zero with full-access credentials issued by the American Red Cross, supporting rescue and recovery teams.

"Indiana Jones with a Bible and a skillet." — how colleagues describe him.

Recognition

In 2010, Texas Baptist Men dedicated the John LaNoue Disaster Relief Complex in his honor — a 15,000-square-foot expansion of the Robert E. Dixon Mission Equipping Center in east Dallas. The complex houses the TBM fleet of disaster-relief vehicles and a secure, generator-backed communications center. It is, in effect, the operational headquarters of the movement he started in a Mesquite driveway four decades earlier.

He has also received commendations across the political and humanitarian spectrum, including a personal "Job well done!" letter from President George H.W. Bush. In January 2017 he was honored on the past-history panel at the 50th Anniversary celebration of Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, recognizing his role as one of the movement's pioneers. He retired from the Texas Baptist Men staff in 1999 after decades of denominational service.

Today

Dr. John serves as Global Disaster Consultant and Director for Amigos Internacionales, mentoring the next generation of medical-mission and disaster-response leaders working in East Africa and beyond. He and his family make their home in Frost, Texas. He is survived in legacy by two children — John LaNoue Jr., MD, a pediatric surgeon, and Lydia LaNoue Slinkard of Atlanta — and a wide circle of grandchildren, colleagues, and volunteers whom he equipped, deployed, and prayed for over six decades of service.