US: As they wait in line for hot food at the George R Brown Convention Centre in downtown Houston three times a day, few evacuees know where their meals are coming from. Some believe they are provided by the American Red Cross, others by the federal government or the city authorities.
In fact, every meal is prepared, served and paid for by volunteers from the Second Baptist Church, one of Houston's numerous megachurches and part of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Religious groups, or "faith-based organisations", have played a key role in the disaster relief effort in Louisiana and Mississippi, offering food, shelter and friendship to thousands of hurricane survivors. Churches have raised tens of millions of dollars and mobilised thousands of volunteers, many of whom have taken evacuees into their homes and offered practical help in finding jobs and permanent accommodation.
"It's kind of living our religion out. Faith-based organisations are in business to help people, temporally and eternally," according to Dr Gary Moore, senior associate pastor at the Second Baptist Church.
When buses carrying evacuees from New Orleans started arriving in Texas, Houston's mayor, Bill White, asked Ed Young, the Second Baptist Church's chief pastor, to co-ordinate the response of all the city's faith-based organisations. Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other groups agreed to focus their efforts on feeding the 25,000 people expected to pass through Houston's shelters at the Astrodome, the Reliant Centre and the Convention Centre.
They calculated that feeding 25,000 people for a month would cost $4.2 million and the Second Baptist Church led the fundraising effort, collecting $1 million in pledges within days of the disaster. Muslim groups and the Society of Friends each raised $1 million and before long, the religious groups had exceeded their fundraising target.
Few question the practical value of faith-based relief efforts but some secular groups are uneasy about the expanding role of religious groups, some of which are hoping to receive federal funding for their work.
At the Second Baptist Church's headquarters in Woodlawn, a smart Houston suburb, Dr Moore dismisses such fears as pure prejudice.
"I think that's the secular mind, fearful of God," he said.
One of the church's three centres in Houston, Woodlawn is the size of a modest university campus, with two chapels and a stadium-sized "worship centre", a school, two gyms, a restaurant, an indoor adventure playground for children and a large Christian bookshop.
The central atrium is a cross between a five-star hotel lobby and an executive airport lounge, with an opulent, mahogany reception desk, indoor fountains and plasma screens advertising the day's events.
These include separate bible study groups for men and women, choir practice for adults and children, something called "Grief Share for Children" and a "Sex in the City Community Group" the purpose of which even Dr Moore couldn't quite work out.
"It could be something to do with sex addiction or purity, I don't know. We try to be user-friendly. We work out what the secular man likes to do with his time and offer attractions to bring people in who wouldn't come here otherwise," he said.
Dr Moore stressed, however, that there was no missionary dimension to the church's relief effort and that volunteers were not seeking to save souls in the Convention Centre.
"We're not going to hold a Billy Graham crusade in there. We don't go in there handing out bibles," he said.
Other Christian groups are less restrained, however and Operation Blessing, a relief effort led by the controversial televangelist Pat Robertson, has ordered 80,000 bibles to distribute to evacuees. Mr Robertson returned to public notoriety in recent weeks when he called on the US government to assassinate Hugo Chávez, the left-wing president of Venezuela.
Groups campaigning for the separation of church and state have warned that federal funds channelled into groups like Mr Robertson's could end up being used to finance missionary activities. Others fear that, if religious groups receive federal funds, they will be exempted from the usual rules forbidding discrimination in employment policies.
Dr Moore believes that the government would be wise to use the manpower and organisational base offered by faith-based groups but he insists that any such relationship must be at arm's length.