Barriers Recognized at Communications Conference
Diocesan Press Service. June 6, 1966 [44-3]
Isabel Baumgartner
When 34 Tennesseans -- clergy and lay persons, Episcopalians and non-Episcopalians, white persons and Negroes -- gathered at DuBose Conference Center, Monteagle, Tenn., May 12-14 for a Communications Conference, the participants discovered that the barriers of race, sex, and denomination -- while real and biting -- were not as strong as other factors which continually separate person from person.
The Communications Conference, growing in frequency in the southeast, offers the participant -- as the goal stated -- an opportunity "to increase his awareness of how he communicates himself to others, and how others communicate themselves to him --" and to discern, at least partially, how he might "develop new ways of improving (such) communication."
As the March 1966 Alabama "Churchman" stated, this type of conference developed in the main from the work of Percy Oron South who, while a college professor in Montgomery, initiated lay-clergy conferences in 1963-4 when he was Alabama's diocesan laymen's president. Now on the faculty of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, South continues his communications work. Says the article, more than 100 Alabama Episcopalians have participated in such conferences since 1964, and two of the last three conferences have included participants from Tennessee as well as Alabama.
The May gathering, first to be racially mixed, was sponsored by the Human Relations subcommittee of Tennessee's Pilot Diocese Steering Committee. The Rev. Donald McK. Williamson coordinates the Pilot Diocese effort. Heading the 7-man Conference staff was the Rev. Richard E. Byrd of Edina, Minn., until recently a member of the Leadership Training staff of Executive Council's Department of Christian Education. (Isabel Baumgartner - The Tennessee Churchman).