Tenn. Church Goers Counter Budget Cuts
Episcopal News Service. November 4, 1981 [81287]
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Episcopal Church and other local religious leaders have moved quickly to capitalize on the momentum generated by a mid-September Conference that sought ways to respond to federal budget cuts in social services.
The Rev. Edward Landers, director of urban and regional ministries for the Episcopal Church in the Nashville region, said in a recent interview that the conference had resulted in an interracial clergy-laity dialogue and action on three programs: affirmation of the federal Voting Rights Act extension; development of practical food delivery systems and an extensive campaign to weatherize Nashville area homes.
Landers and other Episcopalians were influential in organizing and running the conference which brought together 220 religious, civic, business and governmental leaders. With support from the Chamber of Commerce and the mayor's office, the conference assessed the impact of budget cuts in areas of food, clothing and shelter, but then moved quickly to map a strategy of coalition-building, training and coordination for the metropolitan region's more than 700 places of worship.
In a conversation six weeks after the workshop, Landers detailed some of the work being done and talked about the philosophy and attitudes that are shaping that work.
"Right from the beginning," Landers noted, "we were thinking of this as the start of a process far more than a single event and that is the way it is being seen and the way in which people are responding to it."
The first result of that determination was the start of a dialogue between black and white clergy groups. The two cooperated often but usually on a sporadic, programmatic basis. It was from these current talks that the groups resolved to press for extension of the Voting Rights Act in its present form.
The two practical programs are also being worked out through those conversations and have already won widespread support from Episcopal parishes.
The first of these is food support systems including operation of food banks, emergency supply centers and recovery programs. Churches are dividing up the tasks -- satellite centers, bookkeeping, administrative, educational and development -- according to the gifts that each parish feels it can bring to the program.
Shelter -- the third dimension of the program -- is as urgent an issue as food with the onset of winter close at hand. Here, Landers said, the Episcopal Church has chosen to emphasise stewardship -- particularly conservation -- in its efforts. Weatherization training and kits and groups to winterize the homes of the elderly and infirm are the major elements of this facet.
"We will have 60 people -- a third of them Episcopalians -- scattered through the city early in November to hold training sessions," Landers said. "The idea is to give people the basic skills -- wrapping pipes, simple carpentry -- by which they can go a long way themselves to making their homes more efficient. Even more, they will be able to train others in those skills and assist in identifying those people who can't help themselves with this. Then we will have teams available to go out and winterize those homes."
"The whole concept behind this," Landers explained, "is to secure the widest possible involvement. We are trying to create a full opportunity to act out the self-help philosophy among all sectors of the community."
One outgrowth of that philosophy is the "coalition building" that has come out of it. "The cooperative effort to launch and sustain the food and shelter aspects is certainly a part of that, but we hope to carry it further. For example, there have been some seven different social service referral systems working in the region. With the cooperation of the telephone company, we hope to be able to pare that down and avoid so much duplication to reach the same goal."
In addition to the telephone company -- Southern Bell -- the programs are assisted by the Tennessee Valley Authority and National Electric and they hope to expand the industrial and commercial support as they go on.
Asked if what Nashville Christians had done could be done elsewhere, Landers replied: "What we've tried to create are fully workable models that I think would fit most other places. We have a unified city-county government that is a big plus, but a traditionally very fragmented religious community that is something of a drawback. Certainly the sense of crisis, the recognition that we have to do something, is not unique to Nashville and that has been a big factor in mobilizing the community."
Landers emphasised that, for Episcopalians, the only way to make a program a success was through the active involvement of diocese and parish. Diocesan Bishop William Sanders and the diocesan convention have made urban mission and ministry one of their top priorities and one of the biggest elements of the diocesan Venture in Mission. Additionally, Landers noted, each proposal and project was worked out through local parish vestries and their appointed outreach task forces.