Children and Gambling Top Agenda on Visit to Diocese of Connecticut
Episcopal News Service. May 18, 1995 [95094]
Ed Stannard, News Editor for the Episcopal Life
(ENS) The social costs of casino gambling, and the wide range of challenges facing "children at risk," occupied diocesan and national church leaders during a weekend visit to the Diocese of Connecticut April 28-30.
The visitation was one in a series bringing Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning, House of Deputies President Pam Chinnis and Senior Executive for Program Diane Porter to discuss partnerships between dioceses and the national church. They will make a similar trip to the Diocese of Olympia in Washington state. They have already visited Nevada and Mississippi.
Under the weekend's theme of "the common good," diocesan leaders used a broad definition of "children at risk" to raise concern about children of all races and circumstances.
"The children are the most vulnerable of society but we're talking about children of all strata of society and children of every race," noted Bishop Clarence Coleridge of Connecticut, who began a special fund for children at risk at last year's diocesan convention.
Porter pledged to put the welfare of children at the top of the national church's agenda.
Casino gambling provoked the most discussion during the weekend. Porter visited the Foxwoods Resort Casino in rural Ledyard, the largest in the Western Hemisphere, which is owned by the Mashantucket Pequot tribe. An average of 40,000 people have visited the casino every day since it opened in February 1992, and its 3,900 slot machines brought in nearly $48 million in March alone.
Joined by the Rev. Douglas Cooke, the Rev. Canon David Cannon and Charles Moncrief of St. James, Poquetanuck, a parish that sits in the shadow of the immense gambling complex, Porter talked with Foxwoods President Michael "Mickey" Brown and Michael Telesmanic, vice president of table games, and met with a group of Foxwoods employees.
Porter later said that the tour was highly educational. "I did not know of its goal not to be the casino to the high roller but to operate on low-roller volume," she said. "I knew it had a lot of employees -- the number 10,000 was overwhelming. That's bigger than some towns."
At the round-table discussion the next day, warnings about the negative effects of casinos on those with gambling addictions and casinos' questionable economic benefits were balanced with comments about the aid the Pequots give to Western tribes and criticisms of the churches' strategy on the issue.
"We tended to hear the church vs. casinos," said Charles Morse of Grace Church, Hartford. "I think we would have made a stronger witness evangelically if we had worked for economic development."
Later the discussion turned to the challenges of developing a team approach to ministry in a traditional Yankee state where many parishes have old, high-maintenance buildings.
"So many of our churches are fraught with their own economic development -- that is fixing their roof rather than fixing the roofs of houses in the community," said Jack Spaeth, diocesan director of administration and finance.
"There's a history in my little town of that incredible New England parochialism, where the diocese is irrelevant to the parish, much less the national church," said the Rev. James Curry of Trinity Church, Portland. The group agreed to concentrate on children, gambling and spirituality, Porter said.
The weekend also included visits to St. Luke's Community Services in Stamford -- Browning described it as "one of the most diversified programs that I have seen anywhere" -- St. Mark's Day Care Center in Bridgeport, the Masonic Home and Hospital in Wallingford, where a local parish is beginning an outreach ministry, and St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Hartford, a West Indian congregation that has thrived since its founding two years ago.
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