Episcopal Press and News
Churches Help Paralysis Give Way to Action in Appalachia
Diocesan Press Service. October 22, 1971 [96-5]
Isabel Baumgartner, editor of The Tennessee Churchman.
(Note to Editor: The story below was written by Mrs. Isabel Baumgartner, editor of The Tennessee Churchman. She attended the recent meetings of the Commission on Religion in Appalachia (CORA) and Appalachia South, Inc. (APSO), in Gatlinburg, Tenn., and has furnished the story below.)
Appalachia is moving.
This is not to say that the 20 million residents of the 825-mile stretch between southwestern New York and mid-Alabama have decided to live elsewhere.
It is to say -- as the Commission on Religion in Appalachia made clear October 5-7 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee -- that here and there in this vast depressed area, paralysis is giving way to positive action.
With financial and human resources mobilized by the widely assorted group of Christians who comprise CORA, things are beginning to stir. Items:
-- rural families in east Kentucky's Breathitt and Wolfe counties are sensing, for the first time, the personal dignity that comes from being self-supporting. Women skilled since childhood in making quilts are finding widening markets for their handwork. Farmers are raising feeder pigs, and growing vegetables in inexpensive plastic-covered greenhouses. At a woodworking plant and a chair factory, both new, men are using lifelong skills to produce family income. a regional task force on social, political, and economic issues (SEPI) has spun off state SEPI groups, by which local people learn to share in the political process. Special concerns: health, welfare, education, tax reform.
(In Appalachia tuberculosis still afflicts thousands. Half of all children have intestinal parasites. If a man starts early enough to mine coal, he can become totally disabled by black lung disease before his thirty-fifth birthday. In other named areas of concern, the facts are every bit as shocking as these.)
-- the churches themselves are taking a new look at their present fragmented mission involvements in Appalachia, with a view to updating methods and making joint strategy plans. The Appalachian Mission Renewal project, newest arm of CORA, offers its communions a full-scale analysis of all mission activities supported by national judicatory church offices -- including programs in health, welfare, education, and community development.
The aim: to find ways to renovate systems of long standing, and retool for late twentieth century effectiveness.
-- people in Clairfield, Tennessee, using local materials and initiative, have organized to help themselves by building a small plant to manufacture wood pallets for industrial shippers. CORA helped channel into this effort funds and personnel from the Tennessee valley Authority and the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation.
-- CORA has founded a non-profit corporation to build an endowment, receiving from individuals, churches, and foundations tax-free gifts which will produce ongoing income for emerging tasks across the region.
-- a two-week regional school for church leaders, to refurbish and enhance mission skills, drew 175 people from 13 states to its third annual session last summer at Morgantown, West Virginia.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
A 1962 Ford Foundation study documented the severity of Appalachia's plight and urged a regional search for solutions.
CORA came into being three years later, after Christian leaders across Appalachia had asked themselves and each other, "How can we work together, across state and denominational lines, to reduce poverty and build community, here in the place sometimes called the nation's most stubborn rural slum?"
Pursuit of that question led to the formation of the CORA coalition, whose ecumenical dimension is probably unequaled anywhere else in the U. S.
The Commission embraces 17 Christian communions (see listing below), 11 state Councils of Churches, the Council of Southern Mountains, Inc., and the National catholic Rural Life Conference.
A MILESTONE MEETING
The Gatlinburg meeting became a milestone in CORA's maturing process. In April 1970 in Johnson city, Tennessee, CORA gathered grassroots people and government agency people, to hear from both groups an appraisal of how the Commission might continue to, link them most helpfully. This spring in Montreat, North Carolina, CORA's guests were bishops and other judicatory leaders, assembled to share their communions' views and to offer growing support.
This month, CORA invited national-level decision makers from each member church to attend, enabling a meeting of minds on both long-range goals and specific 1972 project plans.
As CORA executive director Max Glenn of Knoxville puts it, "This is the turning point we've been working toward so long. The results of our search for appropriate roles for the church to play here have been shared helpfully with our national executives. And they've combined their thinking with ours to project how best to move ahead."
CORA's president, Bishop coadjutor William E. Sanders of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee, spelled out clearly the Commission's role as bridge-builder, not agency -- as a table around which Christians of all persuasions can gather to reinforce one another in mission and ministry to Appalachia.
The meeting endorsed CORA's stated purpose: "In the name of Jesus Christ, to engage the resources of the communions and other agencies in activities designed to meet the pressing human needs of the people in Appalachia."
A policy statement adopted by the meeting terms CORA'S work " a necessary and valid demonstration of the love of Jesus Christ." One delegate put it this way: "I see CORA as a channel by which the won man can express his commitment to Christ."
The Commission and its guests heard Dr. Ralph Widner, executive director of the u. S. Appalachian Regional Commission, point out that such government agencies necessarily see only the big picture. It is up to the churches," he insisted, "to sensitize the whole social system to the needs of the single individual, to help us marry the sense of the needs of one precious human being to our grand strategies ... It's not good enough to improve health care, transportation, education, and housing unless we give the people themselves control over what happens in their lives."
Dr. Widner touched a point already apparent to CORA people -- that some mountain churches present a religion that is fatalistic, individualistic, escapist, emotional, and other-worldly.
People paralyzed into hopelessness by these concepts need to catch a new vision of Christian potential for mission in today's world. As the Washingtonian put it, "You must make the Church a positive, affirming force. YOU must be the mediating force that holds communities together."
A second Washington guest, Phillip Brown of the Rural Housing Alliance which is funded by the Ford Foundation and the OEO, said that the weakness of present housing efforts is the lack of a "delivery system" by which monies can be put to work. He recommended that when CORA's task force on housing is ready, with a staff person who has gained at least semi-professional competence, the Commission can provide the skeleton for a housing institution in Appalachia.
CHURCH MONEY IS SEED MONEY
Member communions underwrite CORA's administrative budget for 1972, about $70,000 and additional church seed money in turn mobilizes grant money from government and foundations for program -- to date, in excess of $1 million for next year, with no limit to the amount readily applicable to self-help programs as it becomes available. The CORA staff lines up in a novel way. Manning its Knoxville office, though seldom in it all at one time, are three men. Max Glenn, executive director since 1968, is a clergyman in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Assistant director the Rev. John B. McBride, of the Southern Baptist Convention, spearheads the regional mission renewal study mentioned above. Layman Gary Slaats tells CORA's story many ways via a religious communications network he has founded a regional religious atlas has also been published.
The Rev. Bennett Poage, of the Christian Church (Disciples), enabled the east Kentucky human/economic development efforts to take shape. A trained economist and onetime U. S. Department of Agriculture staff member, he now moves to other Appalachia spots to spark programs similar to the one in Kentucky.
From the field also, the Rev. Dr. Shirley E. Greene of the united Methodist Church acts as consultant to the SEPI task forces, his half-time services donated by his church. Other people on CORA s collegiate staff relate this way to the semi-autonomous task forces, without pay from CORA's budget.
It's been a slow and demanding process, starting from scratch to gather data and formulate plans and get projects off the ground. But the Gatlinburg gathering clearly showed that CORA has come of age, and is now equipped to move into productive adulthood with united Christian strengths.
The Episcopal Church's own regional board, until now called Appalachia South, Inc. (APSO), met directly following the larger assembly, to plan for the coming year. constituency: a bishop, a priest, and a lay person from the Dioceses of Pittsburgh, Maryland, west Virginia, Virginia, Lexington, western North Carolina, Southwestern Virginia, and Tennessee.
Now that Pittsburgh has affiliated, and clergymen from Southern Ohio and western New York expressed the interest of those Dioceses by their presence at Gatlinburg, the corporate name will be changed to eliminate "South."
APSO president is Bishop William G. Marmion of Southwestern Virginia. Its executive director, the Rev. R. Baldwin Lloyd, works from Blacksburg, Virginia, to counsel and coordinate and encourage the people-to-people efforts which APSO began in 1964: he calls APSO the vehicle by which the Episcopal Church enters into the united efforts of CORA.
From its outset APSO has assumed a dual task. It supports and strengthens Episcopal clergy and congregations, for example, by orienting new clergymen (its own and others) to the cultural climate of the region, and by producing Christian Education materials written in vocabulary understandable to persons with limited formal education. It also works ecumenically wherever possible, particularly through the Commission on Religion in Appalachia. Director Lloyd, a member of CORA's collegiate staff, gives a portion of his time directly to these interchurch undertakings.
Many goals APSO envisioned, early in the scheme of things, dovetail with those now actively pursued by the newer ecumenical Commission. Yet certain uniquely Episcopal life styles continue to maintain their identity and to receive their full share of APSO's attention.
Via the Highland Education project guided by the Rev. w. Ross Baley in Northfork, west Virginia, student volunteers from many parts of the country engage in vocation church school teaching, and in work projects to repair the fabric of Episcopal mission property.
APSO board members and Mr. Lloyd are furthering linkages with individual Dioceses and congregations, to focus the strengths of Episcopalians in a collective approach to Appalachia's multiple human problems.
The national Church plays a key part, too. The Rev. Robert Martin, Deputy for program, represented presiding Bishop John Hines at the CORA meeting. Mr. Woodrow carter, also of Executive Council's New York staff, met with APSO this time as he does frequently, for liaison purposes. Of APSO's 1971 operations budget of $28,000, the sum of $9,000 (over and above support from the Dioceses) comes from general Church funds. Presiding Bishop Hines contributed an added $1,000 this year; Massachusetts Churchwomen gave $200; and two parishes in Maryland and a third in Connecticut gave over $2,200. APSO program funds of some $32,000 for 1972 will come, as in the past, from individual Dioceses where projects are in process.
Some of their uses: conferences which bring together Episcopalians and grassroots people, to melt intercultural barriers and open ways for mutual mission -- continuing education opportunities for Episcopal clergymen -- training workshops for lay and clerical leaders within and without the Episcopal Church.
The October meeting saw APSO constituents underline their firm commitment to its two-fold purpose. In the words of the Rev. William Burns, who directs an Episcopal mountain education center at Valle Crucis, North Carolina, "we're like a two-wheeled vehicle riding a double track. One track is our own Episcopal effort, and the second is our ecumenical work via CORA. Both move ahead because each wheel energizes the other."
CORA member communions: American Baptist Convention, American Lutheran Church, Christian Church (Disciples), Church of God, Church of the Brethren, Episcopal Church, Friends united Meeting, Lutheran Church in America, Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, Mennonite Central Committee, presbyterian Church in the U.S., Reformed Church in America, Roman Catholic Church, Southern Baptist Convention, United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church, United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.