Interfaith: Together Building Community

Bethel Church of God in Christ provided music at a recent assembly.

At the end of my last post, I promised a bit more about Interfaith and I want to share three things. First, I mentioned in that post that Interfaith needs “organized people.” By that we mean people who understand that the self-interest of each of us is interconnected with everyone else’s and that the community thrives when we all have voice and participate in public life. 

That requires developing relationships with people we do not usually rub elbows with in everyday life. It means going out of our own neighborhood to meet in a church on the other side of town. It requires patience and can be frustrating, but the rewards are huge—both personally and communally. 

Second, I also mentioned in the last post that Interfaith needs “organized money.” By that we mean “our own”! In other words, Interfaith strives to support itself by dues-paying institutional members. In addition, we receive some grant support from the business community and various foundations, and gifts from individual people who are not part of a member institution. 

As a matter of policy, we do not accept any funds from any governmental entity at any level. That is because we sometimes go to governmental entities to get things done, or we need to call upon them to be accountable. For example, Interfaith convinced Monroe City Council to invest city economic development funds in NOVA, the independent workforce intermediary we helped get started that is currently contributing over $2 million annually to the economy of Ouachita Parish.

Interfaith uses its funds primarily for the training and education we need to organize people and money to get the job done. We have one organizer-trainer who is the sole staff person for the Ouachita Parish cluster of Interfaith and the “glue” that helps keep us volunteers on track!

The third and last thing I want to share in this post is that we have begun to plan an event for this fall called “Conversations about Monroe.” Our goal is to bring together six people—the pastor plus five others—from 20 institutions, or approximately 100 people. These people will be divided into “house meeting” size groups of 8 – 12 people each. With the help of a facilitator, each group will have a conversation in which each person will be encouraged to share his/her vision and energy for making Monroe, West Monroe and Ouachita Parish a community in which everyone thrives. The purpose of this event is to set Interfaith’s agenda for the next few years and identify people with vision and energy to carry it out.

You will hear more about this in upcoming weeks. For now, I can say that I will be one of the facilitators. Several local pastors have agreed to attend and to bring members of their congregations. All who care about this community are welcome. Please comment below or contact me if you'd like to participate.

Best Game in Town: Interfaith

In early summer 2001, I walked into the ULM Catholic Student Center where a meeting was just getting underway. By the end of that meeting, I knew that I had found something of great value. It was a meeting of leaders of Northern and Central Louisiana Interfaith.

The first thing that got my attention that evening was the mix of people in the room. They were African American and white, Missionary Baptist and Episcopalian, Church of God in Christ and Lutheran, Ba’hai and Jewish, from the north side and the south side, teachers and janitors, businessmen and laborers, and although it was less immediately obvious, they were poor and middle class and relatively well-off. And they were there to work together for the good of the community.

Interfaith celebrates its 10th Birthday with a skit.

Of course, I did not yet understand how my own life would be affected, but I remember leaving the Catholic Student Center thinking, “this is the best thing happening in this community.” I have been involved with Interfaith ever since. We have had our ups and downs, successes and failures, and we are now in a time of rebuilding. But it has changed my life, it has changed the community, and I still think it is the best thing happening in this community.

Why? Of course I must mention some of our big successes, like getting the city and the school board to cooperate in closing a 12-foot deep drainage ditch that runs right along the edge of the playground of Madison James Foster Elementary School. Teachers had fished more than one kid out of the water during rainy seasons!

The city school system began a cycle of major remodeling projects, but mysteriously ran out of money when they got to the dreadfully inadequate, deteriorating gym at Carroll High School. We went to the school board and said, “That’s not acceptable,” and today Carroll has a new gym.

NOVA might well be our biggest accomplishment to date. NOVA is a workforce intermediary. It is employer driven. It locates living wage jobs with career tracks and benefits that are going begging in this community for lack of skilled applicants. Then NOVA, with the help of Interfaith, recruits motivated but underemployed people in the community, gets them in and through the training they need, and into the jobs employers have been unable to fill. Through NOVA, we are building the middle class of Ouachita Parish.

NOVA executive director Paul West speaks to an Interfaith assembly.

Just a few weeks ago, NOVA expanded into the Delta. NOVA, with the help of Interfaith, will conduct two graduation ceremonies this summer. The one for Delta graduates has not yet been scheduled. However, Ouachita Parish graduates will commence at St. Thomas’ Episcopal at 7 p.m. July 26. Come to hear how lives have been changed—not only those of individuals but of entire families!

But most important of all to me is the relationships I have found and cultivated through Interfaith. I am welcome at New Light Baptist Church and am on the board of directors of their community development organization. I am connected with people at Jesus the Good Shepherd Catholic Church, at Mt. Nebo Missionary Baptist Church, at Messiah Lutheran, at Lighthouse Church of God in Christ, and the list goes on.

My relationships through Interfaith are central to my rootedness in this community. They are what make “community” out of diversity for me.

Want to get involved? Interfaith needs organized money and organized people to do what it does. I’ll write more about that next month, but for now, see me if you’d like to help. And I will definitely need some folks to provide finger foods for the reception to follow the NOVA graduation!
                                     

Lesson from Fr. Brito

Note: This is fifth in a series about my visit with a group of U.S. deacons to the Dominican Republic in spring 2011.

In the most recent installment of the story of my “Latin Experience” in the Dominican Republic last spring, I gave an overview of the classroom instruction we received for the first couple days at the Bishop Kellog Conference Center in San Pedro de Macoris. This month I want to focus on just one of those classroom sessions, the one that spoke most powerfully to me.

The session called “A Social Analysis of the Latin American Family” was conducted by Fr. Napoleon Brito, Dean of Epiphany Cathedral in Santo Domingo. What impressed me so much about this presentation was that Fr. Brito had the courage to share with us—the outsiders from the U.S.—some of the problems of Latino culture.

Fr. Brito listens to Deacon Maureen Hagan's question.

Fr. Brito identified several phenomena that have powerfully influenced Latino families in various ways, such as the rural to urban transition, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the other pressures of modernism—all experienced by many societies, including our own. Thus the construction of affordable housing in urban areas has not kept pace with population growth, 80% of youth work to supplement inadequate family incomes instead of study, and consumer goods ranging from food to culture and media are unequally distributed.

In Latino society, however, these phenomena and their consequences interact with another cultural characteristic—machismo—in a way that produces especially negative outcomes. Machismo can be defined as exaggerated masculinity stressing attributes such as physical courage, virility, and aggressiveness. These attributes are typically expressed through domination of women.

The combination of poverty and machismo is lethal to families and thus highly disruptive of society as a whole. The consequences Fr. Brito enumerated include:

• A low rate of marriage and high rate of co-habitation.
• Men with two or three families who can barely support one.
• Alcoholism, sexual promiscuity and a general cultural emphasis on hedonism.
• Many children born to single mothers or into families in which the father is dividing time between more than one family and job.

 The Episcopal Church in the Dominican Republic is responding to the state of Latino families with a strong focus on family ministry in urban areas. These devastating challenges, Fr. Brito explained, can best be dealt with by strengthening families. And although “family values” often get cited but rarely defined in the U.S., the Church in the Dominican Republic has had to be much more purposeful in ministering to families holistically, especially by countering machismo and promoting the full-time presence of men in one family.

A mother and her sons walk the dirt streets of a poor barrio in San Pedro de Macoris, DR.

It is our natural tendency as humans to put on a good front, brag about our accomplishments and foreground the most enticing, enjoyable aspects of our culture. Likewise, it is our tendency to hide our shortcomings and unite to keep problems hidden from outsiders. I have heard these tendencies with startling clarity in our own political dialogue of late, when those who dare to admit that we as a society also have problems are labeled unpatriotic.

Fr. Brito’s talk was compelling and informative. But I was most impressed with the courage it took for him to speak to outsiders so openly and frankly. Latino culture has much to offer that is wonderful: spirit, color, music, warmth. But I particularly appreciate that our hosts trusted us enough to share their challenges with us as well. Would that we should be so humble.

Learning the Culture

Note: This is fourth in a series about my trip to the Dominican Republic in late May 2011.
                                            
In the second entry of this series, I wrote about the opening Eucharist of my 10-day “Latin Experience” in the Dominican Republic, an educational opportunity organized by the Association for Episcopal Deacons (AED).  It was a most inspirational beginning.
                                
The group of ten from the U.S. of which I was a part spent the next several days at the Bishop Kellog Conference Center in San Pedro de Macoris. We had come to the DR to learn about Latin culture and spirituality and about the formation and role of deacons in the Dominican Church, and we needed to acclimate before we ventured out to meet people and join in the ministry of the church there. Many a blunder has been committed by well-intended but uninformed “do-gooders” in another land!

But we had a purpose beyond personal development and doing ministry abroad. U.S. Deacon Bob Snow has been a missionary in the DR for more than 10 years, and during that time has hosted hundreds of mission teams from the U.S. He conceived of Latin Experience as a way for the DR Church to “give back” to the U.S. Church, and to give back in a way that would help the U.S. Church minister to the many Latinos among us here.
                                       
Our teachers at the Bishop Kellog center included both U.S. missionaries in the DR and Dominicans. We got to spend lots of time with Dominican deacons and those in the process of becoming deacons.
    

U.S. missionaries Deacon Bob Snow, Karen Carroll and Ellen Snow.

Indeed, one of the first and most powerful lessons we learned is that the Episcopal Church in the Dominican Republic is very big on deacons! As in the Diocese of Western Louisiana, Dominican deacons attend a diocesan school of theology and get all of their training locally. Priests must get a Master’s degree from a seminary. Thus it takes less time and is less expensive to produce deacons than priests.
    
In addition, the church must go to the people in the Dominican Republic because many of the people are poor and have no way to travel to big churches in urban areas. Thus the Dominican Church is busy planting small churches in barrios and rural villages. Many of these congregations will never be able to support a full-time priest. Thus priests aided by deacons serve several parishes, and in some cases deacons are in charge of missions.
    
I got to share in the ministry of deacons in the DR, but that comes later in the story. For now, a few words about our classroom experiences. Day one of that training, no fewer than FOUR bishops were in attendance! One of the four was the U.S. bishop who was a participant just like us deacons. Another of the four was retired U.S. Bishop Bill Skilton, who serves as assistant to and translator for Bishop Holguín.

Current Bishop of the DR Julio Holguín.

Bishop Julio Holguín, the current bishop, welcomed us and talked about the vision and ministry of the Episcopal Church in the DR, as well as challenges the church faces. He also presented us each with a beautiful cross of black coral and silver. You will see it hanging around my neck with my deacon’s cross most Sunday mornings!
    
Bishop Holguín is the second native-born bishop of the DR. He introduced the first native-born bishop, Bishop Telesforo Isaac, who was also the first DR-born deacon and priest. 

1st native-born Bishop of the DR Telesforo Isaac.

Bishop Isaac captivated us with stories from his lifelong work developing the Episcopal Church in the DR. He also spoke clearly and directly to us about the utter necessity of suspending one’s own cultural norms, standards and practices when in a cross-cultural ministry situation.  It is not possible to show the love of Christ while busy passing judgment on the other, he argued.
    
And that evening we got another taste of exuberant Dominican spirituality in a rousing session of learning Spanish-language praise songs!

Fr. Brito, Aspirant Elsa and Deacon Lourdes teach us praise songs.