Triple Threats and Divine Response

Spencer Bradford, Executive Director, DCIA

Delivered in abbreviated form August 21, 2007.

Durham Congregations in Action has a history of identifying needs in the community that become opportunities for faith communities to share God’s love in ways that make a difference. Through feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, mentoring the unemployed, training young people, and other ministries, DCIA has mustered resources and creativity to touch the lives of people at risk and vulnerable in Durham. In this activity, DCIA has sought to initiate new ventures and bring them to sustainability, and often spin them off, while bringing our faith communities together in a common, united mission of caring for our neighbors.

This is a history for which we can be grateful, and it is one that I want to see continue. The matrix through which I see Durham’s needs for our ministries is that which Martin Luther King Jr. described 40 years ago (just a couple of years before the initial gatherings of churches began in downtown Durham that would eventually become DCIA) as the “triple evils” of poverty, racism and war: “forms of violence that exist in a vicious cycle. They are interrelated, all-inclusive, and stand as barriers to our living in the Beloved Community.” DCIA has a mission to move us nearer to God’s Beloved Community by addressing these evils.

First, DCIA has done much to address the crises of poverty in our community, and continues to do so. Families First, our mentoring program that matches congregational teams to unemployed parents, continues to be a special service in Durham. We need to grow it. We need more people of faith coming together to guide and support the unemployed into sustainable work for themselves and their families. In the coming year, we need fifteen new teams from Durham congregations to begin helping participating families. I’ll be assisting Pebbles Lindsey-Lucas to equip them, but we need seeds to be planted and doors opened in our congregations for this to happen.

YO-Durham also seeks to open doors out of poverty for young people in our community, nurturing skills, habits, and abilities that will benefit them and the people in their lives around them. We will continue to need additional employers and mentors to work with these young people, to invest time and attention with them, to create opportunities that will grow into changed lives.

DCIA initiated an “ending poverty” group that is expanding into a more broad-based network to create jobs and job-training opportunities in Durham. Supporting that network’s ventures and engaging Durham’s congregations in its employment projects will be a key part of DCIA’s work against poverty in the coming years.

DCIA is proud of projects we’ve initiated on behalf of the vulnerable, like Meals on Wheels, Interfaith Hospitality Network, Genesis Home, and Interfaith AIDS Ministry, and of the work of others we’ve supported. Promoting their services and supporting congregational involvement with their work, including expanding their connections to new congregations, will continue to be a key aspect of our work. But we will need to focus on what has been our historic role of identifying gaps in our community’s systems of care and seeding or nurturing new approaches to address them, so that no one in our community is forgotten. Among Durham’s homeless teenagers, struggling students in schools, and both disabled and working families seeking affordable housing, there is much more action needed. We’ll be attentive to not re-invent the wheel, and wherever we can support or assist existing organizations in the community to expand or extend what they’re already doing, we will. But we’ll also prayerfully explore new initiatives that will step into gaps with needed resources and care; we’ll BE that agency limber enough to go into action with our congregations and initiate a solution where needed. Our specialty is attending to EMERGING solutions to problems in Durham. Poverty is a persistent problem and will remain a focus of our attention, and we will continue to summon new energy and creativity to overcoming it. God continues to summon us to a life together under God’s provision, in which, as both Moses and the apostle Paul saw, those who have much do not have too much and those who have little do not have too little.

Regarding the second evil identified by Dr. King, overcoming racism also has been part of DCIA’s history. While Durham’s racial diversity, and the parity in population between whites and African-Americans, makes for unique opportunities here, racial divides and differences continue to be a struggle. The Southern Anti-Racism Network recently hosted a conversation on the tensions between Hispanic and African-American residents. The relationships we have with undocumented Hispanic immigrants compel us to attend to national legislative arguments, and to follow the God who summons us to welcome the stranger and foreigner. The bitter incivility at Durham school board meetings in previous years, and the response to the Duke Lacrosse case accusations, both demonstrate the tensions still at work in Durham between whites and blacks.

DCIA has long fostered “partnership” relationships between congregations of different traditions, with a focus on building relationships between predominantly black congregations and predominantly white ones. Recently, this has been augmented by adding the “Teen Teams Building Bridges,” drawing together youth from congregations of different races and traditions in common service and fellowship. This is work that needs to continue and grow in our community. Forty years after the end of legal segregation, we have to realize that healing racism is like walking up a down escalator – if we’re not actively working at it, we’re drifting backwards. And now we’re trying to figure out – among blacks and whites -- how the growing Hispanic population fits into this work. Recovery from racism in Durham is priority work for DCIA, and DCIA will work at its mission to “build an inclusive community of justice and peace across boundaries of faith, race, and ethnicity.” But promoting understanding will not be enough. We need to promote partnership and support across those boundaries. DCIA will work at being an anti-racist advocate in Durham, and supporting our congregations in growing as anti-racist communities of faith, so that we treat each neighbor with regard for the face of God behind their face.

The third evil identified by Dr. King was war. Though DCIA does not have a focus on peace advocacy in the world arena, overt violence is a problem on our local scale that we do address. DCIA will continue to support and partner with the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham in its work to reduce violence, increase public safety, and heal the wounds of murder in Durham. We need more of our congregations entering into relationships with ex-offenders through RCND’s Reconciliation and Re-entry project, to support and mentor them in rebuilding their lives as part of our community with honesty and grace. The practice of such restorative justice is a divine and reconciling remedy that DCIA needs to continue to promote in our community and congregations.

Domestic violence occurs too often in our community and our congregations, and DCIA will seek to support and equip congregations to address it and to be places of safety for the abused and endangered. It is a sinful tragedy that our congregations are generally regarded as the last place that an abused spouse or molested child can go to confide their pain and seek relief. DCIA will continue to support the work of the Crisis Response Center to help us become places of healing and safety for the wounded seeking God’s peace.

The violence of our culture and media, the struggle of congregations and communities to respond to the growth of gangs in Durham, and other manifestations of violence in our lives also confront us with the need to seek new ways to put our faith into action. And as we do so, we will find that the violence in our neighborhoods, prisons, and homes is related to the violence in the conflicts of the wider world. Which is why I want to invite anyone interested to participate in a prayer service for peace on the international day of prayer for peace, September 21, about which there will be more information the coming days.

In addressing all three of these evils – poverty, racism and violence – DCIA has a two-fold role: moving our congregations into the community, and the community into our congregations. Our work is connecting our congregations with hurting places beyond their walls in our community, but also to resource our members and congregations with tools and information about community issues, and help connect our lives of worship and faith with public conversation and action. Sometimes we work to move people from pews into the streets, and sometimes we bring the streets into the pews.

Having offered Dr. King’s matrix of social evils as a way to direct our work and our prayers, I want to close with the hope that Dr. King held to in the face of such evils, stating, “I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of [poverty], racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” For that bright daybreak he looked for on the horizon of his society and ours was the same one envisioned 2500 years ago by the prophet Isaiah, binding our praying on our knees with our acting on our feet: “If you remove bondage from among you, the accusing finger, the slanderous speech, if you share your food with the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, bring the homeless poor into your house and cover the naked, then your light shall rise in the darkness, even break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly, and the light of God will be your security.” (Is. 58:7-11, paraph.).