Episcopal Press and News
Urban Bishops Hold National Hearing in Washington
Episcopal News Service. March 2, 1978 [78052]
Washington, D.C. -- The Episcopal Urban Bishops Coalition shifted its focus somewhat in a recent hearing that sought information on the national problems that contribute to the crisis in the cities.
The Coalition -- formed at the 1976 General Convention to uphold the concerns of urban mission -- has been holding a series of hearings throughout the country to seek out problems and potential solutions that will provide the basis for a strategy of urban ministry. The focus of most of these hearings has been the more particular problems that cities and regions face.
In late February, the Coalition invited 16 testifiers to appear with them at St. John's Church, Lafayette Square, here, to present their views on the overall theology that should instruct such an effort and on problems that transcend regions. Testimony ranged from a scathing indictment of the United Way community appeal system through a proposal for model programs in ministry to gay urban groups to a discussion of the effectiveness of community action in combating neighborhood redlining by banks and insurance companies.
The concerns of Blacks, women, urban activists, Hispanics, Appalachian people were also heard by the panel which was chaired, first, by the Rt. Rev. Coleman McGehee, Bishop of Michigan and later by the Rt. Rev. John T. Walker, Bishop of Washington and president of the Coalition.
About half the groups presented potential models or proposals for specific programs while others concentrated on laying out the dimensions of problem areas.
The models included a community action program in New York called Bank on Brooklyn which succeeded in gaining a multi-million dollar pool of loan money from a local bank which had previously invested only 15 percent of its funds in the community. Mr. John Collins of the Center for Corporate Responsibility in Investments outlined this proposal with high praise for the "skillful, hardheaded negotiation" that the racially and economically mixed community used.
Collins also bemoaned the lack of coordinated national urban policy and the misconceptions that allow banks, insurers and realtors to "disinvest" the communities that they serve. He expressed strong confidence in the Church's ability to provide the leadership and support that can assist community groups in fighting these situations.
At the same time, he pointed out that Church investment policies were at odds with social perceptions and scored major Church investors, such as pension systems, for passively assisting redlining.
A Princeton University professor, Gibson Winter, told the panel that Urban mission had to become one of "shared advocacy and revelation" and warned that Churches only "aid the manipulative society if they enter the struggle as the 'Church Triumphant.'"
One speaker -- Roger Hickey of the Exploratory Project for Economic Alternatives -- pointed up the paradox that programs strongly targeted to aid the very poor often alienate the working poor whose support is needed. He agreed that this alienation often led to violence and catastrophic dislocation but said that the very pressures that produced these conditions could also lead to solutions. Hickey is part of the team that is working with Ohio Bishop John Burt and an ecumenical group which is trying to buy and run a steel mill as a community project in an area that is being abandoned by the steel industry without regard to the economic status of the workers.
The findings of this hearing will become part of a report that the Coalition hopes to prepare this month as the first step in presenting an overall, comprehensive focus on urban mission that will involve the Church at national, diocesan and parish levels and which will more than likely be presented to the General Convention in 1979 as formal proposals.
Panelists at this hearing were: Bishops McGehee and Walker and Bishop William Marmion of Southwestern Virginia; Bishop Milton L. Wood, executive for administration at the Episcopal Church Center; the Rev. Suzanne Hiatt of the Episcopal Divinity School; the Rev. Edward Rodman of the Diocese of Massachusetts, and Thomas Hinsberg, a Roman Catholic and urban worker in Detroit.