I’ve been in Madison for over six months now, and one of the things I’ve learned is that agencies, organizations, even communities of faith don’t talk together. For example, there is apparently no structure for clergy to meet regularly and share information and support one another. Presumably, this is done on the denominational level. Certainly we Episcopalians meet regularly. But even though Grace is within three or four blocks of two Lutheran churches, a United Methodist church, and a Catholic church, I have met only one other member of the downtown clergy.

What that means is that it is difficult to find out what other churches are doing, especially in terms of social services. Are we duplicating one another’s efforts? Are there ways we might cooperate on larger projects? Such questions can’t be asked because there is no one to whom one might ask them.

Take homelessness for example. It turns out there are conversations going around all over the downtown area, that involve homeless men and women, clergy, social service providers, and advocates. At these conversations many of the same topics come up: conditions in the drop-in shelter, the availability of social services, etc. People want to mobilize to do something, but the first thing they think of is to develop a new program or organization. It might be better to broaden the conversations and above all, gather the data about programs and problems.

To that end, we at Grace have done something fairly simple–compile a list of meal programs in the downtown area. Sure, such lists exist, but when we began to compare the list with the programs that homeless men and women actually know about, the list suddenly became much longer. So here’s what we’ve come up with: Free Services.

What surprises me most is that more than 25 years ago, when I was doing Field Education at a downtown church in Boston, one of my jobs was to create a roster of services provided by downtown churches, and to develop a way for those churches to communicate what they were doing with one another. Perhaps such efforts took place in Madison’s past, but today, we churches are the proverbial “left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.”

To be honest, I have reached out to other clergy and most of those whom I have contacted have been welcoming and gracious in their response. So perhaps we have the opportunity of turning things around.