Pat Schneider of the Capital Times continues to pursue this story. As I’ve mentioned before, with the imminent closure of the Central Library for renovations and continuing closure of the Capitol basement, there is great concern about where homeless people will go during the day this winter.
Schneider interviewed Steve Schooler, Executive Director of Porchlight, which runs the Drop-in Shelter housed at Grace and other downtown churches. In initial meetings with other service providers, churches, and the downtown business community, stop-gap measures were identified, but as Schneider and Schooler point out, there are large gaps in potential coverage, especially on the weekends. Schneider’s most recent article is here. For a depressing perspective on attitudes toward homeless people, read the comments thread.
I’ve previously discussed this issue here and here.
At about 1:15 this morning, Madison’s Common Council approved by a vote of 15-4 the redevelopment proposal for the St. Francis House property. It has been a long process, with a lot of passion and energy on both sides.
Later today, the really hard work will begin of rebuilding relationships with those who opposed the project and working with them to ensure that in the process of construction and after the buildings are completed, the concerns of our neighbors are heard, and problems addressed.
This was a completely new experience for me. I had never witnessed democracy in action on quite this level. I had never participated so directly in hearings and debates, nor watched, for a total of over 14 hours, city committees and the city council at work. I don’t know how they do it. Before coming to our items on the agenda, they had to deal with issues related to employees and firefighters’ benefits. Councillors had to put up with dozens of emails from us, countless conversations. They told of spending a day exploring every nook and cranny of Luther Memorial, or checking to see what the moped situation was like outside of Grand Central. They were thoughtful, open, and are dedicated both to the concerns of their constituents and to the city as a whole. With the budget crisis facing them, they were able to laugh with each other, and with us, as well. There was incredible tension in the room at times, and there were also moments of levity. I hope not to have to go through something like this again in the near future, or ever, for that matter, but it was exciting and educational.
As I wrote early this morning, our proposal was approved by the Plan Commission. Now it’s on to the Common Council.
Here are the comments I made during last night’s public hearing:
Good Evening. I am Jonathan Grieser, the rector—priest, at Grace Episcopal Church on Capitol Square. I am a member of the board of St. Francis House, and have shared in the deliberations over the future of that ministry. The proposal that comes before you is the product of three years of prayerful discernment and consultation with our neighbors. We have adapted the proposal to address Luther Memorial Church’s concerns. I believe this project deserves Plan Commission approval. It accomplishes some long-term goals of the city—in-fill development, moving student housing closer to campus. Moreover, by returning this property to the tax rolls, it will add to the city coffers in this time of fiscal challenges.
I do not want to downplay LMC’s concerns about noise, congestion, and vandalism. Their concerns are common to urban churches across the country, including my own. We struggle with parking restrictions for everything from Ride the Drive to the Ironman Triathlon, with noise from protestors, parades, and Capitol Square events like Art Fair on the Square or Taste of Madison, which in addition to noise and parking, offers our worshippers smells from countless food carts. It is a rare Sunday that doesn’t bring some event or group to the Capitol. As the site for the men’s Drop-In shelter operated by Porchlight, our efforts to put our faith into action bring their own set of challenges.
Urban ministry can be a challenge, but I’m sure my Lutheran colleagues would no sooner abandon their location than we would abandon ours on the corner of N. Carroll and W. Washington Ave. Whatever the challenges, the opportunities for ministry and mission are much greater. For us, those opportunities involve our neighborhood on Capitol Square; for Luther Memorial, it is the opportunity of sharing God’s word in the heart of a great university. The passionate involvement of so many LMC members in this process is proof of the vitality of that congregation and evidence of the bright future that lies ahead for it, no matter what happens tonight.
None of the challenges I’ve mentioned, nor the issues raised by LMC, constitute a threat to ministry. They are opportunities that require careful attention, cooperation, and adaptation. The board of St. Francis House seriously considered the possibility of abandoning our location, but we rejected that option, convinced that our location offered exciting opportunities for campus ministry that could not be met in any other way. Our decision to stay and our commitment to this development proposal is also a commitment to the neighborhood, a commitment to make it a vibrant and livable community for all of its residents and all those who work and worship in it.
We don’t know what the future holds. We do know that the status quo cannot be maintained. We know that we must adapt to meet the changing needs of students, and the changing nature of our larger community. This development is our attempt to do just that, to create sustainable, exciting, adaptable ministry into the future. We look forward to working closely with our Lutheran neighbors to ensure the vitality of our ministries and our neighborhood. I urge you to support this proposal.
The Episcopal Lead asks the question, following up on an article about Sacramento churches that includes some info about Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. The Very Rev’d Brian Baker’s response is very much in keeping with my own. I tell parishioners that anyone asking for assistance on Sunday should be brought to me. We have a list available of meals programs, and I used to say, before the Salvation Army quit serving breakfast, that on Sundays you could eat for free in downtown Madison pretty much all day long.
I don’t want to be crass or insensitive to people’s needs, but I do think it’s important that people be allowed to worship and take part in Sunday programs free of harassment. We have homeless people who come to services and to coffee hour, and occasionally, they will hit parishioners up for money. It’s hard to say no, especially when the gospel that day has something to do with selling all and giving to the poor. But panhandling can be a nuisance, especially in Madison. One parishioner who works downtown carries new pairs of socks in his coat pockets in winter, and when asked for money, offers socks instead.
The Plan Commission meeting began at 6:00 pm; they got to our agenda item around 9:00, but we needed to be there by 6:00 if we wanted to register to speak. At 11:30 or so, it was over. The Plan Commission approved the redesign of the project by a 4-3 vote. Now we have another meeting. Tomorrow night, it’s the Common Council.
And I thought faculty meetings or diocesan convention were interminable; this evening’s meeting made both of those experiences seem action-packed and entertaining.
Previous entries on St. Francis House are here and here.
There have been more articles about the proposed cuts to human services in the Dane County budget. Hearings have been taking place this week, and Pat Schneider of the Cap Times has been asking hard questions about the proposed cuts in funding to the Salvation Army’s Warming House (the warming house provides mattresses for homeless families in the SA’s headquarters when their shelter overflows). Also on the cutting floor is the county’s support for Community Action Coalition, which serves Dane County food pantries. Lynn Green, director of the Human Services department, rationalizes the cuts in this way:
“This community cares. It does what it can to fill in the gaps,” Green told me in an interview Friday. Church groups and others already run food and clothing programs, she says. “I believe this is something this community can rally around and pick up.”
The article is here, and an earlier report on the budget hearings is here. I have previously posted about this crisis. I don’t know if the numbers of people visiting our food pantry have increased in the past month or so, but I have the sense from helping out at First Mondays at Grace, as well as my daily rounds on the square, that the demand on services is increasing.
I’m really not sure how much more we can do. The economy is difficult for everyone, and many of our parishioners are state workers who have seen their take-home pay and benefits cut, leaving them with less to give.
This week, I’ve been thinking about one particular aspect of urban ministry that is frustrating and challenging, but also offers interesting opportunities. Among the issues raised in the discussion over the St. Francis house development (previous blog posts here and here) are increased noise, traffic, congestion, parking difficulties and vandalism. None of these is unique to the block on which the proposed development will be built. Urban churches deal with them every day and few are as affected by them as Grace Church. Three of the last four Sundays have seen parking restrictions and re-routed traffic on the streets around the church. We have had noise (and smells) from the Taste of Madison on September 4, and on September 11, in addition to the nightmare of the Ironman Triathlon, there were 9-11 services at the Capitol during our 8:00 service.
Still, the opportunities outweigh the challenges. In spite of the fact that people had incredible difficulty arriving for our 5:00 interfaith service on 9-11, there were around 150 people in attendance. All of that foot traffic around the square for Taste of Madison or the Triathlon is free publicity for our church and an opportunity to tell our story (at no monetary expense) to passers-by. Our courtyard garden is an important part of our mission, ministry, and outreach. I received a letter this week from a neighbor who praised its beauty and the hard work of our volunteer gardeners.
I was intrigued by an essay by Richard Krawiec that explores the community created in urban settings. He argues that our random or regular encounters with people in the city create a certain kind of community:
In the city, community is created when the clerk who knows your face lets you take the sandwich, trusting you’ll be back tomorrow to pay. When the guy at the newspaper kiosk remembers your interest in the Red Sox and sums up last night’s game for you as he hands you the Boston Globe. When the owner of the small café invites you in after he has closed and personally cooks you something to eat.
It is a set of interactions, human behaviours that have meaning and expectations between its members. Not just action, but actions based on shared expectations, values, beliefs and meanings between individuals. Interdependent.
He contrasts that sort of community and those random encounters with suburbia. It is something I’ve noticed as well. We know our neighbors better in the year we’ve lived in our Madison home than we got to know in 5 years in a Greenville County subdivision. The complete essay is here: The Bearable Closeness of Being: Why Cities Create Community
There is a challenge that faces us, however. It is that many of our neighbors are students, who grew up in suburbia and may not realize that they are living in a community that includes people other than other students, and that living in such a community brings with it shared responsibility and some shared values. Each class needs to be educated about that, both by the university and by the larger community.
To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of interfaith worship. From my experience at Harvard Divinity School in the 1980s, it always seemed to reduce itself to the lowest common denominator or be an opportunity for progressive Christians to feel good about themselves for their inclusivity.
Still, when I began thinking about doing something interfaith for 9-11 this year, I thought it was important for religious people in Madison to make such a statement. Our city is well-advanced in its de-christianization, and by extension, its secularization. To offer an interfaith religious witness on this 10th anniversary was one way to remind people that knee-jerk anti-religious responses to terrorists claiming Islam as their warrant, and Christians using crusade language in support of a military response, were not the only religious options.
We live in a polarized society in which the differences among us, political, cultural, religious, are often stressed. But there is also a great deal that unites us–as human beings, as American citizens, and, yes, as people of faith. My goal was to offer a service that was an authentic witness to the diverse faiths that were represented, but that also expressed the faith we do share. Whatever any else might say to the contrary, Muslims, Christians, and Jews do worship the same God. We experience that God in very different ways, through different revelations and in different historical and cultural contexts. Perhaps those differences are due to human frailty; perhaps they a result of God’s infinite mystery.
We also share values–a desire for peace, for a shared common life, and for the possibility of living together in the midst of our diversity. To come together in that way is no small thing, given the histories that divide us–the wars we have fought, the violence, discrimination, and the Holocaust. In many parts of the world such violence between faiths is still a reality–witness the attack on the Israeli embassy in Egypt last week, and the Muslim-Christian violence in Nigeria.
We bore witness yesterday to the possibility of a different future–one in which violence is supplanted by peace and mutual understanding. But in a small way, we bore witness to another possibility–that the divisions in our culture and country that express themselves in language of great violence, may give way to a realization that in spite of our differences, there lies in our hearts, whatever our political views, a deeply-shared love of country, freedom, and democracy.
Our service made no headlines (in fact it took extraordinary effort for the local newspaper even to publish it in their calendar of events for 9-11) but there was a report on Wisconsin Public Radio. That can be found here. I suppose we were not flashy enough to be newsworthy.
Here’s video of an interfaith service held in Newark, NJ last night:
It was a beautiful early fall day today, although temps were a bit warmer than they had been earlier in the week ( a high of 82, perhaps). Today was also the Ironman Triathlon. Like almost every other Sunday throughout the summer and fall, driving and parking downtown were adventures. I knew the triathlon began at 7:00, but knowing that it began away from our corner of Capitol Square, I imagined that the early service would be relatively free from noise. I was wrong. There was some sort of commemoration of 9-11 taking place at the Capitol. As I walked up to the church, I heard Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. There were speeches and bagpipes. Our service was accompanied by patriotic music; our recital of the creed drowned out by the flyover of a fighter jet. I preached on our memories of 9-11 and on forgiveness. That was the gospel, after all. My words seemed drowned out, at least symbolically, by all that was taking place at the Capitol.
Later, we had an Interfaith service. Jews, Muslims, and Christians came together at Grace to reflect on the past ten years, to mourn the dead, and pray for peace. The chant of Allahu Akhbar reverbated from the walls and ceiling of Grace.
I was grateful to all those who participated and all those, 150 or so, who attended. Coming to the service was a challenge because of the race; several people told me it took them an hour to get across town. Organizing it took a great deal of time and energy, but those of us who attended, and those of us participated thought it was well worth the effort. We prayed and remembered and could hear the loudspeaker shouting out race finishers from the other side of Capitol Square. And we made some connections, across denominations, and across religious traditions, connections that might deepen interfaith cooperation and understanding in this very secular city.
That juxtaposition was itself meaningful. It reminded us that life goes on; that, perhaps, we have been taking all of this 9-11 stuff too seriously (but on the other hand, who takes anything more seriously than a tri-athlete?).
And then we came home. I had a couple of beers and grilled some hamburgers.
And tomorrow? Tomorrow promises a full slate of meetings, and emails, and conversations, and getting ready for next Sunday. Life goes on.
Preaching Grace on the Square 