Chapter 23
Drug Busting : United
Methodists
When the Rev. DarEll T. Weist sat down with a committee of fourteen other church leaders in 1986, no United Methodist group had ever tried to pull together a strategy for one of its districts. But three years later, after more than a dozen provocative — and sometimes soul-searching — sessions, goals for "The Los Angeles District in the Year 2000" finally emerged.
"The United Methodist Church has always been a middle-class church," said Weist, who wrote the report. "So if we're going to succeed, the challenge is to develop a ministry that meets the needs of the people living in poverty in South Central and East Los Angeles, as well as the emerging yuppies . . . who are moving into Hollywood and West Los Angeles."
Weist's committee also had to reckon with the fact that forty-eight of the sixty congregations in the district were aging: twenty-four had major building code violations. "We discovered we could no longer buy new property because of property costs, and because of building costs, it was no longer possible to build new churches from scratch," Weist explained.
So compromise goals were set: (1) Refurbish as many of the buildings as the district could afford. (2) Earmark the others for
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recycling to a different ministry. (3) Or sell them to provide an endowment for other ministries.1
Setting these kinds of goals was not easy; it was painful to realize that not all of the sixty congregations would make it into the new millennium.
"This will be very difficult," Weist's report noted, "since closing churches looks like failure rather than a natural part of the life cycle of being born and dying. Church grief work for the affected congregations will have to be done. A clear strategy will help us do the grief work with integrity and also conserve our resources."2
The case of the Los Angeles Methodists illustrates the importance of goals and strategy at the local and district level. They're pivotal also on the national front.
Drug Deaths on the Doorstep
The nine-million-member United Methodist Church has been a goal-setting pace-maker in the church war on drugs. The impetus for their drug program, which has become a model for religious groups around the country, began one night in 1989 when members of A.P. Shaw United Methodist Church in southeast Washington, D.C., were gathered for a prayer meeting. A drug turf war erupted outside, and the pastor went to investigate. On the church doorstep he found two teenagers shot dead.
That incident, recounts Pastor Bernard Keels, served as the "clarion call" for his congregation to enlist in the war against drugs. Soon the denomination appointed Felton E. May, a burly, energetic, black United Methodist bishop, to a year's special drug-busting assignment. "The plan was to work together much as we did on civil rights during the sixties," May told me. "This is basically a spiritual warfare."3 The idea, May continued, was "to build solidarity in terms of life and death with folks right where they are."
May took up his battle station during 1990 in the nation's capital, where he developed a coordinated response. Shaw and thirteen other United Methodist congregations participated in a demonstration project. Five of them set up huge army-surplus tents they called
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"saving stations." Inside the tents were special outreach campaigns; children's activities; drug-education seminars; food, shelter, family programs, and counseling. The saving stations were advertised by large red-and-white signs in front of each church and staffed largely by volunteers. By summer's end, they had ministered to a thousand persons.
The saving stations produced "tremendous evangelistic benefits as well as helping the community," Pastor Keels testified. Meanwhile, Shaw Church developed "10 Steps to Deliverance," a scripturally based substance abuse program. The Methodist Board of Global Ministries later adopted it on a nationwide scale.4
"Scores of sermons, workshops, seminars, 'think tank' meetings, and symposiums also marked the drug war effort as May crisscrossed the nation, meeting with church and government leaders," reported United Methodist communications officer Robert Lear. In one gathering, 1,500 persons were urged by the Rev. Cecil Williams of San Francisco's Glide Memorial United Methodist Church to take the crusade to the streets.5
Gliding in with "Unconditional Love"
Glide folks did exactly that when 800 members and supporters tromped into the Valencia Gardens housing project in the drug-infested Tenderloin district, announcing that "recovery time" had arrived for addicts and their families.
Rather than simply forcing drug dealers to move a few blocks away, effervescent Williams told the pushers and users, "You stay here. The total community needs recovery. We're coming in with unconditional love. We're your family." Williams's remedial approach — faith and resistance — has successfully liberated many from drugs, according to Charles Jackson, counselor for San Francisco's Substance Abuse Referral Unit. Jackson particularly praised Glide's program for "young crack mothers."6
Williams, a close friend of May, has hosted several national conferences, bringing thousands of church and community drug-abuse workers together. In 1987 he started an informal daily rap session at Glide called "Open Mike." Drug addicts come forward to share their stories and segue into recovery groups.
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The message that help is available to overcome drug addictions and that housing projects are not the turf for dealers has also been proclaimed loud and clear at other United Methodist churches across the land.7 And the concept of saving stations has spread to New York, Detroit, and other cities. Even to St. Luke's in Shady Gap, Pennsylvania, a rural community of 500.8
The Methodist bishops renewed the program under May's leadership for 1991. Goals also include a push for "realistic national policy" on substance abuse that allocates resources for education, prevention, and treatment as well as for law enforcement.
As an outgrowth of the United Methodist leadership, a consultation called for by the National Council of Churches brought together sixty-four denominational leaders in the fall of 1991 to set goals for a drug-free society. The participants discussed a "Declaration of Interdependence" among the churches. The plan calls for cooperation on drug issues, joint media projects that could compete with the commercial media's glamorization of alcohol and drug use, and an ecumenical substance-abuse think tank.9
Attacking crises as massive as substance abuse does indeed require cooperative effort — at the denominational level at the least. Best of all would be a combined spiritual, psychological, political, and local approach.
May thinks the government is unable to muster "an all-out assault" on drugs because of bureaucratic sluggishness and the "horrendous problem of coordination"; he believes churches can do a better job of "reaching people on the street."
The United Methodist Church alone has more churches than the U.S. Postal Service has post offices. May suggests that recovery groups could meet in church facilities, retreat centers, and closed army camps and hospitals.10
But, once again, chances of financing such a grand plan seem slim; the United Methodists had difficulty funding and staffing the fourteen-church summer project in southeast Washington.
May remains optimistic, however. "I'm convinced," he says, "that if the church were not involved, this country would be in chaos."11
