And it’s not unusual for Presbyterians in their ordinary lives to keep a certain distance from those who live nearby, but who because of economic or other circumstances lead very different lives. We may drive by them, but we don’t necessarily have them over for dinner.
In Charleston, S.C., a group of Presbyterian churches is working to change all of that. It started with a simple idea: to provide school uniforms and school supplies to children who can’t afford them. And what it’s grown into is a surge of Presbyterian volunteerism in low-income, low-performing schools and a growing desire among Presbyterians to worship together and work in mission in new configurations.
In these schools, the volunteers are also learning.
Cindy Smalls is principal of Mary Ford Elementary School, a school of about 420 students in Charleston that’s the definition of a low-income school — more than 99 percent of the students come from families living in poverty. Their average income is about $12,000 a year, Smalls said.
Recently, a man who volunteers as a mentor to boys at the school stopped by her office, and told her “he was just so shocked, he didn’t know what to do. Every child he had in that room had either witnessed a sibling being killed or had a father or male relative incarcerated,” Smalls said. “That’s what we’re faced with. Getting our kids to concentrate on school becomes very difficult for us. Sometimes they don’t have water or electricity. Or it might be food.”
Seeing the need, volunteers from Westminster Church, about a half-dozen miles away from Mary Ford, started a program called Backpack Buddies at the school. On Fridays, the volunteers leave backpacks filled with nonperishable food that children can take home with them when they leave. The students return the empty backpacks the next week to be refilled.
That’s because the church volunteers had discovered that on Mondays, “kids were falling asleep or they were horribly cranky or they were weeping,” said Tammy Gregory Brown, Westminster’s pastor. “They were exhausted from hunger.”
Some had not eaten since their last free, hot meal at school on Friday.
The volunteers are coming to understand this – how children go hungry, just a quick drive from a nearby Presbyterian church – because they have become involved with a non-profit ministry of Charleston-Atlantic Presbytery called The Hands of Christ.
The Hands of Christ program started in 2002 – the brainchild of Brown, who had worked with a similar program called Manos de Cristo, that provides dental care, food, clothing, and educational programs to low-income residents in Austin, Texas.
After moving to South Carolina, Brown wanted to find some way that Westminster, a mostly-white congregation started in the 1960s in what was then the suburbs, could partner in ministry with another congregation. So she approached Zion-Olivet Presbyterian Church, a predominantly African-American congregation in the heart of Charleston. Representatives of the two churches traveled together to Austin, visited the Manos de Cristo site, then headed back to South Carolina to create a program of their own.
In the summer of 2003, Hands of Christ began distributing school uniforms and school supplies, serving just over 1,000 children. And every year since then, it’s grown. In quick numbers, Hands of Christ this year provided clothing and school supplies to nearly 4,000 children, with the support and help of 18 Presbyterian congregations and from local businesses.
Each child gets a new pair of pants, a slightly-used pair of pants (volunteers seek donations and scour used-clothing stores for children’s khaki pants for months), two new polo shirts, two pairs of underwear, two pairs of socks and a shopping bag full of age-appropriate school supplies.
And a wonderful byproduct of the program, Brown says, is that it’s brought together congregations “from liberal to conservative, black, white, brown, some that are urban, some that are rural.”
The distribution sites rotate through a series of Presbyterian churches — with the volunteers rotating through as well, going from site to site to pack, organize, and hand out the supplies.
Often, medical professionals provide free vision and health screenings at the distribution sites. Each child is assigned a volunteer to help them pick out their clothing — “if they have seven children in the family, they’ll have seven shopping buddies,” Brown said. The volunteers make a point to greet each child and each family member by name.
“So often, especially when it comes to people in poverty, they are faceless, nameless folks,” Brown said. “We try to forget. They make us uncomfortable. In the house of the Lord, they should be called by name.”
They’re also offered children’s Bibles, in English or Spanish, and information about worship services and Sunday school at the church where the distribution is taking place. “We want them to know they’re welcome to come back,” Brown said.
Ethel Swinton, a grandmother of five, is an elder from Zion-Olivet and was one of the earliest volunteers in the program. She’s stuck with it ever since.
She has traveled more than 100 miles from home, to rural areas, to hand out clothing to children who need it. She has met public school teachers who often spend $200 or $300 or more of their own money to buy supplies for their classrooms. As she goes around town, she’ll sometimes meet children on the street who will say, “Mama! I know that lady! She gave me clothes.”
Every summer, Swinton takes the month of August off from her job at Wal-Mart — two weeks paid vacation, which is her entire vacation time for the year, and two weeks unpaid time. Swinton uses all of it to work for Hands of Christ.
“I feel that God has blessed me,” Swinton said. “Two weeks without pay doesn’t make a difference to me. … I get my blessing from God. When I see a child smile, I get my blessing. Pay doesn’t make no difference to me as long as that child is happy or that grandmother says ‘Thank you.’ That’s my blessing. That’s my opportunity for pay.”
Jim Frye, an elder from Westminster church, retired in 2002 after being president of a steel production company. He decided to volunteer one day a week at an elementary school in need — it happened to be Mary Ford.
“I’ve been told by the mayor that it’s the poorest area in the state of South Carolina,” Frye said. “Drugs, alcohol, mostly single-parent families, very low educational backgrounds … I’ve seen kids come to school in clothes that don’t fit, clothes that are in tatters.”
In his corporate career, “I traveled around the world in some very difficult places,” Frye said. ‘I thought I’d seen some pretty tough things. But nothing prepared me for the problems these schools are having with these kids. … People don’t know the stories about these schools. They don’t understand how many problems these kids are facing.”
Principal Smalls added, “The parents aren’t as educated — they are young parents, I have parents in their mid-20s with over five kids. … It’s a high-crime area with a lot of drugs and violence. Our kids witness this all the time.”
At Mary Ford, the Presbyterian volunteers “just do so much, I can’t even name all of it,” Smalls said. They tutor and mentor children, help the teachers in the classrooms, “adopt-a-teacher” and buy classroom supplies. Some days the Westminster volunteers provide breakfast or lunch for the teachers. During “Teacher Appreciation Week,” they host a special dinner for the teachers.
At Christmas and Thanksgiving, they prepare boxes of food for families in need and deliver the food to their homes. When a family lost everything in a fire, the volunteers collected furniture and clothing and new school uniforms for the children.
“They’re really dedicated and passionate people. We just very greatly appreciate their support,” Smalls said.
As Hands of Christ has grown, the volunteers are coming from all over Charleston-Atlantic Presbytery. Rebecca Sigmon is an elder at Sunrise Church, located on Sullivan’s Island, a barrier island just outside Charleston.
Sunrise provides both financial support for Hands of Christ and dozens of volunteers, people who inventory the clothing, set up tables, load box after box onto a trailer (before that it was a platoon of borrowed pickup trucks) and, when it’s all over, load up what’s left back onto the trailer, to take to the next church distribution site.
Through working side-by-side, these Presbyterians have built friendships and discovered connections with Presbyterians from other congregations — in some cases, black and white congregations that are only a few miles apart from one another. The experience, Sigmon said, has left her and others hungry for closer relationships.
“We really feel like we’ve become friends.” Often, at worksites, the volunteers will pray together and, at the end of a long day, share a meal. “But on Sunday mornings, we go back to our own churches and worship on our own,” Sigmon said. “It’s been wonderful. We enjoy being together. We would like to worship more together,” do more joint work in mission.
Hands of Christ has also brought more Presbyterian volunteers into schools all over the Charleston area — including Sigmon, who has volunteered for the last six years at an inner-city school. “Their entire student body gets free and reduced-price lunch,” she said. One teacher, new to the school, recruited friends and neighbors from her old school to donate mattresses, after discovering that some children had nowhere to sleep.
Jim Deavor, an elder at Westminster Church and a college chemistry professor, sees the Hands of Christ program as breaking down walls between Presbyterians and their communities, between Presbyterians from different congregations.
After each distribution day, the volunteers eat a meal together. “It may be a ham-and-cheese sandwich, and ‘Have some baked beans,’” he said. “They’re what I like to call ‘kingdom meals,’ sharing stories from the day. Once you get to know folks, you’re sharing stories from your lives. They’re your friends. … It doesn’t matter whether you’re conservative or liberal in terms of your political views. We’re all here equally. We’re all here for one purpose.”
