The idea was conceived on the Lower East Side of New York, a poverty-ridden part of Manhattan, where I served as pastor of a Lutheran church. We gave emergency help to people who knew what it meant to run out of food, but we came to realize that we needed to do much more to enable people to escape the grip of hunger and poverty. My father used to say, “It’s better to build a fence at the top of a cliff than to have an ambulance at the bottom,” and we were driving an ambulance.
Out of this emerged the idea of challenging Christians to seek government policies that would be more effective in reducing hunger at home and abroad. In my new book, The Rising of Bread for the World: An Outcry of Citizens Against Hunger, I describe the exceptional part of one great Presbyterian in that story.
Bread for the World’s initial board of directors included respected leaders from various church bodies, who helped to give the organization immediate credibility. But the person we most wanted was Eugene Carson Blake, a towering figure within mainline Protestant churches, whose influence stretched far beyond them. Former Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church in the USA and civil rights activist, he had been featured on the cover of Time magazine and had recently retired as the chief executive of the World Council of Churches. But getting him was not easy.
I wrote Blake a letter inviting him to join our founding board. He replied to my letter with a series of questions, which I answered in detail. To my dismay he turned me down, saying he was not convinced that Bread was sufficiently ecumenical. I wrote a third letter, again at length. This time he called to say he would be willing to meet me for lunch to discuss the matter. We did so, and Blake agreed not only to serve on the board but to become its chair.
At the time, fall of 1973, Bread for the World was not much more than an idea on paper, though a trial run in New York City had garnered a few hundred members and a few thousand dollars in the bank. Clearly Blake and our other board members were risk-takers.
In May 1974, with a worldwide hunger crisis in the news, we decided to launch Bread nationally using the limited funds we had. The invitation to join hit a responsive chord within the churches, and Bread soon established itself as the nation’s main (and at the time only) citizens lobby on hunger.
Blake gave much more than his name and prestige to the effort. He made contacts with church leaders. He accepted speaking engagements and on a few occasions we traveled together for these. Even before our national launch, we went to Washington, D.C., where he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support of the World Bank’s facility that lends money at virtually no interest to the poorest countries — testimony that proved crucial in several respects. This reinforced my belief that Bread for the World could have an impact far out of proportion to its numbers.
Blake also gave me advice and encouragement. He never said so, but must have realized how much I needed to learn, having never organized anything on so large a scale. I am profoundly grateful for his guidance, as well as that of the board as a whole. We made an unlikely pair: Blake the ecumenical giant, and I a parish pastor in the Missouri Synod, a decidedly un-ecumenical branch of the Lutheran Church.
Blake told me that he would not have considered serving Bread had it not been explicitly Christian. He wanted to use his energy to work with and through the churches, he said. Because the World Council of Churches was viewed negatively by conservative evangelicals, he told me I would have to take the lead in approaching them, for which my Missouri Synod affiliation was an asset.
With more detail than this article allows, my book puts in print for the first time a description of Blake’s remarkable role in the development of Bread for the World. He was not the only Presbyterian to seize the initiative against hunger. James Cogswell, who headed a visionary hunger program for the Presbyterian Church, U.S., also gave shape to Bread for the World as a board member. And six months after Bread’s launch George Chauncey led a significant new partner entity, the Inter-religious Task Force on U.S. Food Policy. These and others at various levels of leadership have, over the years, contributed disproportionately to Bread for the World’s growth and effectiveness. Without them Bread would not be the strong citizens’ voice against hunger that it has become. All of them have my gratitude, but none more than Eugene Carson Blake.
Arthur Simon is the founder and president emeritus of Bread for the World. His book, The Rising of Bread for the World, was released in July by Paulist Press.
