By Dr. Denise Strothers, Pastor Harold Dugger, Ismail Royer and Chelsea Langston Bombino
Edited by: Kailena Anderson, Mary Kathryn Daigle and Meg Biallas Henry
Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part article series which was adapted from a webinar presentation featuring members of CPJ’s Sacred Sector. The text has been edited for brevity and clarity.
[Chelsea Bombino]: Dr. Strothers, can you speak into this moment, describing the impact COVID-19 has on your faith based organizations’s ability to live out their missions in the public square?
[Dr. Denise Strothers]: Absolutely. I am with Healing Communities as the national director of operations, and we work with training churches to develop prison ministry by focusing specifically with those in their congregation. After graduating from Howard University School of Divinity and participating in the Sacred Sector Fellowship with CPJ, I am more firmly convinced that churches and their community members must do more than serve those in need. While many churches are excellent at serving those that are in need, they should recognize how their faith calls them to also engage in acts of citizenship, advocating for public policy changes, and cultural shifts that would end social evils. Working in communities, we train congregations to be stations of hope for families who have incarcerated loved ones. Churches who are interested in having ministry to prisoners, we train interested churches on how to start with the members in their own congregation. The goal is to rally around these families from start to finish: beginning with the moment their loved ones are incarcerated and upon their return home and until they have become thriving members in society. The focus of the ministry involves allowing the family to grieve the loss without guilt or shame. Many congregates will never tell anyone that their loved ones are incarcerated. Instead, many families, especially children deal with disenfranchised grief. Think about it like this: if someone were to be taken from us, we mourn. People sign up for meal trains, visits from family, friends, pastors, and there is a beautiful service to help us say goodbye. But when someone is incarcerated, their family can experience their loss like a death but there's no food, no one comes to visit. Families feel the loss just the same, while those of us on the outside stand silent, unsure of what to say.
These trainings are all about developing a process and system for how to care for their incarcerated loved ones. We work on facilitating family visits, mediating family relationships, facilitating a healthy return home and offering social, spiritual, and financial support along the way. We’re on the front line trying to get prisoners with non-violent records released so that they do not get exposed to COVID-19. In the DC jail alone, 38 employees were infected, 13 recovered. We know of 148 inmates who were infected, and 72 of those have recovered and 52 remain in isolation. Although the jails do what they can to ensure prisoners are released, it's very difficult. In many cities across our country, judges release non violent criminals to just go back into society, and we step in to help them get placed as well into homes. A lot of times when people come out, they don't have anywhere to go.
God is a God of justice. Matthew 25 encourages us to clothe those in need of clothing, look after those who are sick, visit those in prison. Proverbs 31:8-9 says “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, ensure justice for those that are being crushed. Yes, speak up for the poor and helpless and see that they get justice.” God wants justice for orphans, widows, the battered spouse and children recovering from the trauma of having a loved one in jail.. We cannot be silent anymore. We must walk outside of the four walls of our church and bring our Christian values to the public square, working with community organizations and people of other faiths. These are issues that threaten all of our communities and all of our families.
[Chelsea Bombino]: Thank you, Denise, for your powerful words. Ismail, could you build on Denise’s words and tell us about the work you do in providing civil social serves in Muslim communities. What role does your organization play here and how has COVID-19 impacted your operations?
[Ismail Royer ]: Yes, of course. I'm the director of Islam and religious freedom at the Religious Freedom Institute. We're a non-denominational organization and our mission is to support religious freedom for everyone, everywhere. Currently, we’re working on a project, to try to develop a program that would educate Islamic organizations, Islamic faith based organizations, and congregations on how to forward their mission of caring for others in the public square.The Quran says “Cooperate with one another in business or piety and righteousness.” The Prophet Muhammad said, “None of you will have faith until he loves for his neighbor what he loves for himself,“ which many of you will recognize that as being a common teaching with Christianity and Judaism. As the Prophet said, “Whoever would love to be shaded in the shade of God, let him help someone in hardship..” riven by these imperatives to help our fellow humans, Muslim organizations have established, a very wide and deep network of faith-based efforts to help the community. Many of these focus to some degree on the congregation itself, but Muslim congregations are very pleased to be able to serve the broader community. he mosque will open up, almost from the very beginning with social service departments. They'll help people in need with food banks, finding housing or furniture, getting to the doctor, or elderly and the sick visitation. These sort of ad hoc efforts don't receive the attention that they deserve or that would help them to really flourish. The Muslim community lacks an international organization w that serve local congregations. So many of these organizations suffer from a lack of knowing best practices in board governance, lobbing or interacting with local governments.. Many of these organizations and efforts are simply sort of learning by trial and error, playing it by ear. Of course, many organizations are immigrant-led, which exacerbate the issue of familiarity with the systems they're working with and the bureaucracy that slows them down. Also, many of these efforts are based in the African American community. Many of the strongest and oldest Muslim efforts, whether based in mosques or other locations, come from the African American Muslim community. They suffer from many of the same problems that black churches face: being overlooked for support because they are in underserved communities.
Our plan with the Center for Public Justice, and Sacred Sector specifically, is to create a series of leadership and training seminars for members of nationwide social service organizations to try to give them the training that they need and to connect them with funders. The training involves best practices for seeking public and private funding, as well as some tips on board governance, good governance and other important legal issues.
We also provide expertise from Islamic scholars for how to ethically navigate many of these issues. For example it's forbidden for Muslims to take interest or to pay interest. so With this latest [round of COVID-19 legislation that provides funding for small businesses and nonprofits], the Paycheck Protection Program has created a dilemma for some of our leaders. PPP is essentially an interest-bearing loan, while also being forgivable if the money was used in the proper way. This is a rather technical question as whether this actually amounts to interest, that sort of interest that is forbidden for Muslims to engage in, so there's a difficulty there. There are other issues that have come up because of the pandemic: most regretful is the reality of prejudice toward Muslims who are trying to help relief efforts. For example there is a mosque in Syracuse, New York. It was mostly closed but there was a food ministry that delivered raw food packets to the community, which was open but very strictly following CDC guidelines. Despite this careful attention, the fact that this mosque was “open”, spread around the internet on some very intolerant forums and social media accounts. People attempted to use the open ministry of the Mosque to paint a picture of injustice towards Christians: were attempting to use this fact of this mosque having been open in that very limited fashion to try to try to say, “Christian churches are being harassed for being open but mosques are all open.” This was not the case, but unfortunately, too many fell for the lie and still don’t know the truth.
Denise Strothers is a director Healing Communities, and a 2018 Sacred Sector Fellow with the Center for Public Justice.
Harold Dugger is the pastor of First Baptist Church Capitol Heights
Ismail Royer is a director with the Religious Freedom Institute.
Chelsea Langston Bombino is the director of Sacred Sector, an initiative of the Center for Public Justice.
WANT TO GET INVOLVED?
Know a seminarian or a faith-based organization? Connect them with Sacred Sector’s Fellowship and Community, designed to equip individuals and organizations to live out their faith-shaped callings. Email virginia.creasy@cpjustice.org for more information.
Sign up for the Sacred Spotlight monthly newsletter to stay updated on this series and learn more about Sacred Sector’s learning communities.
How is your faith-based organization living its mission? Share your story with us.