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Church Reaches Out

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By TOM JACKSON

tjackson@tampatrib.com

Published: December 10, 2008

HOLIDAY - Times are lively on the campus of the church at the edge of the world. Dan Campbell, a recovering businessman who shepherds Community United Methodist's modest flock, likes it this way. But the time is short and the task enormous.

For the second year in a row, galvanizing its status as an annual staple, Community United is expanding the noble footprint of Metropolitan Ministries, the Tampa Heights-

and faith-based charity devoted to combating homelessness.

"They do great work," says Campbell, robust at 57, "but our people can't get there."

They - homeless folk and others in southwest Pasco who are either teetering on the brink, or can see the brink from their kitchen tables - can make it to Community United, on U.S. 19 just south of Moog Road, close enough to Ground Zero of the county's nondomiciled population that the aroma from their campfires drifts even to the sanctuary's front doors.

Under the Rev. Campbell's tireless direction, the entire four-building complex and then some is gearing up, digging in, hunkering down and decking the halls. Veterans in red aprons and rookies in green are everywhere - as many as 400, triple the church's membership, have signed on to shoulder the work God lavishes on believers.

Out front, a tent marks the location for drive-through drop-offs - "Just like downtown!" Campbell chirps - of donations.

The fellowship center doubles as a one-stop yuletide shopping experience, with sturdy, if rough-hewn, shelves clad in cheerful Christmas wrap groaning under fixings for holiday feasts and toys to delight any youngster still in touch with his/her inner Santa.

A craft room where the ladies' auxiliary sews quilts 50-odd other weeks of the year to donate to cold-night shelters soon will surrender to artists recruited to help youngsters create unique gifts for the adults in their lives (providing valuable distraction time while those adults browse the fellowship mall).

Pride Takes A Fall

In the modest chapel, prayer requests ranging from whimsical to heart-rending are pinned on a board covered in black felt, and parishioners give each - a puppy, a plea for a job, secure housing, the return of a loved one, the divine healing of an abnormal brain - purposeful attention.

Around a couple of corners, in the reception area outside the church's suite of offices, patient volunteers coax anxious visitors through application forms that not only help identify who needs, or wants, what, but, in the data-hungry social services world, are gold mines of practical information, indicating what is as well as what's coming.

This sometimes creates difficulties. Not for Gloria Thompson, whose husband, Wayne, and their three children are only recently removed from Detroit's economic necrosis. Times are hard for a $250-a-week maid-service supervisor and an expert, but idled, house painter; as she jots family info onto the qualifying form, Thompson is untroubled by the fear shared by many, of winding up as a permanent file in Big Brother's mother computer.

The Coming Storm?

"The kids" - they're 16, 14 and 7 - "know. They ask for this or that, and we keep having to say, 'No.' This morning my son asks for a dollar to get something special at lunch. Somehow, I found it. It's bad when you can't do that."

With that day looming, Thompson choked back her pride and stuffed her post-modern paranoia in a closet, resolved to do what she had to do, certain that it's a one-off: "Things will get better," she says. "We'll be OK. We have to be. We have three kids."

Only moments before, however, an English-challenged mom with dark, darting eyes and a baby slumbering on her shoulder, had fled rather than complete the application. She hadn't arrived with photo identification - Metropolitan Ministries' hurdles are higher than some states' voting laws - and when attempts to translate for her via cell phone failed, she apologized, ducked her head and dashed out.

Campbell took a memo: Add to the list of urgent needs (food, toys, teen-appropriate gifts, cash) several on-site translators for Holiday's substantial Spanish-speaking population. He sighs. Too much of the business surrounding December's crush, honorable and necessary as it is, is just basting splitting seams.

For all the activity, Campbell sometimes can't escape the sensation that they are performing the dance of the proverbial deck chairs on the Titanic. Noting the unshrinking number of encampments in the nearby woods he says, "Mercy we're good at, justice not as much."

Once an accomplished salesman of medical supplies - ventilators were a specialty - these days Campbell frets over the widely advertised perception of a vanishing middle class, disparities in wealth distribution, the iconic "struggling" two-income household and families disappearing "into the abyss."

Deep as we are into the Greater Holiday Season, we shall belay systematic disputation of Campbell's alarm, noting only that economist Stephen Rose, quoted by conservative pundits and the Democratic Leadership Council alike, crunches U.S. census data to persuasively refute all the aforementioned conventional wisdom.

The Human Condition

That said, Campbell and Community United, along with the several area churches that support their mission, lay hands upon tangible humans day-in and night-out. Those individual hardships are not so easily dismissed as statistical anomalies.

The Coalition for the Homeless of Pasco County put the number of county's unhoused at 4,000 in February. Murmurings on the foreclosure front, where as many as 5,000 may be in the pipeline, suggest, Campbell says, "That number could double overnight."

Pasco's canary in the coalmine could present itself as early as Dec. 18, when distributions to qualified applicants begin. Having put a cap of 600 and 1,400, respectively, on families and children to whom they are willing to commit, by then Campbell and his aide-de-Christmas, small-group leader Nancy Doughtery, will have a good idea just how enormous their wait list is likely to be.

Which means, what, exactly, to the rest of us? Only that it is time, again, to invoke Charles Dickens' well-to-do businessmen who visited Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve seeking "to make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time."

After all, "We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices."

What shall we put you down for?

Keyword: Yuletide for more photos. Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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