This is a chapter in a Memoir, “ Give Light…” of the six decades the author has spent writing about faith communities in daily, weekly and monthly news publications covering the western third of Virginia.
In earlier chapters, I have recalled how people of faith communities, led by their clergy, have broadened the outreach of congregations to folk who need specific help. This was done a half-century ago when my late husband and I came to Roanoke to write for the daily afternoon newspaper by a strong organization of ordained white, Protestant men. This pastors’ group, known as the Roanoke Ministers Conference, attempted in the 1950s and 1960s to guide the community into what they regarded as Christian attitudes toward racial integration, undeclared war and the need to bring everyone into commitment to Jesus’ teachings. As inclusion of more groups – African-Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, women and non-Christians – were welcomed to the conference, a division occurred with the more conservative pastors going a separate way. As the clergy group weakened, new organizations such as Roanoke Area Ministries (RAM), Mental Health Services and many others with humanitarian goals, such as total Action Against Poverty (TAP), were supported by churches and their laity, even with tax funding involved.
Finally, as the end of the 20th Century neared, lay-led helping groups mushroomed in localized neighborhoods around the valley’s four government entities. Such a group has existed in the City of Salem with its Glenvar area in western Roanoke County since the early 1990s. It actually started with a free food pantry around 1976 when the Lutheran and Episcopal parishes pooled resources to stock a space in the College Lutheran building. Later, the pantry was housed in a small structure owned by the Episcopal church. A free clothing, closet open Monday through Friday for four hours and staffed entirely by volunteers from about a dozen Salem congregations, was begun some 30 years ago in First United Methodist basement under the promotion of two women of that parish, Dr. Esther Brown and Joan Dorsey. For three years, I spent several hours each month unpacking, sorting and hanging donated garments.
When the church Scout troop needed the space, the ministry closed, was tried in a less satisfactory site and finally – along with the Salem Community Food Pantry – reopened in a warehouse offered free by Novozymes Biologicals. In time, the heavily used pantry required the entire donated space. The separate closet – now named in Dorsey’s honor before her death in 2016 – has occupied room in another warehouse. Rental funding – a major challenge for the supporting Salem Area Ecumenical Ministries (SAEM) – has now temporarily been secured. The trend to clusters of neighborhood faith groups going together to support such programs as providing nourishing extra food for low-income school pupils now is popular in the Williamson Road, Southeast, Northwest and Old Southwest-Raleigh Court areas. Salem too does this in summer. Vinton congregations work with The Rescue Mission of Roanoke. Clergy still support these efforts – as they did when carrying most of the load 60 years ago – but abundant lay retirees, joining in a common cause, put faith into action.