Frances Stebbins
Columnist

In the mid-1950s, when I began working for the daily afternoon newspaper “The Roanoke World-News,” the Roanoke Ministers Conference was an active organization in the city. Meeting twice monthly on a Monday morning at the large downtown First Baptist Church, its members often took stands on moral issues as a guide to the community.

In those days, membership was confined to white, Protestant, male clergy who served congregations in the city. This would be broadened over the coming decades; over the next 25 years the conference would be both strengthened and weakened as it admitted religion professionals, not in those categories.

By 2010 attendance had dropped to the point where regular meetings were no longer scheduled. The reasons for this were complex, but one legacy from those early years remains.

It is known officially in a directory of members in 1990 as The Chaplain Committee. Its duties were to “have the responsibility of securing the services of a chaplain to serve the Roanoke City Juvenile Home, the Roanoke City Nursing Home, the Roanoke City Jail and the Salem-Roanoke County Jail.”

Today it exists as a separate non-profit entity from its clergy parent which birthed it more than 50 years ago.

The Rev. Bob Fiedler, a Presbyterian minister, retired from a long pastorate in Southwest Roanoke County, has been deeply involved with the institutional chaplaincy ministry for much of the 30 years he and his ordained wife, Dusty, have been in the area. The first chaplain employed by the ministerial group in 1967, the Rev. Dr. Burton Newman, is now retired in the area after a long academic career away from Roanoke.

My clipping files reveal some of the changes that have taken place since the young pastor Newman, a Presbyterian of Jewish background, took the institutional chaplaincy job for $8,000 a year. He was expected to offer spiritual help to residents of the city’s juvenile detention facility and the city’s nursing home, both at Coyner Springs near Blue Ridge as well as to inmates of the jails in downtown Roanoke and Salem.

He couldn’t afford to stay long and was quickly followed by Cecil Fike, a Church of the Brethren pastor, and by Sam Young, a colorful Scot converted from addiction who charmed his fellow clergy with his accent; Young was a Baptist.

A Lutheran pastor, Richard Harris, who had been a missionary in Ethiopia, took the job in 1982 and remained for 12 years concentrating on the jails. In 1985 he permitted me to be “a fly on the wall” as he directed Bible discussion around a table for five anonymous prisoners at the Salem-Roanoke County Jail. At that time several congregations, especially Salem Baptist, offered Bible classes regularly for the men and women behind bars.

The visit was a memorable experience which, of course, I wrote about for the daily afternoon paper. There is something about those doors closing behind one…

Harris outstayed his welcome. He resigned in the mid-1990s and not long afterward died in an automobile accident.

In May 1996 the Rev. Gene Edmunds, a female Presbyterian minister who had gone to seminary after rearing her own family and joined the staff of Raleigh Court Presbyterian Church as an assistant, took the jail chaplaincy job as an interim. Meanwhile, the work with the incarcerated had been studied for greater efficiency and economy.

Working with juveniles and the indigent elderly had been abandoned many years earlier. Fifty-years after the Roanoke clergy professional group hired Newman and his many successors; the ministry is now a well-accepted part of enough church budgets to cause Fiedler to say it’s on solid financial ground.

A major change occurred in 2001 when the Rev. Dan Netting came as pastor of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Salem. He told me in an interview soon after his arrival that he felt a special calling to carry on this ministry outside his established congregation.

For more than 15 years, Netting has regularly worked with inmates of the Salem-Roanoke County Jail, and when the regional facility was opened later near Elliston, he also took on that work. In an interview dating from a decade ago, Netting told me he has done mostly counseling of inmates leaving Bible studies to volunteers from some churches in the area.

The chaplaincy non-profit agency also serves the Roanoke City Jail where a veteran African-American pastor, Cedric Malone, finds time from his major work at Greater Mount Zion Baptist Church to maintain the chaplaincy there.

Along the way, Edmunds had to give up the load of working in both Salem and Roanoke institutions as she became in 2003 the grandmother of triplets living in North Carolina. A decade ago Melissa Hays-Smith, an ordained Episcopal deacon and professional counselor, assisted Netting. Others, such as the grandfatherly Fred Pope, an Episcopal clergyman, filled the ministers’ conference role in the 1970s. Pope told me he found it gratifying that some of the inmates he worked with saw him as the loving human father they had never had.

From its beginning, the work of the jail chaplain has been seen as a human supporter, not as a Christian evangelist. Netting has told me he has secured spiritual advisers for Muslim and occasionally Jewish prisoners.

Out of his ministry has grown a holiday program for the children of inmates as well as the sending of Christmas cards, stamped and donated by church members. Although some nationally known agencies such as Kairos are active in some communities, the Roanoke Institutional Chaplaincy begun by clergy is strictly local.