SPE Program Spotlight
Detroit Program Builds Community across Boundaries
It’s only a small chip of quarter-inch plywood, two-inches by three inches, painted bright blue. But for Father Tom Helfrich, chaplain at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Mich., it is a totem of the entire world, a reminder of the bonds that link us all.
Prominently displayed on Helfrich’s desk, the plywood chip is a food token from a Catholic outreach center in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. People in the surrounding township earn the tokens for keeping their small houses and yards clean and redeem them at the outreach center for lunch, soup mix, and bread, enough to keep a small family fed for a few days.
The outreach center gave the token to Helfrich last summer, during a week-long immersion trip to South Africa with his Sustaining Pastoral Excellence pastor peer group, sponsored by Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit.
“I look at the token and it helps me remember that the world is a lot bigger than our back yard,” said Helfrich. “It reminds me that the people who are going through these struggles are our brothers and sisters.”
This month, on Nov. 5, Helfrich and the other 13 members of his peer group will gather for their last formal meeting, this time to de-brief and talk about their South African trip and their overall SPE experience. They are the first group to complete the three-year program, which requires participants to take part in an initial week-long retreat, another five two-day retreats each year, a day-long conference every spring, and a six- to ten-day immersion experience every summer, first locally in Detroit, then elsewhere in the U.S. and finally, overseas.
Pat Benson, Ph.D., the seminary’s SPE director, said the program is intended to build Christian community across many boundaries, visible and invisible. As befits a seminary with the first name “Ecumenical,” the program sought out an extraordinary variety of pastors from throughout greater Detroit and the surrounding region: men and women, Protestant and Catholic, black and white, inner city, suburban and rural. In the first SPE group, for example, eight denominations were represented among the 14 members.
“In the seminary, we bring together students with different theologies and perspectives and tell them they don’t have to agree, but they do have to listen and to consider each other’s ideas and be open to the insights of others,” said Benson, who co-facilitated the first peer group. “We used that same approach in the SPE project, and in the group I worked with, it became a reality.”
A respect for diversity, for difference, and for “the other” is essential for pastoral ministry anywhere in the U.S. today, but particularly so in the Detroit region, said Benson. One of the more racially divided cities in the U.S., the scene of uprisings in the 1960s, Detroit has a long history of racial discrimination, said Benson. As in many other large U.S. cities today, the divide between urban and suburban areas is wide.
“All these pastors face the issues of metro Detroit in various ways,” said Benson. “Some are in affluent suburbs with little awareness of the problems of the inner city and some are immersed in the inner city every day. Hopefully, the bonds these pastors make with one another will help them find ways to work together for the sake of the whole Detroit metro area.”
The Rev. Dr. Lottie Jones Hood, pastor of First Congregational Church of Detroit, a multi-racial congregation near downtown, said the SPE peer group was a life-changing experience.
“Right from that first week we spent together, it was like I had died and gone to heaven,” she said. “I realized that I had three whole years to spend with these other pastors, to grow and to learn what I need to make my church an even better church.”
The notion that pastors also need nurturing, which was introduced at that first meeting three years ago, was eye-opening for Hood.
“As pastors we nurture others all the time, but this was the first time I had been told that we needed nurturing too,” she said. “It was so glorious.”
Although Hood’s SPE group is now officially coming to a close, the members have already decided that they will continue to meet periodically. Under an arrangement with ETS, Hood and several other group members will also start work on D.Min. degrees at the school in January and will get one year of credit for their SPE experience. But probably the greatest benefit, said Hood, was the friendships she made.
“I now have a group of people who are there for me,” said Hood. “There will always be somebody I can call on for assistance or just to talk to.”
For many peer group members, the immersion experiences were a highlight of the program. Following the first year’s experience in Detroit, the group spent their second summer immersion in Seattle and the third in South Africa. While it isn’t absolutely essential for people to travel far away to gain new insights, it can definitely help, said Benson.
“A change of place and context gives you a fresh perspective,” Benson said. “People get so immersed in their own world that it helps to go somewhere else to hear a new voice and to see a new thing. Yet it relates to what you’re trying to do back home.”
Seattle, for example, is an ethnically and economically diverse city struggling with many of the same issues that all urban areas are facing. There, the Detroit SPE group visited various local ministries and programs including a drug and alcohol abuse program, an Asian women’s center, and a center for native Americans. One of the group’s favorite stops, though, was a visit to the Georgetown Gospel Chapel and its pastor, the Rev. Leroy Hedman. A small Full Gospel congregation, located in a poor neighborhood, the chapel has become a virtual oasis amidst urban blight, with a community garden and numerous environmental programs and outreach programs.
“The Georgetown Gospel Chapel made one of the biggest impressions on everyone,” said Benson. “They all came home from meeting Pastor Leroy, saying ‘He’s one person in one little church, like me, and he’s doing something to change his community. I can do something too.”
As powerful as the experiences in Detroit and Seattle were, this summer’s trip to South Africa was “the top of the heap,” said the Rev. Roxie Ann Davis, another group member and co-pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Mt. Clemens, Mich., a Detroit suburb.
Visiting the South African townships, witnessing obvious economic poverty right next to middle-class affluence, Davis said she and other group members saw anew the impact that our way of life in the U.S. has on people around the globe.
“The decisions we make day in and day out have an effect on people in South Africa and the rest of the world,” she said. “We Americans are so gluttonous for resources that throw our brothers and sisters in other countries into a poor state.”
The visit to South Africa also prompted much discussion among the group about race relations both in Detroit and in South Africa. Members realized that South Africa had made great progress since the fall of apartheid while race relations in the U.S. continue to lag behind, said Davis.
As the group visited South Africa, Helfrich said he couldn’t help but think back to their first meeting three years ago. Back then, the pastors were tentative and cautious, as happens with any meeting of strangers. But in South Africa, Helfrich said he felt tremendous trust, care, and friendship among the group.
Together, they had crossed many boundaries and differences. Before, for example, Helfrich said he had never known about the Church of God in Christ, a historically black denomination. But in the SPE group, he had become friends with a Church of God in Christ pastor.
“To spend three years and actually room for a few days with this wonderful Church of God in Christ pastor,” said Helfrich. “Oh man. There is a big world out there I don’t know much about. And I’m sure at that first meeting, some of the others were thinking, ‘Oh my gosh. There’s a Catholic priest. What’s he doing here?’ But now they say, ‘Look at him. He’s just like me.’”
