Denominational Leaders Address Drug Crisis

Late last month, the District of Columbia’s embattled mayor, Marion Barry, announced that drug-related violence in the nation’s capital was so “out of hand,” he might soon have to call in the National Guard. On the same day, in a church not far from the D.C. seats of power, mainline church leaders gathered to discuss their own battle strategies in the war on drugs.

The consultation, which drew about 60 denominational leaders from across the country, was called by the National Council of Churches’ (NCC) Prophetic Justice Unit as an “in-house church meeting” to discuss churches’ roles in fighting substance abuse. The purpose was to put forth concrete proposals for an ecumenical response to the drug crisis. According to Kenyon Burke, director of the unit, a report on the consultation will be given to the NCC’s general board this month, and after input from all NCC units, an official program will be developed.

Participants in the consultation agreed that substance abuse is at root a spiritual problem and that churches are thus uniquely equipped to deal with the crisis. “We have wounded people in our churches and our societies. We as Christians and our churches are also wounded [by the drug crisis],” said NCC president Leonid Kishkovsky in convening the meeting. “But being wounded, we can also be wounded healers.”

Several presenters outlined church projects already in place in various locales. In Houston, Texas, the “Families Under Urban Social Attack” ministry of Holman Street Baptist Church set up a satellite drug rehabilitation agency in the congregation’s ghetto neighborhood. The church has purchased eight crack houses and a crack “shooting gallery” apartment complex and turned them into drug treatment centers and a Sunday-school facility.

In Los Angeles, the First AME Church runs several ministries, including a comprehensive 18-month drug rehabilitation program. And in Portland, Oregon, an ecumenical group runs the Letty Owings Home for mothers recovering from drug addiction.

“If it weren’t for the churches, we as a nation would be in chaos,” said United Methodist Bishop Felton May, whose special one-year assignment to develop a denominatonal response to the drug crisis ends in January. (The UM Council of Bishops might extend the assignment for a second year.)

Along with the United Methodists, other church groups, including the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Congress of National Black Churches, have begun to work out comprehensive antidrug strategies. May said cooperative efforts have thus far been too few and too far between. “There are those who will die from drug-related violence before we can move through the structures of our denominations and the processes to determine to do something cooperatively,” he said. “I wonder who will be held responsible.”

Among the proposals for cooperative efforts that came out of the consultation were:

• A major march on Washington, D.C., by religious leaders to raise national consciousness about the problem.

• A nationwide teleconference on “the cocaine epidemic” broadcast on cable television. Some 100 cities would be targeted as special centers where large groups of people could come together and interact “town-meeting style” via telephone and satellite video links.

• The formation of a grassroots advocacy program to sway public policy on issues of drug treatment and education and also to address “root causes such as economic conditions at home and alliances with drug traffickers abroad.”

Consultation leaders agreed that maximum cooperation is essential and spoke of including other faith groups, such as Jewish organizations and the Nation of Islam. James Andrews, stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), suggested this might be an area where mainline churches and evangelicals could work cooperatively. “Individual churches are tired of waiting for official structures to act,” he said.

However, National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) executive director Billy Melvin told CHRISTIANITY TODAY that given the theological differences between the two groups, he doubts there will be any official cooperative efforts. “The fact that we have different theological commitments would probably dictate how we would approach the problem over and against how they would approach the problem,” he said.

Melvin said the NAE is not planning any national, umbrella response to the drug problem. “Our method of operation is to support our churches in ministries which we think are appropriately advanced by the local churches and denominations, and therefore any response to the drug problem in this country will come from the churches themselves, not the NAE,” he said. He noted that “no group is more active than the Assemblies of God through their Teen Challenge program.”

The conference appears to have been a timely one. Recent weekends in the nation’s capital have been among the bloodiest, with record numbers of drug-related homicides, all of them taking place within a few miles of the meeting site.

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