Equipping Appalachia’s Saints

The mountains of Appalachia have many faces. One face, shown mostly to vacationers, is picturesque mountain people sewing quilts and playing dulcimers by wood-burning stoves. A different face reveals how Appalachia’s hills and hollows have been left scarred and denuded by overdevelopment. And yet another face exposes how rural families have been hurt for generations by alcoholism, violence, and depression.

A true portrait of Appalachia, perhaps, blends together all these differing images, telling a story with more sadness than triumph, with more sorrow than joy.

Three-fourths of the poor in the United States are white people living in rural areas. The greatest concentration of those poor people is in Appalachia, which is home to 22 million people. Illiteracy stands at 35 percent in the 397 counties of the region, and 15 percent of the homes still have no telephones.

“What we have here,” says Karen Main, deputy director of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Rural Health, “is extensive grain-alcohol abuse, family violence, homicide, accidents, substance abuse, and depression.”

The economy of Appalachia has collapsed. Coalmining jobs, light manufacturing, and federal assistance have largely dried up. Today, most of Appalachia’s people work at the marginal jobs that remain. The average annual income for a family of four in West Virginia is $10, 000.

“I’ve been in ministry for 30 years and have never seen more poor people,” says Mary Lee Daugherty, executive director of the Appalachian Ministries Educational Resource Center, based in Berea, Kentucky.

Daugherty knows hard times from the inside. Daugherty and her brother, Jim—both brown-eyed and red-headed—grew up in the home of a West Virginia miner and factory worker. Their mother died in their early teen years. Their father drowned his grief in alcohol.

Drawn close through adversity, the children found hope in their hometown church. Daugherty came to Christ through the influence of the Sunday school. Jimbo went forward in a tent meeting at age 15. Within two years, his life completely turned around; soon he was directing a local Youth for Christ group.

The twosome ministered together in small-scale revival services. He preached; she played the piano or sang, and the determined duo earned their way through college. Afterwards, she went on to seminary, and Jim moved into national ministry with Youth for Christ. Daugherty set her sights on missionary work, thinking there she might find more freedom to use her gifts.

Arriving in Brazil, she was struck by the pervasive poverty and quickly became involved with the women of struggling families. Their plight closely paralleled her Appalachian experience. Chuck, a son of American missionaries to Brazil, was one of Daugherty’s fellow teachers. They were married and gave birth to a daughter and son, and eventually returned to the States.

Back in Charleston, West Virginia, Daugherty cared for children during the daytime, yet found spare time to teach religion courses at a local college. She quickly discovered that many pastors coming into the region were unprepared for the culture shock that comes from ministry to the rural poor. Working with local church leaders, Daugherty set up an orientation program for new pastors. But she had to abandon the classes when her college dropped its commitment to religious studies. Then, 11 years ago, the Commission on Religion in Appalachia (CORA) asked Daugherty to start a training program for individuals planning to minister in Appalachia. In 1985, the Appalachian Ministries Educational Resource Center (AMERC) in Berea was born. AMERC is a trio of hands-on experiences designed to give pastors the skills they will need to work among the chronically poor:

• The January Travel Seminar, an intensive session taking students to family farms, strip-mine sites, and cooperative parish ministries.

• On-site rural internships, in which students work directly in parishes.

• Summer Term, a six-week program taught at Berea College, where students spend much of their time living in a community.

A major reason that AMERC succeeds is Daugherty herself. Out in public, she is persuasively direct, talking about poverty without playing up sentimentality. Daugherty’s unassuming intensity is relieved by a distinctive laugh. She will, says a staffer, “rare back and let out a belly laugh” at herself and the bizarre situations that shoe-string operations frequently find themselves in. That humor helps her staff to “run but not faint.”

AMERC’s mission is to strengthen church leadership in Appalachia by recruiting and training clergy and lay professionals for long-term service. Students may learn how to strengthen the churches by working with local people, how to teach in a low-literacy environment, cultivate a garden, or do canning in the church kitchen.

The old Pearson Farm, donated anonymously last October, has given AMERC a campus. The farmhouse has been remodeled and its garage has been converted into a library. Typical of Daugherty’s unstinting hospitality, this winter she housed volunteer workers in her own apartment and prepared meals.

In February, friends gathered to dedicate the library. The library fund is named in memory of Daugherty’s brother, who died of cancer last year.

Daugherty is equally gracious and comfortable with feminists and fundamentalists. As a result, AMERC is thoroughly ecumenical—including Protestants, Roman Catholics, and the Orthodox. J. Steven Rhodes, AMERC’s associate director for academic affairs, says he treasures the memory of a monk, an IBM executive, and a snake handler washing each other’s feet at the service that ended a recent summer term.

Daugherty believes the high level of cooperation has been achieved in Appalachia “because we’ve been poor longer, long enough to no longer look to big government or big business, long enough to be asking, instead, ‘How are we going to help ourselves?’ ”

Governed by CORA, Berea College, and 45 sponsoring theological institutions, AMERC is now the largest cooperative alignment of seminaries in America. AMERC has trained 439 seminary grads from 37 denominations.

Daugherty points out that since there are not enough big-steeple churches to go around, more than half of all seminary graduates will end up in small-town and rural pastorates. Her goal is to train them to cope so that she can successfully appeal to each to give 15 years in service among the rural poor.

By then, she figures, the new influx of resources into the mountains will be under way. Meanwhile, don’t underestimate this spunky angel for Appalachia.

By Harry Genet.

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