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By Linda Bloom*
3:00 P.M. ET September 8, 2011 | NEW YORK (UMNS)
The Rev. James K. Law, pastor of Chinese United Methodist Church in
Chinatown, N.Y., surveys the new construction at ground zero. A UMNS
photo by John C. Goodwin.
View in photo gallery
The day after Sept. 11, 2001, the Rev. James K. Law was on “the
pile” with rescue workers at ground zero, fulfilling his side duties as a
chaplain for the New York City Department of Corrections, when an
alert signaled that the wreckage could further collapse.
Like everyone else, he ran down the hill of rubble, twisting his left ankle in the process.
Sitting in the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden nearly a
decade later — close to where a new tower is going up at the World Trade
Center site — Law remembered the momentary panic he felt.
“It sent a cold chill down my spine,” he said. “You can imagine being crushed.”
Like others, Law, the pastor of Chinese United Methodist Church in
Chinatown, struggled with stress and exhaustion for months after the
terrorist attacks. Eventually, he realized what he really needed was a
spiritual recovery.
While the events of Sept. 11 remain a painful memory, the tragedy
also had a positive impact on the ministry of United Methodist pastors
in New York and New Jersey.
‘Remarkable time of ministry’
The Rev. Bill Shillady learned to practice what he calls “radical
hospitality,” ushering in “a remarkable time of ministry” for himself,
personally, and for the congregation he was serving on the Upper East
Side of Manhattan.
The Rev. Bill Shillady and Matthew Lawrence Pierce (in white robe) led a
Sept. 11 remembrance service outside Park Avenue United Methodist
Church in New York. A UMNS file photo by John C. Goodwin.
View in photo gallery
As the horror of the terrorist attacks became apparent, Shillady
conducted an impromptu prayer service on a bus as he was attempting to
reach Park Avenue United Methodist Church. Once there, he and his
associate pastor, the Rev. Bryan Hooper, put on their robes and started
a vigil on the sidewalk outside the church doors.
At first, they comforted residents in the neighborhood. Then, after 1
p.m., people started arriving from downtown Manhattan. One man,
covered in ash, sat on the church steps for an hour, crying
inconsolably.
The next day, Shillady was able to arrange for crisis center staff
from nearby Mount Sinai Medical Center and local clergy to be available
at the church for trauma counseling. Park Avenue also became one of the
temporary listening posts set up by the United Methodist Committee on
Relief.
By the end of the week, the church’s healing role in the
neighborhood had been established. When police shut down East 86th
Street because of a bomb scare, Shillady asked an officer to allow
church members to come through for a prayer service. The officer
agreed, saying, “The church is a safe place. We’ll let them in.”
That became Shillady’s theme for the next few months, and it
gradually helped transform his relationship with a congregation where he
had not yet quite fit in after replacing a long-time pastor just two
years earlier.
He adopted the practice of standing on the street to greet people
before and after every worship service. He also dispensed dog treats.
The congregation began to grow, he said, “because people saw the church
as a safe place and a welcoming place.”
The Rev. Charles “Chick” Straut served as program administrator of the
New York Annual Conference’s 9/11 response team, which worked with other
faith groups to coordinate recovery efforts. Web-only photo courtesy of
The Rev. Charles Straut.
Although he left Park Avenue church in 2008 to become executive
director of the United Methodist City Society, Shillady said he has
carried the gifts he had received from his Sept. 11 experience with him –
the ability “to think creatively, to respond to people’s needs, to be
nonjudgmental, to be open to the spirit.”
Building an interfaith response
The Rev. Charles “Chick” Straut was expecting more leisure time
when he retired at 65 in July 2001. But on Sept. 12, he was asked by
Bishop Ernest Lyght to assemble a New York Annual (regional) Conference
team to work with UMCOR volunteers coming into the city.
He soon became program administrator of the conference’s 9/11
response, working with members of other faith groups to create an
organization to coordinate their long-term recovery efforts.
Today, he considers those three years of intense focus as “at least as important as anything else I’d ever done in ministry.”
One of the challenges, Straut recalled, was to get people to think
big. “It was hard for the churches, who were used to working
ecumenically on a shoestring,” he explained. “They didn’t understand
what the realities were in terms of what they could mobilize.”
With “real money,” New York Disaster Interfaith Services was born.
The United Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, United Church of
Christ and the Islamic Council of North America each contributed
$50,000 a year for five years, he said, and other groups donated smaller
amounts.
Perhaps the biggest project organized by NYDIS was the “unmet needs
roundtable.” At the height of its operation, denominational staff met
twice a week to hear proposals from social workers and approve grants
from a fund to which UMCOR itself contributed more than $1 million.
Straut called the roundtable “the most successful, best organized, most
effective thing we did during that period of time.”
The Rev. Christopher Miller served as director of the New Jersey Annual
(regional) Conference’s Sept. 11 recovery program. Now 53, Miller also
serves as a chaplain in the Air Force Reserves. A UMNS photo courtesy of
the U.S. Air Force.
The organization’s partnership of 20 faith communities has addressed
other disasters since that time. Straut and the Rev. Joseph Ewoodzie,
the New York Conference’s disaster coordinator, still sit on its board
of directors.
Using lessons learned
One of the skills the Rev. Christopher Miller learned as director of
the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference’s Sept. 11 recovery program
was how to cut costs.
When he was assigned to First United Methodist Church in Delran,
N.J., about 10 minutes north of Philadelphia, in 2005, he put that
skill to work. “I became very frugal,” he said. “My idea was to get
administrative costs down as low as possible.”
Once that task was accomplished, the church, which averages 110 people in worship, had a financial surplus the next year.
Miller, who is now 53 and also a chaplain in the Air Force reserves,
had witnessed firsthand, through his work with those affected by Sept.
11, how paying a family’s mortgage bill or showing someone how to cut
monthly expenses could help re-establish economic stability.
He started offering ideas about how to minister to others in the
community facing economic challenges. “People began to give more to the
church. That was a huge step in our increase in income.”
When the fiscal year ended in 2009, First United Methodist Church in
Delran had $98,000 in the bank. The congregation, which has a committee
to consider aid requests, spent $36,000 in community assistance in
2010 and $18,000 this year. “What we’re doing right now is just crisis
intervention,” he explained.
As it starts to help its own struggling families, the congregation
is beginning to feel an economic pinch again, but, Miller added, “we
haven’t had to say 'no' yet.”
Living through the spiritual
Law was recognized by the Department of Correction for his
“outstanding duty” at ground zero, where one of his own congregants,
Nancy Yuen Ngo, was among the 295 employees lost in the Marsh &
McLennan offices.
But his efforts to heal both church and community took a toll. “The
whole year after 9/11, I found myself jumping from crisis to crisis,
and I was emotionally exhausted and spiritually damaged,” he wrote in a
first anniversary sermon. “I moved from fatigue to burnout. The guilt
of not being fully able to meet the needs of those under my care was
heavy.”
Then he found the presence of God in silence.
Law set himself on the road to spiritual recovery, which has
included taking two trips to Taizё, the ecumenical community in France
that focuses on reconciliation; undergoing a 40-day “desert experience”
at Lebh Shomea House of Prayer near Sarita, Texas.; and reading the
texts of the “spiritual masters,” including Thomas Merton, one of his
favorites.
The 58-year-old pastor — who has a black belt in Tae Kwan Do and
learned Wing Chun Kung Fu as a teenager in Hong Kong from the same
master who taught actor Bruce Lee — also has found peace through the
practice of martial arts.
This fall, he will show others how to intertwine basic martial arts
skills with the practice of contemplative and centering prayer by
offering a class, “Finding God through Martial Arts,” on Wednesday
evenings at his church.
Law can’t guarantee those results, of course. But he believes the
martial arts offer “a spiritual path” to enlightenment, a path he
continues to follow.
*Bloom is a United Methodist News Service multimedia reporter based in New York. Follow her at http://twitter.com/umcscribe.
News media contact: Linda Bloom, New York, (646) 369-3759 or newsdesk@umcom.org.
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