Grants That Get Results
Funds given by Presbyterians are turning hopeful visions intolife-changing realities for people across the nation.
By Mark Ray
Presbyterians Today
April 2012
The first suicide came just six months after the Rev. Ian Noyes arrived in Driggs, Idaho, to lead the fledgling Church in the Tetons. Nine more followed within a year, devastating the small Teton Valley community. While each death was unique, many stemmed in part from the so-called Great Recession, which hit the once-booming community especially hard.
None of victims was connected to the Church in the Tetons, but several families asked Noyes to handle their loved ones’ funerals. “I’ve done five funerals since I’ve been here, and four of them have been suicides,” he said. As a minister, you’re privileged to be invited into these really broken places in people’s lives. It was a tremendous opportunity to share the love of Jesus Christ.”
That opportunity was made possible in part by $100,000 in ongoing Mission Program Grant funding from the Presbyterian Church (USA) and $125,000 from the Kendall Presbytery. Before the congregation received this grant support, it had been getting by through the leadership of area pastors who would travel from up to three hours away to lead evening worship services. “It was our connectional church in action,” Noyes said.
Mission Program Grants, which fund new church development, and Self-Development of People grants, which support social-justice initiatives, also demonstrate connectionalism in action. In different ways, both grant programs are transforming communities one relationship at a time.
Uniting a Community
Many of the relationships Noyes has formed stemmed from the community’s spate of suicides. Early on, he brought together the local hospital administrator, school superintendent, sheriff, and mental health coalition chair to help craft a unified response to the issue. Out of their meeting grew the Teton Valley Suicide Prevention Task Force, which is developing prevention and “postvention” strategies.
Something else grew out of that meeting as well, a recognition among local residents that the new congregation could be a force for good in the community. “Getting involved in that way said a lot about what the church can do and does,” Noyes said. “It invited us into conversations with people we weren’t in conversation with before.”
Some of those people were from the Mormon Church, the area’s predominant faith tradition. Others were nonbelievers, unchurched people, or disaffected Christians – the kinds of people that nimble new churches can often reach better than established congregations.
“We forget what a huge threshold it is for people to come to a church. New church developments are not waiting for people to cross that threshold; they are the ones crossing the threshold and going out into the community and building relationships,” Noyes said. “In a church plant, unless you’re out in the community building relationships, you will cease to exist.”
Because grant money helps him be a full-time pastor, Noyes doesn’t have to worry about the distractions and time constraints his bi-vocational colleagues face. But he still has to worry about money. His congregation’s five-year sustainability plan requires it to increase internal giving by 20 percent a year.
According to Elder Tim McCallister, associate in the Office of Mission Program Grants, new-church grants used to be much larger, which gave some congregations a false sense of security. “The grants we’re giving now are much more modest, which creates a funding cliff from the beginning,” he said. “If you’re not really planning for what’s next, you’re going to know it very quickly.”
The Church of the Tetons is planning for what’s next – and is actually a year ahead of schedule on internal giving. More importantly, the relationships it has built are bearing fruit. In fact, among those who now attend the church are two of the people from Noyes’ first suicide-prevention meeting.
Taking It to the Streets
A continent away from the Teton Valley, the House of Manna serves one of Pittsburgh’s toughest neighborhoods. Like most church plants, its doesn’t own a building. During the summer, it doesn’t even have a roof over its head. When the weather allows, the congregation leaves its rented space in the Greater Pittsburgh Coliseum to feed the homeless and the hungry – and to worship – on a street corner better known for drug deals and gang squabbles. That’s intentional, according to the church’s pastor, the Rev. Eugene Blackwell. “We serve everyday people: the doctor, the drug dealer, the professional, the prostitute, the lawmaker, and the lawbreakers,” Blackwell said. “If they don’t know Christ, we want to introduce them to Christ. If they knew Christ once, we want to reintroduce them.”
Blackwell’s wife, Dina, the church’s mission ministry leader, said programs like the Friday night celebrations are about more than food. “Poor people have given up not on God – that’s important – but on the church. We want them to know that we serve a good God that comes to them,” she said.
To spread its message, the House of Manna – which is receiving $50,000 in MPG funding, $137,000 from the Pittsburgh Presbytery, and $55,000 from the Synod of the Trinity – takes church to the people. It holds Bible studies in the local library. It logs hundreds of weekly contacts with neighbors on the street, in community centers, and at local businesses. It works with organizations like the Community Empowerment Association, Operation Better Block, and the YMCA to provide teen programs, basketball camps, baseball leagues, mentoring, and jobs. And it maintains close ties with a dozen suburban churches, 10 of them PC(USA) congregations, that sponsor specific ministries, multiplying the reach of the church’s Mission Program Grant.
Members of those partner churches also provide meals at House of Manna every Friday night from September through May. But they usually find themselves receiving far more than they give, according to Elder Vera White, director of new church development for the Pittsburgh Presbytery. “There are a lot of people from the suburban congregations that have caught the vision and really become more alive in their faith,” she said.
One of those people described his House of Manna experience in a letter to the congregation. “I experience joy in little snapshots, five or 10 seconds at a time,” he wrote. “Those individual snapshots are beginning to form a compelling new ‘me’ for me, and each week it becomes more compelling. At the age of 68, I am on the most exciting journey of life. Thank you, all of you, for holding my hand as I grow.”
Bringing Power to the People
Like MPG grants, Self-Development of People Grants serve people where they live. As Shanna Rogers knows all too well, where people live is often the problem.
When she moved to Lewiston, Maine, four years ago, Rogers looked at 26 apartments before finding one that was decent enough for her children. Some had broken windows, others were filthy, a few still held the previous occupants’ furniture. “I got a good baseline of what passed for healthy and safe housing here in Lewiston,” she said. “It was concerning.”
Along the way, Rogers got connected with the Visible Community, a grassroots organization that focuses on empowering residents and improving living conditions in downtown Lewiston. She became resident coordinator for the group’s Neighborhood Housing League, which was launched by a $20,000 SDOP grant in 2010, and now serves as the program’s supervisor.
The Neighborhood Housing League is a tangible result of the People’s Downtown Master Plan, which the Visible Community developed with a $20,000 SDOP grant in 2006. Rogers said the group realized that improving code enforcement would address several issues, from the substandard housing she’d encountered to the problem of landlords not treating tenants with respect. After eight months of lobbying, the city agreed to fund a new code-enforcement officer (even though it had been forced to lay off 22 workers over a two-year period). “It was a huge win for us and the community,” Rogers said.
Rogers’s program also recruits block captains who in turn train fellow tenants on their rights and responsibilities and help mediate disputes with landlords. Many of these block captains come from Lewiston’s growing immigrant community, including Hussein Muktar, a Somali refugee who Rogers said exemplifies the empowerment the Visible Community seeks to foster. “He went from somebody who’d just gotten his citizenship and wasn’t sure what that meant or how to participate to gaining the skills and confidence to speak in front of our city council and to speak at a press conference,” she said. “He really became a voice for the problems of housing downtown and positive change in that area.”
That sort of personal transformation is just what Cynthia White, director of SDOP, said the program’s grants seek to create. “Sometimes people ask us about projects that have failed. For me, almost none of them fail. Just the act of people coming together to act on a particular issue is a step in the right direction,” she said.
Since SDOP grants are often the first funding a group receives, the church plays a key role in transforming communities. “I think it’s important for members of the Presbyterian Church to know that their One Great Hour of Sharing giving really does make a difference. It is making a difference across the United States and in different parts of the world. People are really appreciative that the church cares,” she said.
Grant Programs (sidebar)
Last year, the Presbyterian Church (USA) distributed $2,076,510 in Mission Program Grants to 129 new or rebuilding congregations across the country. Through its Self-Development of People program, the church gave $972,804 to support 38 community development programs. At first glance, the numbers seem huge. Do the math, however, and you discover that each MPG project received just over $16,000, while each SDOP project received a little under $26,000. While that’s hardly pocket change, it certainly doesn’t seem like enough money to transform a congregation, much less a community.
But church planters and community organizers are getting big returns out of these relatively small investments. Through careful planning, lean budgeting, and support from other groups, including synods and presbyteries, grant recipients are performing loaves-and-fishes miracles every day in communities from Belize to Boston and Argentina to Alabama.
Mission Program Grants provide supplemental, short-term, and start-up funding for new congregations and for presbyteries that seek to transform existing congregations. The grants are administered by the Mission Development Resource Committee. For more information, visit
Self-Development of People grants are designed to empower poor, oppressed, and disadvantaged people to change the structures that perpetuate poverty, oppression, and injustice. The grants are administered by the Presbyterian Committee on the Self-Development of People. For more information, visit
Both grant programs are supported by the One Great Hour of Sharing, along with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance.
Mark Ray, Writer||502-327-9229|mark-ray.com