My name is Bette Kauffman. I’m a Deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana. I came to northeastern Louisiana almost 14 years ago to teach at what is now the University of Louisiana at Monroe.
I figured I’d suffer some climate shock coming to the Deep South, but the oppressive heat of the Louisiana summer wasn’t half as challenging to me as the oppressive racial, economic and religious divisions I found in the community. It seemed to me that northeast Louisiana was a place even history had left behind.
Then one day the pastor of my church invited me to a house meeting to talk about what needed changing in our community. And shortly thereafter, I walked in to my first Interfaith meeting.
I was blown away. Black folks, white folks, Christian folks, Jewish folks, Baptist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Catholic, Church of God in Christ… and more.
Northern & Central Louisiana Interfaith came into being when an Industrial Areas Foundation organizer by the name of Perry Perkins finally quite driving through Monroe on his way to who knows where, and began to have a series of meetings with local pastors: Rev. James Johnson of New Light Missionary Baptist Church, Rev. Dale Farley of Messiah Lutheran Church, Superintendent Charles Stephenson of Bethel Church of God in Christ, Rabbi David Kline of Temple B'nai Israel.
These men of faith—and I believe it was mostly men in the beginning, but not any more! These men of faith decided to write a new history of Monroe and Ouachita Parish. And they gathered together more pastors and many people from their congregations, and those people brought friends and neighbors…
Turns out a lot of people thought it was high time to get involved in writing a different kind of history of their community. And the notion that ordinary people can pool their smarts and their energy and their money and build power.. and get things done in their communities… spread to Shreveport… and to Alexandria… and now to the Delta!
Not only that, but we have sister IAF organizations in other parts of the state: Jeremiah in New Orleans and Together Baton Rouge. And if we put our minds to it, if we pool our resources, if we organize our people and our money, we can build enough power to write a new history of the state of Louisiana!
Old Testament Scholar Walter Brueggemann says, “Blessed are the history-makers.”* But he’s not talking about the official history-makers—the kings, governors, presidents and so forth who populate the official history you and I learned in school.
Yahweh is the decisive history-maker, Brueggemann says, but not in some mysterious, supernatural way. Rather, God.. makes history.. through the voices and actions of people of faith everywhere. Ordinary people of faith everywhere.
People like Rosa Parks, who refused to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus and changed our lives forever.
People like Rabbi Kline, who said to the Monroe City Council, “You must close the drainage ditch that runs through the playground of Madison James Foster School because the safety of our children depends on it.” And everybody in the room knew that not one of Rabbi Kline’s children or grandchildren had ever set foot in that school. And that ditch got closed!
Ordinary people like all of us who helped create the political will and the funding to start NOVA, an employer-driven workforce intermediary that recruits under-employed people and helps them get the skills they need to move into jobs that actually exist, and that pay a living wage and have benefits and a career path.
Ordinary people.. like all of you gathered here this evening to celebrate a vision—our shared vision—and not only to celebrate, but to build the power we need to get the job done in our communities and our state.
AMEN.
*This is the title of a chapter in his book Hope Within History.
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