Beware when you put a Presbyterian and Episcopalian together on trash detail for a week. They might have too much fun.
“We’ve been bathed in liquid garbage!” exclaims Daisy Wagner, a feisty woman in overall shorts who rode shotgun in the Habitat for Humanity trash-carrying pickup.
“I’m surprised you can’t smell us,” Katherine Tooker said, beaming.
Wagner, the Presbyterian, and Tooker, the Episcopalian, didn’t know each other before Monday, when they began working on the site.
Hauling trash forges a bond that’s hard to break.
They are just a few of hundreds of church volunteers who supported Habitat in the Jimmy Carter Work Project and western Anniston revitalization project.
“The churches are the foundation for Habitat,” said Dana van Ekris, executive director of Habitat’s Calhoun County affiliate.
As a Christian organization, Habitat relies on local churches to reflect its spiritual mission, she said. That can mean great sacrifice.
For example, First Christian Church of Anniston has a small cluster of about 35 people who attend on Sundays. They scraped together $12,000 to co-sponsor a home.
“We are doing it because it is what the church is supposed to do,” said the Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn.
Churches make up about 25 percent of the sponsoring organizations in the work project. Some of them ended up doubling their usual efforts.
Habitat offered a deal that many cash-limited churches couldn’t refuse: sponsor one home for $40,000 and sponsor a second for $20,000. The deal was made possible by a financial arrangement with the Alabama Housing Finance Authority in Montgomery, which purchased the mortgages on five of the homes.
Habitat will collect the homeowners’ mortgage payments and repay the authority. The amount paid by the homeowner never changes, officials said.
Tooker humorously calls it the “Habitat special.”
In reality, it was a strategic move that made it possible to get homes built in both 2002 and 2003, Habitat officers said.
Plenty of churches were eager to sponsor homes in the Jimmy Carter Work Project. That made it harder to find sponsors for homes that needed to be built in 2002, van Ekris said.
The $60,000 offer was one that “we couldn’t refuse,” said Martha Vandervoort, a member and volunteer from First United Methodist Church of Anniston.
“Some people doubted whether they could do it,” she said. “Our church was about to start a building fund. But we were able to time it before the church’s own projects were beginning so the church wasn’t just hit.”
“It’s tough for a church; we are all struggling for ministry and mission funds to do the benevolent work,” said the Rev. David Rice, minister at First Presbyterian Church of Anniston.
It’s worth it, he said.
“A lot of religion stays in the head and mouth. Habitat is one of the ways in which people of faith can embody their faith, giving it some arms and legs,” Rice said.
