March 23, 2010. The Florida Times-Union.
On the surface it resembles a political process: At least 1,000 people from around Jacksonville gathered to press local officials to enact policies to boost early-learning programs and reduce youth crime.
But Monday night’s assembly of the Interfaith Coalition for Action, Reconciliation and Empowerment – or ICARE – is an effort to use faith to attack the social and economic problems facing the city, participants said.
And it doesn’t matter if that faith is Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian or even Muslim.
“Good Muslim values are good Christian values and Jewish values,” Imam Enrique Rasheed, spiritual leader of the Jacksonville Masjid of Al-Islam, said during the meeting held at Bethel Baptist Institutional Church downtown.
Rasheed’s was one of about 30 congregations whose members spent months arriving at the issues they wanted addressed in this year’s annual assembly: expanding early childhood education and implementing restorative justice programs designed to give youthful offenders a second chance.
The Nehemiah Assembly urged education officials to commit to supporting such programs.
Issues addressed before press time included expanding the availability of voluntary re-kindergarten programs for economically disadvantaged children in Duval County. School Board member W.C. Gentry and officials connected to those programs expressed agreement with that goal.
ICARE participant Cynthia Graham said the organization strives to address the root causes of crime and poverty that lead people into prisons and homeless shelters later in their lives.
“We do what we can so people don’t have those needs in the future,” said Graham, a member of Lakewood Presbyterian Church.
Participation provides people of faith a way to live out the scriptural mandate to seek justice, said the Rev. Tan Moss, pastor of Greater Payne AME Church and co-president of ICARE.
“One particular pastor or one particular church doesn’t have the ability to demand City Hall deal with housing inequities,” Moss said. “But we can [effectively] come together in a coalition of churches … as a unified body.”
Moss said the annual meeting isn’t meant as a cure-all for the city’s ills but as a way to start the ball rolling toward improvement.
“It starts with a seed like this, and this seed can grow into multiple fruits.”
