Minister shares experience of working with the poor
Almost on a daily basis, Beth Lindsay Templeton learns from the down and out.
The petite woman is unfazed by their predicaments, though they include drug addiction, prostitution, homelessness, chronic unemployment and un-planned pregnancies.
For the woman with an easy smile, it’s all in a day’s work to help these people change their lives for the better. She says the rewards work both ways.
“I’ve never felt more enriched,” she said of her work through United Ministries, a nonprofit based in Greenville, S.C.
TEMPLETON is in Iola for two days to share her expertise — gleaned from 28 years of working with the poor.
She is an ordained Presbyterian minister who for 24 years served as executive director of United Ministries.
For the last four years she has had the luxury to “teach, preach and write” about the organization’s efforts to provide an “opportunity for change” for those seemingly stranded in poverty and its many limitations.
Monday evening Templeton shared a potluck dinner with a small group of parishioners from Wesley United and First Presbyterian churches.
This morning she was to address teachers and ad-ministrators from USD 257. At lunch she was to meet with personnel from Allen County Community College who deal with adult education.
At 7 o’clock tonight she will address the public at a free forum in the Bowlus Fine Arts Center.
Templeton is the first of this season’s Speaker Series provided by the Sleeper Family Trust.
THE SUCCESS of United Ministries’ outreach can be attributed to several factors, Templeton said.
First is its purpose to help people help themselves.
“We don’t want to be an environment of entitlement,” she said. “If I’m working harder on someone’s life than they are, then there’s a problem.”
The center has about 25 paid staff and many more volunteers who help clients in a variety of ways, including how to successfully obtain a General Education Diploma which can then help them qualify for more challenging and better paying jobs.
Last year the center had 340 adults get their GEDs, Templeton said. This year they are on track for about 400 to do so — a much higher rate than any other educational institution in the surrounding community of about 300,000 she said.
The center is big on educating about life. Volunteers teach clients how to manage their money, how to apply for jobs and the importance of personal hygiene.
“If we can teach a stinky person how to shower — then that too, is a success.”
Volunteers often have as much to learn as those they are trying to help, Templeton said. “Sometimes people can make a bad situation worse. We teach people how to connect their passion with wisdom.”
A common mistake is the assumption that everyone can be “fixed,” she said, and “if they just knew the Gospel,” their needs would be met.
People need to want to help themselves, she said. Giving a panhandler a handout could just pay for “the hit that kills them,” if they have a problem with addiction, she said.
She also admonished against taking over someone else’s responsibilities.
“Don’t do something that they can do themselves. That sends the message, ‘I don’t think you can handle this.’”
And, she said, assuming the homeless are not people of faith is way off the mark, noting a majority have strong faiths which help them manage in times of crisis.
United Ministries manages a day center for adults in Greenville where the homeless can come to shower, do laundry, access telephones and computers and many other services of the ministry.
For those who need financial assistance, the purse strings are tight.
Utilities are paid for only once every 24 months; food supplies are allocated once every six months.
Because of the many outreach services provided in the metropolitan area of Greenville, “No one has to go hungry here,” Templeton said, in justifying the ministry’s limited food allocations.
United Ministries also is not geared to work with children.
“We focus on what we do well,” she said of its adult-based services which work to “stabilize family life.”
TEMPLETON said she resisted ministerial work “since I was age 9,” despite feeling God’s tugging.
Instead, she pursued education and became a secondary math teacher. While her three children were young, she left the work force to tend to their needs and dabbled in volunteer work in a nature museum.
Her first step into ministry came when she worked as a chaplain’s assistant at a hosptial. That work “tested the call,” she said, and she entered seminary to prepare for what she thought would be for a small church pastorate.
That call never came. “I was the only female in my graduating class,” she said. “And the only one without a job.”
That’s when Templeton took a “one-week trial” position with the nonprofit United Ministries. In less than a year, she became its executive director.
Templeton’s visit to Iola will surely be an eye-opener to another type of poverty — that of rural areas.
Templeton’s community of Greenville is a far cry from those of Southeast Kansas. Greenville has 57,000-plus residents and is experiencing an almost 20 percent rate of growth. Greenville County has almost 500,000 residents, similar to Wichita’s Sedgwick County.
Greenville is experiencing a 7.4 percent unemployment rate according to the April findings of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Weekly wages there average $700-$799.
Unemployment in Allen County is 7.1 percent. Its average weekly wages are $511. The national average is $840 per week.
