Allan Appel Photo
Rev. Frederick “Jerry” Streets is about to assume a new pulpit from which to preach in favor of changes New Haven hasn’t seen since the Civil Right era.
After a week of special prayer services, concerts and other events, he is to be installed this Sunday as the new pastor of Dixwell Congregational Church, the historic 194-year-old “Amistad” congregation.
Streets, a recent Fulbright scholar, has had many pulpits, religious and secular, in New Haven over the past four decades. He has served as a New Haven alderman, Yale University chaplain, police commissioner, and a clinical social worker with a PhD and an expertise in trauma.
Looking over those past 40 years, Streets said he would give New Haven at best a C+ for “turning compassion into public policy.”
The Independent sat down with Rev. Streets in the Yale Divinity School student cafeteria mid-week in the run-up to the installation. He was about to go in to teach “Ministry and the Disinherited” at the Divinity School, his alma mater (1975), and where he has been teaching for a quarter century.
Paul Bass Photo
Streets (pictured at a Henry Fernandez Democratic mayoral primary campaign event) proceeded to take out of his briefcase the basic text for the course, a well-thumbed copy of Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. “He was a Christian mystic who influenced Martin Luther King. When [MLK] died, it was in his briefcase,” Streets said.
Street explained the basic idea: that Thurman separated “the Jesus of faith from the Jesus of history,” and he asked, “what does religion have to say to people who have their backs up against the wall?”
Streets sees himself taking on that same challenge in making the church’s social-justice mission relevant. His mission, he said, is to “show compassion becoming social policy.” Streets said that while it might “sound hokey, that’s the reality we’re facing: to be more compassionate to each other and to the planet.”
He said religion is uniquely capable of being able “to articulate a moral vision.” Impediments to doing so are two-fold, he added: when faiths don’t respect themselves enough and get caught up in rivalries; or when they turn into a kind of menu for religious ideologies.
“New Haven is a wonderful city,” where there isn’t hostility among the churches and faiths, he said. On the other hand the city sees precious little “boundary-crossing either.” He said severe pockets of poverty and crime persist, just as when he arrived here as a student in 1972. Their persistence doesn’t speak all that well for how effective compassion has been in becoming policy. Overall, if New Haven were a student and he were grading it on the “compassion becoming policy” scale, the city would receive a C+, he said.
Melissa Bailey File Photo
Streets said New Haven needs to enlist major institutions in launching a municipal version of FDR’s massive job-creating Works Progress Administration (WPA). “The resources are here to be tapped,” he said. He paraphrased Gandhi, who talked about “spiritualizing politics.” “I’m convinced we can do it if we have the will and vision,” he said.
In his new role, he’d also like to see New Haven come up with new measures for social action. Streets rejected the notion that after African-Americans make it and move up in society that they don’t engage sufficiently in philanthropy. He said New Haven has a number of multimillion-dollar programs sustained by African-Americans, who prefer to remain anonymous. He also said that the measurers of philanthropy miss a lot of what African-Americans do, such as extensive volunteer work at food pantries and Thanksgiving turkey drives. “The measures are off. A new discussion is needed about that.”
He likened the vision needed to the spirit of the Civil Rights movement, “when a vision is articulated clearly and people are inspired and are willing to make sacrifices to achieve it.”
“Whoever the new mayor is, I hope it won’t be status quo,” he concluded.
Then Streets gathered his books and went in to teach his class, which always begins with a student-led meditation.
“Thurman used to do that,” he said.