[I came across this piece, quite by accident, on THE ROUNDTABLE - a "Religion and Social Welfare" site maintained by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, State University of New York - MT]
The Roundtable:
Your background seems a little unusual for a minister. Can you tell us about it?
Rev. Rider:
I grew up in Oklahoma and after graduation from college there, I went to work for Phillips Petroleum, an energy company. And I moved with them to Houston in ‘82, and eventually moved from company to company and ended up at a company called Union Texas Petroleum in the mid-‘80s and was with them then for the rest of my career in the oil business, which lasted about 20 years.
I wandered through a variety of departments. Most people think that you're either an engineer or a geologist or a geophysicist. But oil companies are big companies, so there's people who do all kinds of things. I worked in the land department with oil and gas leases, I worked in the natural gas marketing department with gas contracts. And eventually I ended up working overseas managing an operation in Tunis, in the country of Tunisia, on the coast of North Africa, where we were drilling for oil and gas, both in the Mediterranean and down in the Sahara. And I was there for three years managing that operation. And it was there when the company went out of business that I had a chance to take a deep breath and see a call to ordained ministry in my life.
Before I left for Tunis was when I was involved with a couple of nonprofits in the Houston area, in the social services arena. The first of those was a reading program where we opened a variety of clinics to help children suffering from mild dyslexia. In the mid-‘80s, the state legislature in Texas mandated that all the schools test and provide services for children with dyslexia. It was an unfunded mandate. So it was a bad situation - it's not like that anymore in Texas, but it was at the time. So the local Masonic lodges, which I'm a member of, in Houston, we organized dyslexia centers. And I think there's 11 or 13 of them now around the Southeast Texas area, where we provide some free training for first and second graders who have been identified for being at risk for dyslexia. And that was a gratifying and a very meaningful operation. We had clinics in private schools, in public schools, not associated with schools, in a variety of locales throughout the state, both in big cities and in very small underserved communities. So that was a good thing to be involved in, and it showed me a lot about what private organizations could do in the social service arena, and also organizations that maybe hadn't done things like that in the past.
Then in the early ‘90s, the church I was attending - St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Houston - began to provide what was called at the time AIDS respite care, where we would go into the homes of people suffering with AIDS and give the primary caregiver a break - where we would come in and clean or cook or whatever - or in many cases it was working with people with HIV/AIDS who had no one at all.
By the mid-‘90s, there were still no housing services for people suffering with AIDS - both on the income end of their situation and on the social stigma and rejection end of their situation. So three of us got together and it was like a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland movie: We said, “Let's open house!” as if we knew what we were doing. And who knew what it would all turn into. But we did find a big old abandoned house in Houston, in a kind of derelict neighborhood. And we had to pry the plywood off the windows to crawl in to see if it was okay. And we kept going. We found the owner, signed a rent lease-to-own contract with no money, and began to have bake sales and garage sales, thinking we could do it on that level. That would never have worked. But about that time was when the government came out with the Housing for People Living with AIDS Act. So we applied for an early grant in that program, and got the almost-a-million dollars we needed to buy and renovate the facility. So we opened within about two years.
The Roundtable:
How long have you been in Poughkeepsie?
Rev. Rider:
I arrived in June of ‘06, so six months now.
The Roundtable:
Share with us your impressions of the city, and its religious life and community service, compared to other places that you've been.
Rev. Rider:
I'm just beginning to get my feet on the ground with both of those, of course. But what I have found in Poughkeepsie, of course, coming from Houston, would be a much smaller town atmosphere, that personally I like. So that I have breakfast every week with one of the Jewish rabbis and the Presbyterian minister and the Congregational Church minister, and the Reformed Church minister, and the American Orthodox Church minister or priest.
The Roundtable:
And this isn't something that would necessarily happen in a city the size of Houston - the interfaith collaboration?
Read Blake's answer to this, and other questions, here
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