Methodists join clothing initiative> New England conference gets Bangor influence

As Bangor goes, so go the Methodists. At least, that was true at the recent annual meeting of the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Conference delegates to the session held recently in Wenham, Mass., followed the lead of the Bangor City Council in supporting the Clean Clothes initiative. Participants in the campaign hope to influence clothing retailers to buy only from manufacturers who pay a fair wage and provide safe working conditions to employees.

The Rev. Joan DeSanctis, pastor of North Brewer-Eddington United Methodist Church, had submitted the measure to the conference on behalf of the Greater Bangor-Brewer Area Cluster of United Methodist Churches. The resolution acknowledged Bangor as the first city in the country to support the initiative.

It described the Methodist conference as “in the process of discerning God’s will regarding the question of economic justice,” and asked church clusters to encourage local retailers to follow the measure.

Methodist churches in the Greater Bangor area already had signed on to the initiative. Other religious groups lending their support were Unitarian Universalist churches, Temple Beth El, Pax Christi Maine and Penobscot Area Ministries.

Endorsing the Bangor Clean Clothes Campaign were several organizations and schools, including Toddy Pond in Belfast, businesses such as the Grasshopper Shop and Harley the Plumber, and unions of electricians, postal workers and firefighters.

Before the City Council passed the measure on June 9, campaign member Debby Samuelian presented petitions with 7,317 signatures of people who live or shop in Bangor.

“As other cities follow suit,” she told the council, “Bangor’s action will spark momentum to raise the standard of living for garment workers worldwide, and ultimately help protect jobs and wages here in Maine.”

That’s what DeSanctis was hoping when she offered the resolution to the 900-plus Methodists at the first conference led by their new spiritual leader, Bishop Susan Hassinger of Pennsylvania.

DeSanctis didn’t go to Wenham with the idea of presenting the initiative, she said, and didn’t write the three-paragraph document until she got down there.

But the idea surfaced quickly with attendance at one of the conference’s small-group discussions on “Economic Justice: A Measure of Christian Living.”

Clergy and laypeople got into the topic by pondering questions such as “How direct a link is there between one’s faith and one’s use of money?”

Economic justice is important to DeSanctis, who has taken mission trips to Third World countries such as Zimbabwe.

“I have worked side by side with people who are getting 50 cents for their labors,” she recalled. “It’s wrong, just like child labor laws in this country were wrong.”

DeSanctis and other members of the local Methodist cluster had already learned about the Clean Clothes campaign, she said. The Rev. Ron Walden of Grace Methodist Church, known for starting the Shalom Zone neighborhood project, had invited Bjorn Skorpen Claeson to speak to the group, leading to the cluster’s decision to support the campaign.

Once the local delegates had arrived in Wenham, the Rev. Randall Chretien produced a newspaper article explaining the City Council’s action. The resolution was written, presented at the end of the business session, and passed easily.

Samuelian, herself a Methodist, was thrilled when she found out about the resolution.

“It’s really exciting,” she said. Samuelian joined the campaign earlier this year, and since then, “I’ve seen and experienced so much. It’s overwhelming but so satisfying.”

It just shows what one person or a few people can start. “The stone was thrown in,” Samuelian said, and from there the effort to raise awareness about sweatshop conditions — especially affecting women and children — has rippled.

“It just makes the future so much more hopeful and possible,” she said.