From 2021 to 2025, I served as Associate Pastor and Music Director at Anniston First United Methodist Church. My office was on the same campus where Interfaith Ministries operates, and I watched the work up close for four years. Shared volunteers, shared resources, shared parking lot. You can't spend that much time next door to an organization like this without understanding what it actually does, and more importantly, what would happen to this county without it.
How It Started
In 1975, representatives from Protestant churches, Catholic parishes, and Temple Beth El, Anniston's Jewish congregation, sat down and had a conversation that should've happened sooner. The question was simple: why are we all trying to do the same thing separately?
Every church had a benevolence fund. Every fund was small. And people in crisis were bouncing from congregation to congregation, hoping someone had money left in the budget that month. The fix was obvious: pool the resources, centralize the process, and let one organization do what dozens of churches couldn't manage alone.
By 1978, they'd incorporated as a 501(c)(3). Nearly fifty years later, the model still works. The congregations keep giving, the staff keeps showing up, and the mission hasn't drifted.
Why are we all trying to do the same thing separately?
The Campus
Interfaith Ministries sits on the campus of First United Methodist Church, and the relationship between the two is more than a lease agreement. First UMC sold The Bridge to United Way last year, and it's now Martha's Hope, a homeless shelter and transitional housing center. The campus keeps adding layers of service, and volunteers move between church work and community work without drawing much distinction between the two.
I saw this for four years. You'd walk from a worship planning meeting into a conversation about a family in crisis, and you wouldn't notice the shift. Some mornings I'd come in and there'd be folks in the parking lot with coffee, just waiting for Interfaith's doors to open.
What They Actually Do
Most people in Anniston know Interfaith Ministries as the place you call when you're about to get evicted. That's not wrong, but it's incomplete. The organization runs six distinct programs, and each one fills a different gap.
Emergency Assistance is the core. Rent payments, utility bills, prescriptions, transportation costs. The kind of urgent needs where the difference between help arriving Tuesday or Friday is the difference between keeping your apartment and losing it. I've seen families come through that door needing $800 by the end of the week. That's not a situation where spiritual counsel helps. It's a situation where money helps.
That's not a situation where spiritual counsel helps. It's a situation where money helps.
The Free Dental Clinic runs on donated time. Area dentists provide emergency extractions to Calhoun County residents who can't afford dental care. Patients get screened at Interfaith Ministries and referred to the Adult Dental Clinic at RMC West. The clinic sees patients at 8 a.m. on Wednesdays. If you've ever had a toothache you couldn't afford to fix, you understand what that one morning a week means.
Meals on Wheels puts hot lunches in the hands of homebound neighbors across Anniston and Oxford every day. A steady rotation of volunteers makes the routes possible, people giving up their lunch hour so someone else can have one.
The Open Door serves homeless and displaced individuals with coffee, showers, blankets, sleeping bags, and toiletries. It's a place where someone who's fallen through every other program can get clean, get warm, and be treated like a person. That sounds like a low bar until you realize how many places don't clear it.
SenioRx helps seniors and people with disabilities work through pharmaceutical company assistance programs to get free prescriptions. It's paperwork, the unglamorous kind, but for someone choosing between their medication and their groceries, it changes everything.
The Christmas Clearing House coordinates gifts for children in low-income families. It runs on donations and the belief that no kid in Calhoun County should wake up on Christmas morning with nothing.
The Coalition
Here's what I find most remarkable about Interfaith Ministries, having watched it operate from next door: the coalition holds. Baptist and Catholic, Black and white, downtown and rural, Christian and Jewish. These congregations have real theological differences. They worship differently, believe differently on plenty of things. But they've decided that helping their neighbors matters more than those differences, and they've been proving it with their checkbooks and their volunteers for almost fifty years.
That's not nothing. Plenty of things still divide Baptist from Catholic in Calhoun County. This isn't one of them.
They've decided that helping their neighbors matters more than those differences, and they've been proving it for almost fifty years.
The Gaps
Government programs have eligibility requirements and processing times. Nonprofits have funding cycles. Churches have limited budgets. Interfaith Ministries lives in the space between all of it, the place where someone who doesn't quite qualify for one program and can't wait for another can still get help before things fall apart.
This is the work that doesn't make the news. There's no ribbon-cutting when a family avoids eviction. No press release when someone's power stays on. No headline when a homebound widow gets a hot meal instead of eating crackers alone. The impact is measured in what didn't happen, the crises that never became crises because someone showed up at the right time.
Still Here
Interfaith Ministries carries a four-star rating on Charity Navigator (95%), which puts it in rare company for an organization of its size. The money goes where it's supposed to go. The programs do what they say they do. And every Monday through Thursday, the doors open at 8 a.m. on Gurnee Avenue because the need doesn't take a day off.
I'm no longer at First UMC, but the work next door hasn't stopped. The churches keep giving, the volunteers keep showing up. It's not a solution to poverty in Calhoun County. Nobody there would claim it is.
Interfaith Ministries of Calhoun County is located at 1431 Gurnee Avenue, Suite A, Anniston, AL 36201. Office hours are Monday through Thursday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. For more information or to volunteer, call (256) 237-1472, visit interfaithcalhoun.org, or follow them on Facebook.
