FAST: Faith and Action for Strength Together

As the terms “justice” and “equity” vault to the forefront of our national conversation, it may seem surprising to learn that they have remained the steady focus of an organization in existence in Pinellas County since 2004. A coalition of 41 faith congregations—Episcopal, Catholic, Jewish, African Methodist Episcopal, Unitarian and more—FAST has been diligently working to make God’s kingdom a reality in our time, for all our neighbors.

Scripture tells the story of Nehemiah, a man who agitated for systemic change centuries before the term came into being. Powerful in his own right, he nevertheless perceived that, acting on his own, he would fail to halt the economic exploitation of his neighbors in Jerusalem. So Nehemiah organized his community, confronting the authorities with a “great assembly” whose number vividly demonstrated the need for immediate remedy. This is the core organizing principle of FAST: to bring about justice by leveraging people power.

Our faith communities are good at following God’s call to “love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God” (Micah 6: 8). At St. Augustine’s, we worship faithfully according to our Episcopal tradition, and our mercy ministries are many and varied. But in that same passage, God also calls us to “do justice.”

FAST provides us with an effective means to answer that call. As a covenanted congregation, St. Augustine’s invests 1% of our annual budget in the FAST ministry. Individual parishioners commit to become Justice Ministry Network Members who promise, among other things, to attend FAST’s annual Nehemiah Action, bringing with them a minimum of three individuals to amplify our people power.

The Nehemiah Action is the forum at which we meet face to face with elected and appointed officials, presenting them with vetted, exhaustively-researched solutions to intractable community problems and leveraging our people power to urge their implementation.

The Nehemiah Action gets results. In 2020, Pinellas County and the City of St. Petersburg pledged a combined total of $97.5 million to affordable housing, putting their respective monetary commitments in binding form. This means that a public school teacher gains an opportunity to live in his school’s neighborhood; that a hospital health care worker no longer pays half her modest income in rent; that the family of four with two working parents can finally move beyond living one paycheck from homelessness.

The end result is not just a Band-aid. FAST has succeeded in creating a fundamental change in community planning, altering the economic equation to one in which that schoolteacher’s quality of life is as valued as the real estate developer’s profit margin.

Housing is only one of many areas in which FAST has played a role in creating a more just, more equitable Pinellas County. Join us at St. Augustine’s as we walk our beliefs out of the sanctuary and into the community, serving the Lord and all our neighbors.