“See you next Tuesday?”
Upstairs at First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta on a recent Thursday afternoon, clients of the Mentoring Ministry program directed that question most frequently — and hopefully — to John Marriner.
Luckily for these mostly poor or homeless individuals, that’s one thing Marriner can easily answer.
He’s always there for people in need. And that’s why fellow parishioners nominated him to be an AJC Holiday Hero.
Officially, the 65-year-old retired city of East Point employee spends every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon volunteering at the program at his longtime church. He patiently cuts through red tape and navigates a web of physical and emotional problems suffered by many clients to help them obtain housing, medical care, Social Security disability or veterans benefits, and any other assistance to which they’re entitled.
Almost none of the issues is resolved quickly or simply. But if they keep showing up and trying, Marriner makes clear to as many as 50 clients in an afternoon, so will he.
“He really is a good friend to those who have no friends,” said Mary Joe Dellinger, First Presbyterian’s director of community ministry. Dellinger had known Marriner for years as a dedicated volunteer at the church’s Sunday morning prayer breakfast for the homeless. “Before he retired a few years ago, he said he couldn’t wait so he could come in here and work more. I said, ‘You’re retiring on a Friday and you can come in on Monday.’
“And he did.”
That’s typical of Marriner, who unofficially never gives up. By the time he shows up on a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon, he’s often already spent the morning accompanying clients to far-flung doctors appointments or time-consuming interviews for housing or disability assistance.
Other days and nights he might follow a plea for help wherever it leads. That was the case two years ago when someone he’d already helped told him about a man with multiple sclerosis who was sleeping outside the Atlanta Union Mission.
“He was out in the cold rain and he had no pants on because he’d soiled his clothes,” Marriner recalled about the man he helped get into a Grady Hospital rehabilitation center and then a group home in Austell. (Marriner had just visited his former client that morning, even bringing him batteries for his radio.) “He couldn’t go down to [the Social Security Administration] office, so I helped him do an over-the-phone interview and then get his disability benefits.”
A desire to serve drew a young John Marriner to government service. But frustration over the pace of that work pushed him to find causes outside his job where he could make an impact. “Sometimes you don’t feel a lot of satisfaction in local government employment. Too often you work on something day or night and they don’t bring it up or they put it on the back shelf.”
He first volunteered with AIDS patients and at a rape crisis center decades ago. He started working with the homeless after his then-church, All Saints’ Episcopal, opened a shelter for homeless men in the early 1980s.
“That’s when I felt a call,” said Marriner. He joined First Presbyterian when he married Ann Foster, a founder of the church’s women’s shelter.
On a recent Thursday afternoon, Marriner helped a young man who doesn’t read well and is prone to seizures fill out the necessary paperwork to receive disability assistance. Then he updated an older man with a heart condition on an ongoing effort to obtain suitable housing for him.
Permanent solutions can be slow in coming and differently defined for each client, Marriner said. But if showing up is half the battle, he suggested, the rewards are constant. “It’s hard to say how many people’s problems get ‘resolved,’” he said, between assuring departing clients he’d see them the next Tuesday, if not before, at the Sunday breakfast. “But I think we help everybody.”
About the Author
