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Health Care Hero Community Outreach: REV. AL FINLEY
By Holly Fisher
Special Projects Editor
Like the small church he pastors in the Berkeley County community of Strawberry, the Rev. Al Finley has a big heart.
As associate chaplain at Trident Medical Center, Finley is on call from 5 p.m. Monday night to 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, ready to step in during a crisis to talk to patients or family members.
Finley started his work with Trident as a volunteer with the Stephen Ministry program, in which he visits new patients and conducts a spiritual assessment. Volunteers with the Stephen Ministry receive training for seven months and then commit to two years of volunteer work.
Finley has enjoyed the program so much he’s in his 10th year of volunteering.
Retired from the Air Force, Finley said he was called to the ministry in 1995 and was pastor of a Baptist church in Ladson. About seven years ago, he was led to start his own ministry and began Zion’s Hill Missionary Baptist Church Inc. in the community of Strawberry, an area of a few thousand people between Goose Creek and Moncks Corner.
While the congregation is small—12 members—Finley said it has a big heart and is working on a variety of programs to assist the community.
Six years ago, Finley started an emergency food pantry at the church. About 90% of the food is purchased from the Lowcountry Food Bank and Trident United Way grants have helped with food purchases as well.
“We feed people from St. Stephen to North Charleston—anyone who needs assistance,” Finley said. “We help people the whole year—single parents, people who are just down on their luck. We don’t challenge their ability. If they say they get food stamps or only make $100 a month, they sign the paperwork and we give them whatever we have.”
For the past two years, Finley has been working to open an Alzheimer’s disease/memory loss respite facility, where caregivers can leave patients for a day while they get some rest or run errands.
Some initial grant money helped the facility get off the ground, and it will open in January for one day a week. The goal is to grow the Strawberry Assistance Center, which runs on volunteers and donations, so that it’s open five days a week. Caregivers will have to pay a fee for the service, but grants will be available to those with financial need.
Finley said he wants to make the center a one-stop facility where people in the community can receive food from the food bank, a food stamp application or job information.
The entire initiative, Finley said, is a project of the Strawberry community, not just of Zion’s Hill church.
In addition to his other volunteer work, Finley is out and about, picking up food donations and distributing weekly food rations to homebound seniors. Once a week Strawberry Plantation, a gas station and restaurant, donates 10 hot meals for senior citizens, allowing
Finley to care for people from Moncks Corner to North Charleston.
All in all, Finley is just trying to help people, he said.
“I hope that I’ve impacted someone’s life so that they will do better and will have gained some knowledge of what life really is all about,” he said. “It’s about helping others through Christ that is within me.”
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