"Bearing Witness to the Pain of Violence" by Yonat Shimron
Photo by Lissa Gotwals
When a faith-based organization realized its tactics were not accomplishing its goal of stopping violence, members tried a new approach: simply being with people who were suffering.
On a recent Sunday evening, several hundred people gathered under an open-air pavilion in Durham, N.C., to remember a young man murdered by a single gunshot to the back of his head.
As they made their way in, each person was handed a slender white candle.
A makeshift altar with a blown-up photo of a smiling JeJuan Taylor Jr. stood at the center of the pavilion; off to one side, a red cooler was filled with bottles of iced tea and water.
“Lord, we come to thank you for your son JeJuan,” the Rev. Reynolds Chapman said. “Lift his name up. Send healing to this community. We pray that no violence will come again.”
Then people shared recollections of JeJuan, who was nicknamed Jay-Jay. Friends and classmates, cousins and neighbors passed around a microphone and talked about the kind and friendly 19-year-old who loved cars and helping people.
There were no petitions signed. No summons to call legislators in support of gun control laws. No lectures about causes of violence.
Just a gathering of mourners grieving the assault that had snuffed out a beloved member of the community.
Such vigils -- hundreds of them -- have become a signature practice of the 21-year-old Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham(link is external).
Each time someone is murdered in Durham, the multifaith coalition reaches out to the family and offers to hold a vigil to lift up the memory of the loved one and to offerprayers for healing.
“To me, the vigil was more spiritual than the funeral,” said Brenda James, whose son Randolph was murdered in 2007. “We all had a chance to say what we wanted to say to Randolph. Each person honored him in their own way.”
Nakecha Snipes Taylor, Jay-Jay’s mother, said the coalition was exactly the type of organization her son -- who helped build homes for Habitat and looked after special-needs children at his high school -- would have liked to belong to.
“It’s not about preaching to you,” she said. “It’s about you being heard.”
Learning from failure
In a typical year, some 30 people are murdered in Durham, a city with a population of 233,000. That’s a rate of 12 homicides per 100,000 people -- more than twice the state average.
The vast majority of these murder victims are young African-American men killed by a firearm.In 1992, a member of the mostly white congregation at Watts Street Baptist Church told his pastor enough was enough. The religious community ought to mount a response.
The coalition assembled a board of clergy and laypeople and set about developing policies to combat gun violence. They worked with local officials and lawmakers on various gun control measures. Those included limiting the public places where people could carry guns and advocating for a federal assault weapons ban.
The coalition met the fourth Thursday of every month. Its members, including the current executive director, Marcia Owen, a United Methodist layperson and a native of Durham, were nothing if not dedicated.
But as Owen eventually realized, “We were completely unsuccessful.”
At about that time, the N.C. legislature passed a bill pre-empting municipalities from regulating guns. The coalition suddenly found itself without any outlet for policymaking.
Then, at a Thursday meeting five years after the organization was formed, a woman -- whose name no one seems to remember -- asked why the coalition didn’t do vigils for murdered people.
Coalition board members looked at each other with no ready answer.
In all its feverish advocacy, the coalition had never met the people most affected by gun violence. They had assumed they knew the answers and that the solutions were within their grasp.
The question “took us to our knees,” Owen said. “That’s where we found our humility.”
After the first vigil in 1997, the coalition’s methods began to change. Though its mission remained the same -- it seeks an end to the violence that is plaguing Durham neighborhoods -- its approach underwent a radical transformation.
The change came about organically. The success of the vigils and the clear desire of victim families for long-term relationship made it easy, even if board members remained convinced of the need to do more legislatively, on a state and national level.
“We’re still hoping to regulate handguns,” said the Rev. Mel Williams, the co-founder of the coalition and the retired pastor of Watts Street Baptist Church. “But we want to get to know the people and their pain.”
“Working for” versus “being with”
Turning from one way of doing things to another does not come easily to most organizations.
Even in the face of evidence that an approach is not only ineffective but may actually be contributing to division and misunderstanding, a typical response is to work harder.
“It takes a lot of courage to say, ‘We’re making the problem worse rather than better,’” said the Rev. Abby Kocher, a United Methodist pastor in Richmond, Va., who led vigils for the coalition when she served as community minister at Duke University Chapel.
“Many organizations respond by saying, ‘We need more money, more fundraisers, more influential people on the board,’” she said. “They tend to go for a bigger solution rather than looking for riches where other people see only needs.”
Questions to consider:
The vast majority of these murder victims are young African-American men killed by a firearm.In 1992, a member of the mostly white congregation at Watts Street Baptist Church told his pastor enough was enough. The religious community ought to mount a response.
The coalition assembled a board of clergy and laypeople and set about developing policies to combat gun violence. They worked with local officials and lawmakers on various gun control measures. Those included limiting the public places where people could carry guns and advocating for a federal assault weapons ban.
The coalition met the fourth Thursday of every month. Its members, including the current executive director, Marcia Owen, a United Methodist layperson and a native of Durham, were nothing if not dedicated.
But as Owen eventually realized, “We were completely unsuccessful.”
At about that time, the N.C. legislature passed a bill pre-empting municipalities from regulating guns. The coalition suddenly found itself without any outlet for policymaking.
Then, at a Thursday meeting five years after the organization was formed, a woman -- whose name no one seems to remember -- asked why the coalition didn’t do vigils for murdered people.
Coalition board members looked at each other with no ready answer.
In all its feverish advocacy, the coalition had never met the people most affected by gun violence. They had assumed they knew the answers and that the solutions were within their grasp.
The question “took us to our knees,” Owen said. “That’s where we found our humility.”
After the first vigil in 1997, the coalition’s methods began to change. Though its mission remained the same -- it seeks an end to the violence that is plaguing Durham neighborhoods -- its approach underwent a radical transformation.
The change came about organically. The success of the vigils and the clear desire of victim families for long-term relationship made it easy, even if board members remained convinced of the need to do more legislatively, on a state and national level.
“We’re still hoping to regulate handguns,” said the Rev. Mel Williams, the co-founder of the coalition and the retired pastor of Watts Street Baptist Church. “But we want to get to know the people and their pain.”
“Working for” versus “being with”
Turning from one way of doing things to another does not come easily to most organizations.
Even in the face of evidence that an approach is not only ineffective but may actually be contributing to division and misunderstanding, a typical response is to work harder.
“It takes a lot of courage to say, ‘We’re making the problem worse rather than better,’” said the Rev. Abby Kocher, a United Methodist pastor in Richmond, Va., who led vigils for the coalition when she served as community minister at Duke University Chapel.
“Many organizations respond by saying, ‘We need more money, more fundraisers, more influential people on the board,’” she said. “They tend to go for a bigger solution rather than looking for riches where other people see only needs.”
Questions to consider:
- Who is your congregation “working for”; what would it take for your congregation to move toward "being with” those people?
- Where is God calling you to show up, walk alongside people in your community and bear witness?
- How do we cultivate humility in our ministry with others?
- Is your ministry open to having its assumptions and solutions challenged?
- How can your organization allow organic change?
- What assumptions might be preventing such change?
The religious coalition chose a different path. It meant shifting from “working for” people affected by gun violence to “being with” those same people.
The first step was to host vigils and stand in solidarity with grieving people without stepping in and forcing solutions.
“We realized that before we change a law, we have to stop and mourn,” Owen said. “The first response is that we gather together, affirm God’s bond and be humbled by the life that’s been taken away from us.”
In developing relationships with families, the coalition found that violence creates a cascading set of needs. So it began monthly “circles of healing,” freewheeling discussion groups in which people affected by violence talk about their pain.
The coalition partnered with Duke Divinity School’s catering service to provide meals for grieving families. And it offered to accompany victim family members to meetings with police or district attorneys.
The purpose was not to intercede on behalf of the families but to stand alongside them and, if needed, interpret what was happening to them.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘I want that person to be well,’” Owen said. “It’s another thing to listen -- to take the time to discern where God is in it. It’s a different approach. One comes from ego needs. The other is about opening the soul to the love of God.”
Job’s friends
Though coalition leaders didn’t know it, they were moving toward a deeper theological engagement. Clergy sometimes call this type of work a “ministry of presence,” but at its best it is perhaps the most profound gesture of Christian witness.
Being with people is how God chooses to be. It is the way of Jesus, who is called “Emmanuel,” meaning “God with us.” After all, Jesus spent 30 years in Nazareth simply being with people before embarking on his public ministry.
And “being with” is how many Christians also look forward to heaven, when they can be with God and with one another.
“Much, perhaps most Christian mission, especially in America, shares with the wider culture an assumption that the central problem of human existence is mortality,” said the Rev. Dr. Samuel Wells.
Wells co-wrote a book with Owen, “Living Without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence(link is external).” The book came about after he took part in coalition activities while serving as the dean of Duke University Chapel. He is now the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London.
“But what if this fundamental diagnosis was wrong?” Wells wrote in an email. “What if the fundamental human problem was not mortality but isolation? If so, mission becomes primarily about restoring relationships and only secondarily about supplying resources.”
Owen likens the ministry of “being with” to an often-maligned but nonetheless important group of biblical witnesses.
“If I had to say who we are, I’d say we’re Job’s friends,” she said. “We come and sit in the darkness and bear witness to the pain.”
To Owen, that’s exactly where the church should be.
Deep bonds of trust
When it comes to violence, most people prefer to pass the work on to professionals.
As a result, family members of both victims and offenders are often shuffled off to probation officers, social workers, lawyers, psychiatrists, police officers and others.
Religious coalition members think that’s a big mistake.
Those professionals are trained to “work for” the individual or family. They can’t offer the kind of relationship that comes when people of faith provide what psychologist Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard.”
These kinds of relationships perpetuate inequality and keep people strangers to one another.
The coalition’s experience is that when people are treated as equals, they form deep and abiding bonds of trust.
It’s that lesson that led the coalition to add a re-entry ministry that pairs a “faith team” of five to eight people of faith with a person who has been released from prison. The team helps the ex-inmate find a place to live and a job, but they don’t set an agenda.
These programs have added to the coalition’s many champions.
“They came over here when I was down and called to make sure I was all right,” said James, whose son Randolph was killed six years ago. “I would not have come through as well as I have if it wasn’t for them.”
One reason these champions support the coalition is that it doesn’t address every person’s pain in the same way.
Glenda Fowler, for example, didn’t want a vigil for her son, Kareem, who was gunned down at age 33 three years ago.
But on her son’s birthday, she wanted to go to the site of his murder. She hesitated to go by herself, so she called the coalition, and Owen went with her.
“Marcia was there to hold my hand and give me hugs,” Fowler said. “I thank God for people who help you in a time of need.”
The “being with” approach has an impact beyond helping those in the throes of grief, as with the case of Joslin Simms.
Simms’ son Ray was shot and killed in 2005. Afterward, Simms wanted the perpetrator caught, and she wanted the ultimate punishment -- the death penalty.
But over time, as she attended monthly circles of healing and got to know other grieving mothers, she began to think of the parents of the murderers and the pain they, too, might be experiencing.
Ultimately, she concluded, the death penalty was not the solution to her pain.
“It’s not going to bring my child back,” she said. “Taking one’s life is not going to replace what was lost.”
Recently, Simms began volunteering in behalf of other victims of violence. Last year, she was invited to speak to the state’s former governor about the Racial Justice Act, which allowed convicted killers to be spared the death penalty if they could prove racial bias in their cases. (The sitting governor has since repealed the law.)
In July, she attended a private luncheon with Gabrielle Giffords when the former U.S. representative visited Raleigh.
Simms’ transformation may be a sign that the coalition’s change in direction is producing fruit. Coalition members increasingly believe that violence will end only when the people most affected by it -- victims and offenders -- can repair the brokenness themselves.
In the meantime, they sum up their approach this way: Show up; know nothing; expect healing.
Read more »
Monday, June 29, 2015
Congregations increasingly find themselves establishing and supporting community ministries -- daycare for infants and toddlers, respite care for elders, and programs for housing rehab and home repair, tutoring, and social justice advocacy. In this volume, Carl S. Dudley revises and updates his earlier book, Basic Steps toward Community Ministry, which Loren Mead called "the most valuable book on parish ministry I've seen in a decade."
Buy the book
Continue Learning with The Church Network
A Tax and Legal Update for Congregational Leaders
A webinar with Frank Sommerville
July 2, 2015, at 2:30 pm EDT
Learn more and register »
Ideas that Impact: Ministry in the Public Square
"You Don't Have to Look Hard or Far to See What Has to be Done"
A Faith & Leadership interview with Raphael Warnock
RECONCILIATION, RACIAL & ETHNIC, CONGREGATIONS
Raphael G. Warnock: You don't have to look hard or far to see what needs to be done
The Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, center, addresses a crowd at a gathering for social justice.
Photo courtesy of Ebenezer Baptist Church
The senior pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, says you don’t have to be in a prestigious pulpit to work for justice and the gospel. Look around at the issues in your own community, he says in this interview.
Being senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church has given the Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock an extraordinary platform for ministry. But pastors don’t have to be at an Ebenezer Baptist in order to work for justice and the gospel, he said.
“It’s all around you,” Warnock said. “You start locally with whatever’s going on in your community. … It’s about being plugged in to what’s going on in the world and being sensitive to human suffering.”
Ebenezer Baptist is the church where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. served as co-pastor with his father from 1960 until his death in 1968. Warnock became the church’s fifth -- and, at 35, youngest -- senior pastor when he was appointed to the post in 2005.
Whatever church they serve, pastors who are interested in “justice making” can find plenty of issues to address, he said.
“You don’t have to look hard or far to see what needs to be done.”
The first step was to host vigils and stand in solidarity with grieving people without stepping in and forcing solutions.
“We realized that before we change a law, we have to stop and mourn,” Owen said. “The first response is that we gather together, affirm God’s bond and be humbled by the life that’s been taken away from us.”
In developing relationships with families, the coalition found that violence creates a cascading set of needs. So it began monthly “circles of healing,” freewheeling discussion groups in which people affected by violence talk about their pain.
The coalition partnered with Duke Divinity School’s catering service to provide meals for grieving families. And it offered to accompany victim family members to meetings with police or district attorneys.
The purpose was not to intercede on behalf of the families but to stand alongside them and, if needed, interpret what was happening to them.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘I want that person to be well,’” Owen said. “It’s another thing to listen -- to take the time to discern where God is in it. It’s a different approach. One comes from ego needs. The other is about opening the soul to the love of God.”
Job’s friends
Though coalition leaders didn’t know it, they were moving toward a deeper theological engagement. Clergy sometimes call this type of work a “ministry of presence,” but at its best it is perhaps the most profound gesture of Christian witness.
Being with people is how God chooses to be. It is the way of Jesus, who is called “Emmanuel,” meaning “God with us.” After all, Jesus spent 30 years in Nazareth simply being with people before embarking on his public ministry.
And “being with” is how many Christians also look forward to heaven, when they can be with God and with one another.
“Much, perhaps most Christian mission, especially in America, shares with the wider culture an assumption that the central problem of human existence is mortality,” said the Rev. Dr. Samuel Wells.
Wells co-wrote a book with Owen, “Living Without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence(link is external).” The book came about after he took part in coalition activities while serving as the dean of Duke University Chapel. He is now the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London.
“But what if this fundamental diagnosis was wrong?” Wells wrote in an email. “What if the fundamental human problem was not mortality but isolation? If so, mission becomes primarily about restoring relationships and only secondarily about supplying resources.”
Owen likens the ministry of “being with” to an often-maligned but nonetheless important group of biblical witnesses.
“If I had to say who we are, I’d say we’re Job’s friends,” she said. “We come and sit in the darkness and bear witness to the pain.”
To Owen, that’s exactly where the church should be.
Deep bonds of trust
When it comes to violence, most people prefer to pass the work on to professionals.
As a result, family members of both victims and offenders are often shuffled off to probation officers, social workers, lawyers, psychiatrists, police officers and others.
Religious coalition members think that’s a big mistake.
Those professionals are trained to “work for” the individual or family. They can’t offer the kind of relationship that comes when people of faith provide what psychologist Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard.”
These kinds of relationships perpetuate inequality and keep people strangers to one another.
The coalition’s experience is that when people are treated as equals, they form deep and abiding bonds of trust.
It’s that lesson that led the coalition to add a re-entry ministry that pairs a “faith team” of five to eight people of faith with a person who has been released from prison. The team helps the ex-inmate find a place to live and a job, but they don’t set an agenda.
These programs have added to the coalition’s many champions.
“They came over here when I was down and called to make sure I was all right,” said James, whose son Randolph was killed six years ago. “I would not have come through as well as I have if it wasn’t for them.”
One reason these champions support the coalition is that it doesn’t address every person’s pain in the same way.
Glenda Fowler, for example, didn’t want a vigil for her son, Kareem, who was gunned down at age 33 three years ago.
But on her son’s birthday, she wanted to go to the site of his murder. She hesitated to go by herself, so she called the coalition, and Owen went with her.
“Marcia was there to hold my hand and give me hugs,” Fowler said. “I thank God for people who help you in a time of need.”
The “being with” approach has an impact beyond helping those in the throes of grief, as with the case of Joslin Simms.
Simms’ son Ray was shot and killed in 2005. Afterward, Simms wanted the perpetrator caught, and she wanted the ultimate punishment -- the death penalty.
But over time, as she attended monthly circles of healing and got to know other grieving mothers, she began to think of the parents of the murderers and the pain they, too, might be experiencing.
Ultimately, she concluded, the death penalty was not the solution to her pain.
“It’s not going to bring my child back,” she said. “Taking one’s life is not going to replace what was lost.”
Recently, Simms began volunteering in behalf of other victims of violence. Last year, she was invited to speak to the state’s former governor about the Racial Justice Act, which allowed convicted killers to be spared the death penalty if they could prove racial bias in their cases. (The sitting governor has since repealed the law.)
In July, she attended a private luncheon with Gabrielle Giffords when the former U.S. representative visited Raleigh.
Simms’ transformation may be a sign that the coalition’s change in direction is producing fruit. Coalition members increasingly believe that violence will end only when the people most affected by it -- victims and offenders -- can repair the brokenness themselves.
In the meantime, they sum up their approach this way: Show up; know nothing; expect healing.
Read more »
Monday, June 29, 2015
Congregations increasingly find themselves establishing and supporting community ministries -- daycare for infants and toddlers, respite care for elders, and programs for housing rehab and home repair, tutoring, and social justice advocacy. In this volume, Carl S. Dudley revises and updates his earlier book, Basic Steps toward Community Ministry, which Loren Mead called "the most valuable book on parish ministry I've seen in a decade."
Buy the book
Continue Learning with The Church Network
A Tax and Legal Update for Congregational Leaders
A webinar with Frank Sommerville
July 2, 2015, at 2:30 pm EDT
Learn more and register »
Ideas that Impact: Ministry in the Public Square
"You Don't Have to Look Hard or Far to See What Has to be Done"
A Faith & Leadership interview with Raphael Warnock
RECONCILIATION, RACIAL & ETHNIC, CONGREGATIONS
Raphael G. Warnock: You don't have to look hard or far to see what needs to be done
The Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, center, addresses a crowd at a gathering for social justice.
Photo courtesy of Ebenezer Baptist Church
The senior pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, says you don’t have to be in a prestigious pulpit to work for justice and the gospel. Look around at the issues in your own community, he says in this interview.
Being senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church has given the Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock an extraordinary platform for ministry. But pastors don’t have to be at an Ebenezer Baptist in order to work for justice and the gospel, he said.
“It’s all around you,” Warnock said. “You start locally with whatever’s going on in your community. … It’s about being plugged in to what’s going on in the world and being sensitive to human suffering.”
Ebenezer Baptist is the church where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. served as co-pastor with his father from 1960 until his death in 1968. Warnock became the church’s fifth -- and, at 35, youngest -- senior pastor when he was appointed to the post in 2005.
Whatever church they serve, pastors who are interested in “justice making” can find plenty of issues to address, he said.
“You don’t have to look hard or far to see what needs to be done.”
Warnock received a B.A. in psychology from Morehouse College and holds an M.Div., an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary. He is the author of “The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness.”
Warnock was at Duke Divinity School recently to lead worship services for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture series(link is external) and spoke with Faith & Leadership. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What was it like, as a young pastor, to step into a leadership role at a historic pulpit like Ebenezer Baptist Church? It must have been incredibly intimidating.
Serving as senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr., is the highest honor of my life. I have long been a student, a disciple, a devotee of Dr. King and the meaning of his ministry, and so to have been asked to come and serve in that pulpit is an honor that I cannot capture in words.
It’s also an incredible opportunity, because it allows me to do on a larger platform the kind of work that I would be doing anyway. For me, justice making and the work of struggle on behalf of the most marginalized members of the human family is central to the meaning of the gospel and the mission of the church. Being at Ebenezer gives me a platform, a larger microphone if you will, and every day of my ministry, I try to leverage that for the sake of others.
Q: What advice do you have for other Christian institutional leaders who want to do that kind of social justice work but who don’t have that kind of platform, who aren’t at an Ebenezer Baptist?
It’s all around you. You start locally with whatever’s going on in your community.
A lot of the work that I’m doing and the things that I’ve found myself involved in, I didn’t go looking for. It came looking for me. It’s about being plugged in to what’s going on in the world and being sensitive to human suffering.
I serve in an urban, inner-city context where there’s both wealth and influence and deep poverty and overwhelming needs all around me. Every year since I’ve been at Ebenezer -- in fact, every year of my ministry (I served in Baltimore before coming to Atlanta) -- I’ve found myself involved in work that speaks to the needs of people who suffer.
When I came to Ebenezer, it was right after Hurricane Katrina, and the church had already been responding by providing care and food and supplies to people in New Orleans. But then many of those people were displaced throughout the country.
Katrina happened in August, and I came in October, and by the spring, they were planning a municipal election in New Orleans that did not include the people who had been so recently displaced.
They were in some 40 states without the opportunity or ability to cast a vote, to raise their voice, to feel that they had a stake in a community that many of them planned to return to.
Ironically -- this was 2006 -- we had gone into Iraq, and our elected officials were boasting about the fact that they’d brought democracy to Iraq, and Iraqi citizens who were living in the state of Michigan could vote by absentee in Baghdad. Meanwhile, American citizens who had been displaced from New Orleans couldn’t vote there.
That, for me, was a deep contradiction that spoke to a larger issue of voting rights in our country. After many of us tried unsuccessfully to get the election postponed, I decided that we would do all we could as a church to amplify this issue, and to take as many Katrina evacuees as we could back to New Orleans so that they could vote.
I didn’t know exactly how we were going to do it. I’d literally been at the church about six months and was finishing up my doctoral dissertation, but I was determined to do this. So I went on the radio and announced that if you were a Katrina evacuee, a citizen of New Orleans, and you wanted to vote, Ebenezer Baptist Church would take you back to New Orleans.
Q: So you announced that before you knew how it was going to happen?
Well, it was coming together. We basically planned to do a bus caravan, but we didn’t know how many people would want to do this. We set up a hotline at our church, and we raised the money and rented buses and took people back to New Orleans to vote.
The media got interested, so it gave me an opportunity at that same time to talk about voting rights. And so we took people back to New Orleans. The election was close. It ended up with a runoff, so a month later we had to do it again.
And every year since I’ve been at Ebenezer, something has come up. Last year, I was fighting for Medicaid expansion in our state. I was part of the Moral Monday movement in Georgia, and was arrested in the governor’s office arguing the Medicaid expansion.
Last fall, I was very involved with voting rights in Georgia as we were going into the election.
So every year, I’ve been doing this kind of work. And it’s because I really do believe that justice making is not the only thing the gospel is about, but it is central to the meaning of the gospel. So it’s always been central to my mission and my work as a pastor, and it’s something that I try to preach and embody.
Q: And for folks who feel the same way, you say opportunities will arise for them as well.
Yes. If you’re just looking around at the day-to-day conversation and politics in your own church, you might miss a whole lot, but if you’re in conversation with people who are doing the work of the church, often without the name of the church -- people who are in peace and justice organizations -- you don’t have to look hard or far to see what needs to be done.
You’ll find some issue you can sink your teeth in -- you can’t do everything -- and you’ll engage it. And some great things have come out of that. We’ve had some really great ecumenical and multiracial coalitions in Georgia around gun reform that brought together everyone from the Baptists to the Episcopalians to Jewish sisters and brothers and Muslim sisters and brothers and Sikhs, all saying that we needed reasonable gun reform.
Q: This morning, a noose was found on the Duke campus(link is external), just the most recent in a series of racial incidents on university campuses across the country. What’s your advice for how to deal with these events?
Yes, it was disturbing, because these are kids who were born in the ’90s, and that’s just amazing, because I was in grad school in the ’90s. It doesn’t feel like long ago. It’s yesterday.
But all of this is happening in a larger context, here in North Carolina and across the country. The killings of Muslim students just a few months ago (in Chapel Hill), allegedly over a parking incident -- if nothing else, it shows a kind of cold dissociation from the humanity of someone who is other. So we just have to be vigilant.
We have to continue to condemn xenophobia wherever it rears its ugly head, and we have to be undivided in our commitment to justice. Black people who are concerned about racism cannot be silent on Islamophobia and homophobia. And white people who are proud of the heritage of America, of what it represents in the charter documents -- justice, and liberty and justice for all -- have to insist, as Dr. King put it, that America be true to what it wrote down on paper, that it live out the true meaning of its creed.
You’re going to hear from the African-American community and people of color in response to something like that, because the history is so deep and painful. But what is needed is white sisters and brothers who are willing to stand up and condemn it with the same kind of passion that says that this can’t stand.
White people have to stand up for black people. Those of us who have some level of privilege have to stand up for poor people. Christians need to stand up for Muslims, not just in terms of our rhetoric, but in terms of the kind of structural inequality that happens in a country where there’s a budget being pushed right now that is cruel and mean to the poor at a national level. And on the campus, we have to insist that tokenism is its own form of racism.
This is an ongoing work. It’s a process, and there’s no easy solution, but I think that kind of commitment begins to move us toward what Dr. King called the beloved community.
Read more »
Affirming the Dignity of our Neighbors
A Faith & Leadership interview with Marcia OwenJustice and healing from violence are best approached by simply being with those who are suffering, says a United Methodist layperson who directs a faith-based organization.
Marcia Owen: Affirming the dignity of our neighbors
Photo by Lissa Gotwals
Justice and healing from violence are best approached by simply being with those who are suffering, says a United Methodist layperson who directs a faith-based organization.
Marcia Owen directs the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham(link is external), a 21-year-old organization in Durham, N.C., that seeks to bring justice and healing to the community by working with murder victims’ families and offenders released from prison.
Early on, the organization was dedicated to enacting gun control legislation. More recently, it has adopted a new approach based on “being with” people affected by violence.
“You have to be near someone, near enough to touch them, to listen to them, to sit in silence with them, to share their pain, their suffering, to really understand them,” Owen said.
Owen spoke to Faith & Leadership about the organization’s approach, described in a book she co-wrote with the Rev. Dr. Samuel Wells, “Living Without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence(link is external).” The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Describe what “being with” means and why it’s important, since being with someone in need and not doing anything to help is counterintuitive.
It’s not about being nonresponsive. To me, it’s about affirming the dignity of my neighbors, of humbling myself.
“Being with” makes the assumption that we are equal -- that you know best what you are suffering, and it is for me to just be present and let that be revealed over time.
From those relationships, things emerge. And that takes trust. It’s a relationship based on respect, equality, dignity, and I would also add eternity. There is no timeline here.
You have to be near someone, near enough to touch them, to listen to them, to sit in silence with them, to share their pain, their suffering, to really understand them.
If an issue or an event or a condition breaks your heart, you don’t presume to know the answer. You go in with an open heart.
Q: As you said earlier, it doesn’t mean never doing anything.
Absolutely. Personal or individual acts of love, I’ve found, necessarily give life to reform, institutional reform.
But what I had done in the past is, I had gone to institutions for resolution, forgetting that a central component of institutions -- be they social services, the criminal justice system, schools -- is that institutions can’t love.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have policy change. However, repair of the harm that we do to one another must occur in the lives of those who have been harmed and have done harm. So there’s enormous possibility in that relationship.
Q: Talk a little bit about what the coalition does.
One of the central components of “being with” is that it really can only be done for love. I’m not “being with” for profit, for security, for my needs to be met.
The organization manifests “being with” so beautifully with the vigil ministry. That was the ministry that gave birth to that realization.
After visiting with families whose loved one had been killed, I would say, “What may I do for you?” And the answer that I have gotten is consistent: “Come back. Just come back and be with me.”
That’s a need that I think people who are not close to the problem would overlook -- that maybe the greatest need is one of connection, of affirmation. How do we strengthen one another?
Q: At the same time, the re-entry ministry, for people coming out of prison, also does practical things, such as helping people find jobs, correct?
Yes. But I don’t go in with a checklist.
One of our partners in the ministry expressed, “No one has ever cared for me like this who didn’t get paid to do it or didn’t want something from me. And I know you all are not being paid to do this, and I can’t figure out what you want from me. I don’t think you want anything from me.”
And I looked at him and I said, “That’s exactly right.” And he just kind of looked at me in the most beautiful way and said, “I get it. You just love me.”
Maybe that’s the best description of “being with.” It’s like friends. When I see you, I don’t expect to have an agenda -- that you’re going to query me about all my needs. I expect you to be with me and trust that if I need to talk about something and reveal something that I will, and that you will not perceive me by my economic status or my criminal record.
You don’t measure me. Friends don’t measure each other. They enjoy one another.
Q: What do you do in this work to keep yourself from burning out and becoming cynical, or just tired?
I don’t know how else to answer it except to say that if I weren’t doing this, I would be more burned-out.
For me, this work is like breathing. I breathe in God’s love and the love of my friends and my family and community, and then I have to exhale. And that exhale, for me, is responding to the suffering of my neighbors. If I did one without the other, I would pass out.
Every time I meet a new partner who’s come home from prison and they say, “I want a faith team,” I want to cry, because I’m so grateful that they have allowed me into their life.
That is a gift beyond compare. This is why I was born. It’s no great mystery other than we were born to love, and love exists in relationship, so you better have a lot of relationships if you want to love big.
Q: Tell me about your faith background and how you got into the work that you do.
My faith background is in the United Methodist Church. My parents actually met in the choir.
I grew up in Durham during the civil rights movement. That was my first exposure to suffering and injustice. Our history of racial injustice is a history of crimes that have never been, I think, admitted to, much less repaired.
The Vietnam War really formed me as well. And then I went to Duke and I completely left the church. I had only seen a part of it, really. And then I came back.
Q: What made you come back?
There’s a lot of good there. I hope I’m quoting him right, but I think John Wesley said if I die with pennies in my pocket -- I’m paraphrasing it -- then I have been unfaithful to my God.
I think that is just so fantastic. That just trips up the ego, and it makes so clear where our security comes from.
Q: What response do you feel is appropriate to the recent Trayvon Martin verdict?
What I know would help me would be a community conversation.
One thing that I’ve found is very helpful is to gather with people who perceive harm or experience anger or frustration -- which we should be feeling regardless of the verdict.
I really want to listen to what other people have to say. Because I think that it is in listening and it is in the establishment of shared values that that kind of guidance -- and I would call it a holy guidance, actually -- is revealed.
Read more »
Rethinking 'Outreach' by Catherine Caimano
Catherine A. Caimano: Rethinking 'outreach'
The problem with 'outreach' is that it is 'out there,' and often presumes that we have no needs 'in here,' writes a denominational leader. But we are called to be near, to serve our neighbor both far away and in the next pew.
Whenever I ask congregations to tell me about their ministry, they almost always start by talking about “outreach.” Whether the parish is large or small, rural or urban, members tell me how they give out food and clothes, donate money to nonprofits and conduct Vacation Bible School for neighborhood kids. They tell me about their committees -- even the ones that have only one or two members -- and the many events and programs they manage.
But more and more these days, they also talk about frustration and exhaustion. It’s the same people doing the same ministry over and over, they say, the same programs and large events staffed by the same handful of volunteers. They believe deeply that the church should “do outreach,” but everyone is busy and overcommitted. The result? Much less gets done by the few who keep giving more.
Sometimes I wonder whether we should just stop. Stop trying so hard. Stop doing the same things hoping for different results. Stop “doing outreach” -- at least as we now envision it. More precisely, I wonder whether we should take a step back and rethink our understanding of “outreach” and how it fits within the context of church and ministry.
The problem with “outreach” is that it is “out there,” somewhere far away. Jesus and his disciples, however, in their ministry, were close enough to touch. They served their neighbors; they healed people whose names they knew or with whom they spoke.
For us, “outreach” is too often about packing food or sending resources and money to others. To be sure, such help is needed, but rarely are we asked to actually know and be with those neighbors in need. Though we might spend time with them as part of our “service,” we are never truly with them. Not really.
“Outreach” too often presumes that we have no needs “in here.” Although most Christians I’ve met have great compassion for others, they -- we -- are often reluctant to know about, are even secretive about, the needs in our own communities. The priest might know who has lost a job or can’t pay the medical bills or whose house is in foreclosure, but not many other people do. Not those who share a pew with them, who pray alongside them, who receive the same bread and wine.
Because those matters are private. Because we are ashamed. Because we are afraid.
As we seek to serve the needs of others, of those outside our congregations, maybe we should also try to do better at knowing and sharing the needs of those within. We are called to be near. “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus was asked. A neighbor is “one who is nigh,” one who is near.
We are called to serve our neighbors. We are called to be near enough to others to understand their needs, to bear their pain, to truly offer ourselves. Do we know the needs of our neighbors -- at home, at church, at work, even in our families? Are we willing to ask?
Being near, however, is scary. Whenever I ask church people what comes to mind when they hear the word “outreach,” the first thing everyone says is “soup kitchen.” Why? Because the average person in the average pew is far away from the average person in the average soup kitchen.
That person in the soup kitchen could never be me. Therefore, I never have to confront the needs of the kind of people I know, or even my own needs. I don’t have to know how needy we all are.
“Be not afraid,” Jesus said. We don’t have to fear the stranger, that person whose life could not seem more different from my own.
Receiving is even scarier. Christian service confronts us with the reality that each of us will likely be poor and vulnerable sometime. We are called to be as open to being served as we are to serving.
Learning to be vulnerable enough to give and receive is ministry. It’s not a ministry that can be easily quantified -- like the number of meals served or mission trips completed -- but it is one that is at the heart of what church is for.
The Christian community is not only a place where we worship God but also a place where members take the time to really talk, listen and reflect on their own lives and on the lives of others. It is a school where we learn to speak truth in love. It’s where we learn, by being neighbors, that all are neighbors, willing to share each other’s burdens. It’s where we learn to erase the boundary between “out there” and “in here.”
Caring for our neighbors, whether in the next pew or far away, doesn’t always require organized programs. In fact, in many congregations today, more energy is expended organizing and scheduling “outreach” programs than in actually doing the work of ministry. Sometimes feeding the hungry is as simple as buying or preparing a meal. Sometimes visiting the sick is just that. These are no less ministry for not being organized in the name of the church, or any other organization.
“If you love me, feed my sheep.” There are many ways to feed others and to be fed. There are infinite places and ways to serve others and to be served. But there is only one place to learn what the words of Jesus mean.
Church is not just another organization to do “good work.” It is a religious community for forming disciples. If we do better at that task, then maybe we will start to see that people “out there” who are hungry and homeless are also “in here,” with us, part of us.
And maybe our communities will grow until we really are all neighbors, all of us, whatever our condition. As Christian disciples, we will still be called to give and receive. But there may not be any more “out” to reach.
Warnock was at Duke Divinity School recently to lead worship services for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture series(link is external) and spoke with Faith & Leadership. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What was it like, as a young pastor, to step into a leadership role at a historic pulpit like Ebenezer Baptist Church? It must have been incredibly intimidating.
Serving as senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr., is the highest honor of my life. I have long been a student, a disciple, a devotee of Dr. King and the meaning of his ministry, and so to have been asked to come and serve in that pulpit is an honor that I cannot capture in words.
It’s also an incredible opportunity, because it allows me to do on a larger platform the kind of work that I would be doing anyway. For me, justice making and the work of struggle on behalf of the most marginalized members of the human family is central to the meaning of the gospel and the mission of the church. Being at Ebenezer gives me a platform, a larger microphone if you will, and every day of my ministry, I try to leverage that for the sake of others.
Q: What advice do you have for other Christian institutional leaders who want to do that kind of social justice work but who don’t have that kind of platform, who aren’t at an Ebenezer Baptist?
It’s all around you. You start locally with whatever’s going on in your community.
A lot of the work that I’m doing and the things that I’ve found myself involved in, I didn’t go looking for. It came looking for me. It’s about being plugged in to what’s going on in the world and being sensitive to human suffering.
I serve in an urban, inner-city context where there’s both wealth and influence and deep poverty and overwhelming needs all around me. Every year since I’ve been at Ebenezer -- in fact, every year of my ministry (I served in Baltimore before coming to Atlanta) -- I’ve found myself involved in work that speaks to the needs of people who suffer.
When I came to Ebenezer, it was right after Hurricane Katrina, and the church had already been responding by providing care and food and supplies to people in New Orleans. But then many of those people were displaced throughout the country.
Katrina happened in August, and I came in October, and by the spring, they were planning a municipal election in New Orleans that did not include the people who had been so recently displaced.
They were in some 40 states without the opportunity or ability to cast a vote, to raise their voice, to feel that they had a stake in a community that many of them planned to return to.
Ironically -- this was 2006 -- we had gone into Iraq, and our elected officials were boasting about the fact that they’d brought democracy to Iraq, and Iraqi citizens who were living in the state of Michigan could vote by absentee in Baghdad. Meanwhile, American citizens who had been displaced from New Orleans couldn’t vote there.
That, for me, was a deep contradiction that spoke to a larger issue of voting rights in our country. After many of us tried unsuccessfully to get the election postponed, I decided that we would do all we could as a church to amplify this issue, and to take as many Katrina evacuees as we could back to New Orleans so that they could vote.
I didn’t know exactly how we were going to do it. I’d literally been at the church about six months and was finishing up my doctoral dissertation, but I was determined to do this. So I went on the radio and announced that if you were a Katrina evacuee, a citizen of New Orleans, and you wanted to vote, Ebenezer Baptist Church would take you back to New Orleans.
Q: So you announced that before you knew how it was going to happen?
Well, it was coming together. We basically planned to do a bus caravan, but we didn’t know how many people would want to do this. We set up a hotline at our church, and we raised the money and rented buses and took people back to New Orleans to vote.
The media got interested, so it gave me an opportunity at that same time to talk about voting rights. And so we took people back to New Orleans. The election was close. It ended up with a runoff, so a month later we had to do it again.
And every year since I’ve been at Ebenezer, something has come up. Last year, I was fighting for Medicaid expansion in our state. I was part of the Moral Monday movement in Georgia, and was arrested in the governor’s office arguing the Medicaid expansion.
Last fall, I was very involved with voting rights in Georgia as we were going into the election.
So every year, I’ve been doing this kind of work. And it’s because I really do believe that justice making is not the only thing the gospel is about, but it is central to the meaning of the gospel. So it’s always been central to my mission and my work as a pastor, and it’s something that I try to preach and embody.
Q: And for folks who feel the same way, you say opportunities will arise for them as well.
Yes. If you’re just looking around at the day-to-day conversation and politics in your own church, you might miss a whole lot, but if you’re in conversation with people who are doing the work of the church, often without the name of the church -- people who are in peace and justice organizations -- you don’t have to look hard or far to see what needs to be done.
You’ll find some issue you can sink your teeth in -- you can’t do everything -- and you’ll engage it. And some great things have come out of that. We’ve had some really great ecumenical and multiracial coalitions in Georgia around gun reform that brought together everyone from the Baptists to the Episcopalians to Jewish sisters and brothers and Muslim sisters and brothers and Sikhs, all saying that we needed reasonable gun reform.
Q: This morning, a noose was found on the Duke campus(link is external), just the most recent in a series of racial incidents on university campuses across the country. What’s your advice for how to deal with these events?
Yes, it was disturbing, because these are kids who were born in the ’90s, and that’s just amazing, because I was in grad school in the ’90s. It doesn’t feel like long ago. It’s yesterday.
But all of this is happening in a larger context, here in North Carolina and across the country. The killings of Muslim students just a few months ago (in Chapel Hill), allegedly over a parking incident -- if nothing else, it shows a kind of cold dissociation from the humanity of someone who is other. So we just have to be vigilant.
We have to continue to condemn xenophobia wherever it rears its ugly head, and we have to be undivided in our commitment to justice. Black people who are concerned about racism cannot be silent on Islamophobia and homophobia. And white people who are proud of the heritage of America, of what it represents in the charter documents -- justice, and liberty and justice for all -- have to insist, as Dr. King put it, that America be true to what it wrote down on paper, that it live out the true meaning of its creed.
You’re going to hear from the African-American community and people of color in response to something like that, because the history is so deep and painful. But what is needed is white sisters and brothers who are willing to stand up and condemn it with the same kind of passion that says that this can’t stand.
White people have to stand up for black people. Those of us who have some level of privilege have to stand up for poor people. Christians need to stand up for Muslims, not just in terms of our rhetoric, but in terms of the kind of structural inequality that happens in a country where there’s a budget being pushed right now that is cruel and mean to the poor at a national level. And on the campus, we have to insist that tokenism is its own form of racism.
This is an ongoing work. It’s a process, and there’s no easy solution, but I think that kind of commitment begins to move us toward what Dr. King called the beloved community.
Read more »
Affirming the Dignity of our Neighbors
A Faith & Leadership interview with Marcia OwenJustice and healing from violence are best approached by simply being with those who are suffering, says a United Methodist layperson who directs a faith-based organization.
Marcia Owen: Affirming the dignity of our neighbors
Photo by Lissa Gotwals
Justice and healing from violence are best approached by simply being with those who are suffering, says a United Methodist layperson who directs a faith-based organization.
Marcia Owen directs the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham(link is external), a 21-year-old organization in Durham, N.C., that seeks to bring justice and healing to the community by working with murder victims’ families and offenders released from prison.
Early on, the organization was dedicated to enacting gun control legislation. More recently, it has adopted a new approach based on “being with” people affected by violence.
“You have to be near someone, near enough to touch them, to listen to them, to sit in silence with them, to share their pain, their suffering, to really understand them,” Owen said.
Owen spoke to Faith & Leadership about the organization’s approach, described in a book she co-wrote with the Rev. Dr. Samuel Wells, “Living Without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence(link is external).” The following is an edited transcript.
Q: Describe what “being with” means and why it’s important, since being with someone in need and not doing anything to help is counterintuitive.
It’s not about being nonresponsive. To me, it’s about affirming the dignity of my neighbors, of humbling myself.
“Being with” makes the assumption that we are equal -- that you know best what you are suffering, and it is for me to just be present and let that be revealed over time.
From those relationships, things emerge. And that takes trust. It’s a relationship based on respect, equality, dignity, and I would also add eternity. There is no timeline here.
You have to be near someone, near enough to touch them, to listen to them, to sit in silence with them, to share their pain, their suffering, to really understand them.
If an issue or an event or a condition breaks your heart, you don’t presume to know the answer. You go in with an open heart.
Q: As you said earlier, it doesn’t mean never doing anything.
Absolutely. Personal or individual acts of love, I’ve found, necessarily give life to reform, institutional reform.
But what I had done in the past is, I had gone to institutions for resolution, forgetting that a central component of institutions -- be they social services, the criminal justice system, schools -- is that institutions can’t love.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have policy change. However, repair of the harm that we do to one another must occur in the lives of those who have been harmed and have done harm. So there’s enormous possibility in that relationship.
Q: Talk a little bit about what the coalition does.
One of the central components of “being with” is that it really can only be done for love. I’m not “being with” for profit, for security, for my needs to be met.
The organization manifests “being with” so beautifully with the vigil ministry. That was the ministry that gave birth to that realization.
After visiting with families whose loved one had been killed, I would say, “What may I do for you?” And the answer that I have gotten is consistent: “Come back. Just come back and be with me.”
That’s a need that I think people who are not close to the problem would overlook -- that maybe the greatest need is one of connection, of affirmation. How do we strengthen one another?
Q: At the same time, the re-entry ministry, for people coming out of prison, also does practical things, such as helping people find jobs, correct?
Yes. But I don’t go in with a checklist.
One of our partners in the ministry expressed, “No one has ever cared for me like this who didn’t get paid to do it or didn’t want something from me. And I know you all are not being paid to do this, and I can’t figure out what you want from me. I don’t think you want anything from me.”
And I looked at him and I said, “That’s exactly right.” And he just kind of looked at me in the most beautiful way and said, “I get it. You just love me.”
Maybe that’s the best description of “being with.” It’s like friends. When I see you, I don’t expect to have an agenda -- that you’re going to query me about all my needs. I expect you to be with me and trust that if I need to talk about something and reveal something that I will, and that you will not perceive me by my economic status or my criminal record.
You don’t measure me. Friends don’t measure each other. They enjoy one another.
Q: What do you do in this work to keep yourself from burning out and becoming cynical, or just tired?
I don’t know how else to answer it except to say that if I weren’t doing this, I would be more burned-out.
For me, this work is like breathing. I breathe in God’s love and the love of my friends and my family and community, and then I have to exhale. And that exhale, for me, is responding to the suffering of my neighbors. If I did one without the other, I would pass out.
Every time I meet a new partner who’s come home from prison and they say, “I want a faith team,” I want to cry, because I’m so grateful that they have allowed me into their life.
That is a gift beyond compare. This is why I was born. It’s no great mystery other than we were born to love, and love exists in relationship, so you better have a lot of relationships if you want to love big.
Q: Tell me about your faith background and how you got into the work that you do.
My faith background is in the United Methodist Church. My parents actually met in the choir.
I grew up in Durham during the civil rights movement. That was my first exposure to suffering and injustice. Our history of racial injustice is a history of crimes that have never been, I think, admitted to, much less repaired.
The Vietnam War really formed me as well. And then I went to Duke and I completely left the church. I had only seen a part of it, really. And then I came back.
Q: What made you come back?
There’s a lot of good there. I hope I’m quoting him right, but I think John Wesley said if I die with pennies in my pocket -- I’m paraphrasing it -- then I have been unfaithful to my God.
I think that is just so fantastic. That just trips up the ego, and it makes so clear where our security comes from.
Q: What response do you feel is appropriate to the recent Trayvon Martin verdict?
What I know would help me would be a community conversation.
One thing that I’ve found is very helpful is to gather with people who perceive harm or experience anger or frustration -- which we should be feeling regardless of the verdict.
I really want to listen to what other people have to say. Because I think that it is in listening and it is in the establishment of shared values that that kind of guidance -- and I would call it a holy guidance, actually -- is revealed.
Read more »
Rethinking 'Outreach' by Catherine Caimano
Catherine A. Caimano: Rethinking 'outreach'
The problem with 'outreach' is that it is 'out there,' and often presumes that we have no needs 'in here,' writes a denominational leader. But we are called to be near, to serve our neighbor both far away and in the next pew.
Whenever I ask congregations to tell me about their ministry, they almost always start by talking about “outreach.” Whether the parish is large or small, rural or urban, members tell me how they give out food and clothes, donate money to nonprofits and conduct Vacation Bible School for neighborhood kids. They tell me about their committees -- even the ones that have only one or two members -- and the many events and programs they manage.
But more and more these days, they also talk about frustration and exhaustion. It’s the same people doing the same ministry over and over, they say, the same programs and large events staffed by the same handful of volunteers. They believe deeply that the church should “do outreach,” but everyone is busy and overcommitted. The result? Much less gets done by the few who keep giving more.
Sometimes I wonder whether we should just stop. Stop trying so hard. Stop doing the same things hoping for different results. Stop “doing outreach” -- at least as we now envision it. More precisely, I wonder whether we should take a step back and rethink our understanding of “outreach” and how it fits within the context of church and ministry.
The problem with “outreach” is that it is “out there,” somewhere far away. Jesus and his disciples, however, in their ministry, were close enough to touch. They served their neighbors; they healed people whose names they knew or with whom they spoke.
For us, “outreach” is too often about packing food or sending resources and money to others. To be sure, such help is needed, but rarely are we asked to actually know and be with those neighbors in need. Though we might spend time with them as part of our “service,” we are never truly with them. Not really.
“Outreach” too often presumes that we have no needs “in here.” Although most Christians I’ve met have great compassion for others, they -- we -- are often reluctant to know about, are even secretive about, the needs in our own communities. The priest might know who has lost a job or can’t pay the medical bills or whose house is in foreclosure, but not many other people do. Not those who share a pew with them, who pray alongside them, who receive the same bread and wine.
Because those matters are private. Because we are ashamed. Because we are afraid.
As we seek to serve the needs of others, of those outside our congregations, maybe we should also try to do better at knowing and sharing the needs of those within. We are called to be near. “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus was asked. A neighbor is “one who is nigh,” one who is near.
We are called to serve our neighbors. We are called to be near enough to others to understand their needs, to bear their pain, to truly offer ourselves. Do we know the needs of our neighbors -- at home, at church, at work, even in our families? Are we willing to ask?
Being near, however, is scary. Whenever I ask church people what comes to mind when they hear the word “outreach,” the first thing everyone says is “soup kitchen.” Why? Because the average person in the average pew is far away from the average person in the average soup kitchen.
That person in the soup kitchen could never be me. Therefore, I never have to confront the needs of the kind of people I know, or even my own needs. I don’t have to know how needy we all are.
“Be not afraid,” Jesus said. We don’t have to fear the stranger, that person whose life could not seem more different from my own.
Receiving is even scarier. Christian service confronts us with the reality that each of us will likely be poor and vulnerable sometime. We are called to be as open to being served as we are to serving.
Learning to be vulnerable enough to give and receive is ministry. It’s not a ministry that can be easily quantified -- like the number of meals served or mission trips completed -- but it is one that is at the heart of what church is for.
The Christian community is not only a place where we worship God but also a place where members take the time to really talk, listen and reflect on their own lives and on the lives of others. It is a school where we learn to speak truth in love. It’s where we learn, by being neighbors, that all are neighbors, willing to share each other’s burdens. It’s where we learn to erase the boundary between “out there” and “in here.”
Caring for our neighbors, whether in the next pew or far away, doesn’t always require organized programs. In fact, in many congregations today, more energy is expended organizing and scheduling “outreach” programs than in actually doing the work of ministry. Sometimes feeding the hungry is as simple as buying or preparing a meal. Sometimes visiting the sick is just that. These are no less ministry for not being organized in the name of the church, or any other organization.
“If you love me, feed my sheep.” There are many ways to feed others and to be fed. There are infinite places and ways to serve others and to be served. But there is only one place to learn what the words of Jesus mean.
Church is not just another organization to do “good work.” It is a religious community for forming disciples. If we do better at that task, then maybe we will start to see that people “out there” who are hungry and homeless are also “in here,” with us, part of us.
And maybe our communities will grow until we really are all neighbors, all of us, whatever our condition. As Christian disciples, we will still be called to give and receive. But there may not be any more “out” to reach.
Read more »
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