To Everything, A Season

There was an article in last Sunday’s New York Times that broke my heart and made me wonder about what ministry ought to look like as we move through this difficult economic time.
The article said that “millions of Americans remain out of work.” It said that about 2.7 million jobless people are due to lose their unemployment benefits before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend those benefits.
The article’s author, Peter S. Goodman, wrote, “Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middleclass life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives – potentially for years to come.”
Well, if the “new poor” are going to be in dire straits for “years to come,” the prognosis for the “chronically or habitually poor” has got to be a whole lot worse.
Nationally, there are 6.3 million people out of work, and who have been unemployed for at least six months, the article said. The only time the unemployment rate was worse was in the 1980s.
How, then, do we serve? How do we do ministry?
We as a people have learned to “make do” all of our lives, but my feeling is that we are going to have to step it up a bit. When people do not have jobs, they cannot pay mortgage or rent, they cannot pay utilities or buy medicine or formula or pay their car notes.
It is at those times that people turn …not to God, necessarily, but to the church.
I think we ought to be proactive, meaning, I think we ought to be thinking and planning about how we are going to do ministry as the misery of the people in our community grows as their needs grow. I know that many in our own congregation are in need as well.
We have to pray, think and plan.
I believe that in giving, one receives. I remember listening to my mother talk about bread lines or food lines that formed during and after the Great Depression. The community had to become a community, practicing ujima, collective work and responsibility, and ujaama, cooperative economics, in order to survive.
Mama didn’t know anything about Kwanzaa or the principles of nguza sabo, but she did know that the community had to work together and share in order to survive.
We have been good about giving seasonally, at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but it feels like we are going to have to bump up our outreach ministry, because the times call for it and because it is what Jesus would want us to do.
Those in our congregation in need, please speak up! This is not the time to be proud. But know that we will ask everyone to give, to help, to work in whatever way you can. Collectively, we can get through this difficult time and get the community through it as well.
Who knows but that God has kept Advent for “such a time as this?” One person told me that Advent is “the little church that can.”
We will see, beloved. We will certainly see.
Have a good week.

Pastor Smith