In the Name of Jesus

Ok, so I don’t think I can rehearse the reasons why ministry to the poor really has to be ministry with the poor (or go too much into the difference), but I will tell you how I got there. I had good teachers: John Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople in the late 4th century. And there was Bob Lyon at Asbury. I thought I was taking Greek, but it turned out we were digging hard into the meat of the New Testament, and what grace and discipleship will look like. And then there were the best teachers I had on this, the ones who made the point as Scripture came to life: Calvin and Arvilla Mynhier.

Calvin and Arvilla and their family were my first converts as a pastor. They had grown up under a very harsh fundamentalist faith. So when I stood with them in the pig-pen talking about grace, about Jesus dying for us precisely while and because we were sinners, and providing us grace even after we placed our faith in him, they were just shocked. They felt like they had to be good enough, and since they were poor (they are the most marginalized people I have ever met; their poverty is precisely the range of poverty defined by the New Testament—not necessarily economic, but one that infiltrates the social and personal aspects of life as well), God was not on their side. Or maybe some days they might think that “This is what it means when He said, ‘blessed are the poor.’”

The way I met them was classic. I was maybe two months into my first church. My mentor, Howard Willen, always emphasized visitation, and so as I didn’t know anything else to do, I started visiting, and if no one was home, I would leave a small card telling who I was and where the church was. Long story short, I had shown up at the Mynhier’s trailer and left a card. So anyhoo, one day I am at Fox’s store and this woman stops me and says, “Aren’t you that new Methodist preacher?” which is one of those questions you aren’t sure you should answer. But I was ready. Infant baptism? Free will? I was ready to answer any controversy a Baptist might start with me.

Well, all she really wanted to tell me was that she had a huge garden and could I see that the food got to the hungry? I didn’t know how it was going to get to the hungry, but if you’re Bob Lyon’s student and you don’t answer with a resounding “Yes!” to such an opportunity, well, you might know how to identify the perfect tense of a middle voice verb, but you weren’t paying any attention. So I said sure I would.

Now, back up. When we were moving into the parsonage, Pablo Shafer (a friend from Lexington who was helping us move) says in passing that the high ground behind the parsonage would make a good garden. Next morning, Robert Curtis is out there with a single-bottom plow and bam I have a 1000 sq. ft. garden. So as the summer went along, I had been taking vegetables with me on my visits, leaving them as a gift from the church. Everybody loved it, even atheists would open the door for me when they saw corn, beans, and tomatoes.

Well, Arvilla and Calvin were as good as their word and next thing I know, twice a week the parsonage porch looked like Kroger. Various kinds of tomatoes, lots of beans, all kinds of peppers, cukes, zucchini, corn. I realized pretty quickly that I was not going to be able to get it all out. So I took what I was not using up to the community service center, and it ran out of there, people were so happy to have the fresh produce.

That’s how it worked that summer. The next summer, we got a little more ambitious. There was an article in the paper that said at some point during the year, 20% of the children in Clark County were hungry. Well heck, I knew some of them, and I was pretty hot because the numbers say there are about 1000 Methodists in Clark County, and I said no way. If there were that many Methodists, no one would be hungry (see, in those days, I still thought that if someone had the guts to call themselves a Methodist, not only were they saved and sanctified, they were hard after ministering to the needs of people. I know, I know, I’m naïve.) Surely 1000 Methodists would have fasted until there was enough to eat (because Methodists are supposed to fast two times a week) and surely they would have opened their cupboards. But no. In my own church, some leaders said, “the poor are poor because they deserve to be.” The most decisive thing I ever heard Bob Lyon say was that the idea that the poor are poor because it’s their fault or they deserve to be “comes from the Evil One.” So, the battle lines were drawn, and the honeymoon was over, all because a poor family wanted to make sure no one went hungry.

One year, Calvin raised rabbits and pheasants, rigging up an incubator for pheasant eggs. “There won’t be no going hungry no more,” he said. And his tithes were pheasants and rabbits. Good eatin’.

So anyway. We realize we can do a lot more than a little gardening here and there. So we get a story in the paper about giving produce to the Community Service Center, about how we’ll come pick it if we need to, plant a row for the hungry, etc. Then we got organized into something we called the Food Security Coalition. Arvilla was there with us from the beginning. We got hooked up with other agencies, and pretty soon we were doing more than getting “garden food” to people. Sure, we had all kinds of people bringing food in (and I think I made the Community Service Center people a little frustrated with the bulk of stuff coming), but we were also showing people how to garden, doing nutrition classes, and then two women at the church (Frankie and Cynthia) started a food pantry so we had the whole range of good food to give people. Man, were we praising God for all He was doing through us. Over about three years, we did some good work.

But the powerful thing, the powerful lesson was not what we did, but how. See, in our initial phase of discipleship, we do ministry “to” the poor. That is, we have some program where we show up to volunteer, they show up to get something and bam we’re done. That’s ok, and indeed it has to be done. But where the Jesus life gets real is when you start to form a transforming relationship with the people you serve. And as you witness to them about faith in Jesus, and you call them to be disciples (that is, you don’t want them to just keep coming to you for help unless, God forbid, you like it that way), then they should be finding their own ministries, using their gifts for the glory of God.

Think about it. This work was Arvilla’s work. Maybe we were like Moses and Aaron, and I did all the talking, the up-front work. But it took her giving from her abundance, her desire to see the food spread out to the poor and hungry. How different would it be if I had thought, “their family is poor. I must minister to them because that will make me a good boy,” rather than the way God worked through it: He placed it in her to undertake this ministry, the hard work of planting and weeding and harvesting, and wondering what could happen if…

And now, here I am at The Rock La Roca UMC, looking to do the ministry that Arvilla and Calvin taught me, knowing it works, knowing that feeding the hungry is a process, a plan, a lifestyle in some way, a ministry that is a direction for a church, not a program among others.

In the end, there is no one who knows what ministry to the poor and hungry should look like except the poor and hungry themselves. Set them free in Jesus’ name and watch and learn.

p/g,

Aaron