Poverty (Photo credit: Teo’s photo)

Ministry WITH the Poor

This blog will be eye-opening for some.  I think the points made by Rev. Paul Slentz,  Pastor of Sixty-First Avenue United Methodist Church in Nashville,Tenn since 1997, are right on.

He starts out with, “A conversation about ministry “with” the poor should start with one important reminder: the poor are indeed in ministry.

“I didn’t always know that this was the case. Growing up in a suburban church, which supported an inner-city congregation with dollars and volunteers, I believed that poor people were recipients rather than doers of ministry. I didn’t have any direct contact with the downtown church and so thought of its members exclusively as people my church did things “for.” That perspective was partly due to my youthfully narrow experience of the world generally. Yet, I wonder if it is not shared to some degree by many middle-class Christians of all ages, most of whom also have limited personal connection with the poor. And since the United Methodist Church is largely a middle-class church, we may be particularly susceptible to thinking of the poor as objects rather than subjects of ministry. But all one has to do is live, work, or do ministry in an impoverished area, even for just a short while, to have all doubts dispelled as to whether poor people are living out their baptismal call to be ministers of the Gospel.

“For the past twelve years, it has been my privilege to be pastor of Sixty-First Avenue United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tenn. Ours is a small congregation of seventy that is made up, with a few exceptions, of persons whose incomes are below the poverty level. Many of our members are homeless ,,,,,,

The whole blog is worth a read.

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