October 16, 2000
'Don't just toss canned goods and tracts to the poor'
___HOUSTON--"The Good Samaritan didn't just toss a bunch of canned goods and religious tracts at the wounded person on the side of the road."
___Yet that's all many Christians today want to do to help the poor and wounded and needy, said Amy Sherman, urban ministries adviser at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Va.
___Sherman, who has led her congregation to create a holistic, whole-family ministry in aneighborhood of low-income, single-parent families, was a keynote speaker at the Faith in Action conference in Houston Oct. 2-3.
___"We're busy doing many good things, but we may not be changing many things," she warned. The church needs to "go further" in its efforts to minister to the community and meet social needs, she charged.
___"We must move from commodities to relationships."
___She quoted 19th century housing reformer Octavia Hill to say: "We've been too willing to help the poor but not willing to know them."
___In America today, it is easy for most well-to-do people to avoid the poor, to keep them out of sight and out of mind, Sherman asserted. "We are guilty of a rocking chair kind of kindness ..., never getting up out of the rocking chair to do something about it."
___Yet the church has an important message for people who think they have no value, she said. That message is that all people are made in the image of God and therefore have great value.
___God's pattern is to bring himself into the lives of hurting people and then use those changed people to transform others, Sherman said. She encouraged participants to see the needy people in their communities as potential "oaks of righteousness," even though they "sometimes don't even look like a seedling of righteousness."
___Bringing spiritual transformation to needy people will require investing in places as well as in people, she declared, quoting the example of the prophet Jeremiah, who was told by God to buy property in Anathoth, an area under siege by Babylon at the time.
___"Who buys property behind enemy lines?" she asked. "God does."
___The church today needs to make Anathoth investments, because there are no God-forsaken places. ... If we don't do it, who's going to do it?"
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