The New Chef in Town
As I continue to dig into the work of empowering communities and leading congregations to develop better practices of community ministry, I am finding that the learning curve is a steep one. We often jump out in the work aiming to fix all sorts of problems, only to find that our own expectations are unable to be met. Sometimes the very way we aim to meet the needs of others falls drastically short, and it is those who aim to serve others who become educated.
A new friend shared a story about a meal program she was once involved with in Baltimore. She had been participating in the program for a long time. The idea of providing food resonated with her. She felt that people are hungry and if you can feed them, you are doing something positive in the community. One day she was serving a meal and a man walked up to her after finishing his food. “You soup is too watery and you all have no idea what you are doing. You’re disorganized and this is a mess!” He continued to share with her that he had just been released from prison and had worked his way up to running the kitchen program in the correctional facility. She intuitively invited him back to work with her volunteers and asked him to run the meal program. In just a few short weeks, the man was running the kitchen much more effectively than before and the meal program was considered wildly more successful. The program ran for several more years successfully under his leadership.
I share this story because it causes me to reevaluate how I understand success. What I find successful was not found in serving meals or feeding the hungry, but in helping a person live into his gifts and talents. I wonder if we are often lured into the trap of believing that in order to help someone we must impart some sort of knowledge, skill, or craft on that person. At the core of most outreach or community engaged ministry is this idea that we have something of value that someone else needs. We hold the keys to another person’s prosperity. And yet, what my new friend offered was a story of a person who was perceived to be in need, teaching a whole community how to more effectively run their program. Success was the empowerment of an individual to use his gifts and talents.
I wonder if many of us, myself included, have been doing this whole outreach thing wrong, or maybe not making the best use of our time and talents. We have spent countless amount of hours, dollars, and energy trying to fix problems by focusing on people’s deficiencies as opposed to seeing their gifts and talents as resources. Maybe respecting the dignity of every human being is about drawing forth their gifts and talents so they can be the people God has called them to be.
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