Wendell Kimbrough (’07), Ali Phillips (’08), and Will Weir (’08)
2007 Academy Alumni. Wendell is currently working at Church of the Advent, a new church planted by the Church of the Resurrection in Washington, DC. As a member of the ministry team mapping out the future of the church, he is able to combine his passions for ministry to the poor, composing and performing music, and a vision for community renewal.
I had only been in DC for a few weeks when I went to the first planning meeting for the upcoming “urban ministry” symposium. A date had been set and a keynote speaker hired, but most of the details were still in the making. As a new staff member at one of the three churches planning the symposium (The Church of the Resurrection), I was playing catch-up: learning my way around DC, trying to plan a conference on helping the poor in a city new to me, and learning how to partner with other churches. What I got was a crash course in all three and a glimmer of hope about the movement of God’s spirit in our city.
After months of planning, in January, the 2-day symposium titled “Loving Your Neighbor: The Church in the City” took place. Bob Lupton, a 30-year veteran of community development among the poor in Atlanta, was the keynote speaker. He told stories from his experience using skills and resources that were not traditionally considered “ministry skills”—real estate development, property management, and finance, for example—to help the poor turn their blighted communities into desirable places to live. The stories he told were encouraging and welcoming—leaving many thinking, “hey, I could do something like this.”
In the adventure of helping to plan and host this symposium, two big ideas have begun circulating in my mind. First, simply the turnout at the event seems to indicate a movement in the culture of the churches in DC, perhaps nationally. For most of the twentieth century, it seems, “social justice” issues have been the concern of liberal mainline churches, while conservative evangelicals eschewed social justice for evangelism. That general split—which has long been a scourge on the American church—did not manifest itself in the attendance of this conference. We had anticipated fewer than 300 people, mostly from our three churches (Grace DC, Christ Our Shepherd, and Resurrection). Instead, 460 Christians from 42 different churches around the city showed up, over half of which were not from the three sponsor congregations. We saw Christians from churches across the political spectrum with an enthusiastic interest in loving their neighbors better.
The other idea that the symposium brought into my mind is the prospect of continued partnership between churches in DC. I think back to Paul’s epistles that were city-centric, “to the church in Galatia”—not to “the Presbyterian church in Galatia.” And although I understand and appreciate the importance of corporate worship happening in multiple congregations with different cultural nuances, I am now thinking hard about how our churches could continue to partner across denominational and cultural lines in order to better serve the city we share as home. Having tasted and seen that partnership is possible and beneficial, I am now eager to continue in that path, and this is not something that was on my radar before.
I pray that the impact of our little symposium reverberates widely and that Christians in this city and others will begin to explore new models for laboring together for the Kingdom of God. Maybe God is at work prompting this movement even now. I certainly hope so.
Academy Class of 2008. Ali is working on a project to evaluate how a physician’s assistant might best approach community health as a ministry to the poor and marginalized. Upon graduation from the Academy, Ali will work at Christ House, a DC homeless ministry in Columbia Heights, where she can gain the clinical hours she needs before applying to a physician’s assistant graduate program. She recently led several days of class at the Academy on the current state of American health care.
I’ve had a hard time with the phrase “mercy ministry” ever since the fall when I first learned that what I wanted to do—namely, love people—actually had an official title in the church (taken from Luke 10). My frustrations with the “mercy ministry” label reached a climax at the conference on poverty.
I loved being around people who wanted to love their neighbors better, but I couldn’t help but feel a certain tension when people talked about loving the poor as an implicitly separate ministry within the church. Mercy ministry is loving people. We are all commanded to love people and this includes the poor. At the conference Lupton focused on affordable housing and unfair structural conditions that fall within the bounds of what people often define as justice problems. After our weekend in DC, I was challenged to think more about my future as a physician’s assistant (PA) and how I want to love people and advocate for people who experience marginalization within the health care system.
As a future PA I’ll need to continue loving people and I’ll also need to engage the structural problems present in the health care system. How do we advocate for members of our communities denied access to the current health care system? Is health care a right of each person or a gift? And if it’s a gift that not everyone has access to, what should the church do about this discrimination? These questions ultimately funneled down to the more basic question—how should we think about living and dying as Christians.
In Psalm 90, David asks the Lord to teach him to number his days. After reading this Psalm last week, it struck me how much David’s request contrasts the mindset that drives the current health care system to extend our days as much as possible. At what cost does this frenzied search for immortality come? Our hope rests in the Lord and this is the same real hope we extend to the people we love. However, Jesus not only forgave sins, He also healed the lame (Luke 5).My prayer is that I will follow Jesus’ lead in loving people well and offering them the only hope that endures.
Academy Class of 2008. Will is a gifted musician and literary thinker. At the Academy he is developing an assessment of the modern worship music movement and how musicians can worship God with integrity.
In the weeks leading up to the Loving Your Neighbor conference, I had honestly begun to prepare myself for what I thought would be a fifteen-dollar guilt trip. I had already adopted, at least latently, the idea that (a) the Church is no match for the mission because (b) it is made up of people like me, whose sinfulness and deficiencies always seem to form a roadblock on the way to that mission. But the conference didn’t focus on the Church’s insufficiency in the face of a task as large as caring for an entire city’s poor population; nor was the focus on my or anyone else’s failure to care for the poor. Instead, the conference was about God’s absolute sufficiency and commitment to seeing that his will is in fact done on this earth.
Where I expected to experience a critical performance evaluation, I actually caught a vision for and evidence of God’s work in interrupting and overturning the cycle of poverty in our cities. Instead of only feeling guilty about my lack of showing Christ’s mercy, I felt more like had benched myself from participating in what God is already doing. The heart of the conference wasn’t the burden of mercy ministry on our shoulders but the hope we have in God to carry out his purposes.
Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. . . . Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art of pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.
John Stuart Mill
