Lately, ive been inventorying some of my grievances against the church I grew up with. At the time, it seemed awesome that we had a clear mission of feeding the hungry and housing the unhoused. We ran a soup kitchen and a shelter and a warming center.
There was a free breakfast on Sundays if you attended the church service. This seemed reasonable to me because we lived in a very Christian town. I was 16ish at this time, didnt know many people outside of school and church.
Then we took a trip to another church in another city that had a similar mission. They fed the hungry, ran a shelter, and did language tutoring for immigrant children.
If the kids were there on Friday, then we would be taking a field trip to the museum.
But these kids were Muslim, and they go to mosque on Fridays.
This put a really sour taste in my mouth and it colored how I view missionary work as a whole. So when I get back to my city and I get back to volunteering at our shelter, I start thinking about how many people in my city were going hungry because they weren't Christian and didnt want to have to pretend to be Christian to get a free meal.
Probably more than I initially thought. Begin my opinions on colonization.
I then learn about some shelters and missions that actively discourage people from going to non-Christian food banks and some other shady stuff and im like... I can't be the only person who thinks this is weird.
So fast forward. I'm now volunteering for a nonprofit that runs a 'no-questions-asked' food pantry. This project was started because some of our members are food insecure and the local 'resource ministry' makes you submit income information and prays over you, so they wanted options that were a touch less humiliating. We have a little white board on the side of it where people can make suggestions for what to add.
Someone had erased everything that was on the board (it was a pretty full list last week) and written in a request for information about that resource ministry.
It could be innocent. It could be nothing! It could be that someone truly wants information about that place. Though- they are literally everywhere, it would be hard to not know about them.
However- did you have to erase... all of it? I was there doing inventory and checking expiration dates so we could put in an order, but we're going to have to guess.
Anything that does good is doing good. But after looking through my relationship with Christian orgs somewhat carefully, I got that sour taste again.
I hate the sense that we're competing. What i will probably do is put a copy of our resource guide out instead because it also has... where you can get free clothes and stuff.
I am always finding pamphlets and business cards and tracts in our little pantry and its very frustrating that even when we make intentional secular spaces- guess what! Jesus is here anyways. If you want free food, you have to deal with Jesus.
If you believe that good things come from Christ, then the mission is the food itself. You, the person giving the food, should not be proseletyzing to the person who is hungry. The message is in the kindness. This is what I was always taught! You do good things and then maybe someone else does good things because kindness is infectious!
But I was taught that by people who believed that dangling a carrot in front of someone to get them to go to church was right and true and good and godly, so im back to one where im thinking maybe we just give people their dang can of corn.
