Food Pantry, Fathers, & Forming Ministry
Fortuitous June
June gloom would not be the phrase we would use to describe this past month.
Not only was it a joyous time of celebration in our household as our daughter turned two years old—it was somewhat fortuitous. As we have gotten steadily involved in ministry and charitable service, what we have found is a joy that cannot be robbed by any measure of hardship or past season of restriction or discouragement.
Food Pantry
I have only been a part of this local work for a little over a month, and it has already become one of the highlights of each week. There is a great need and opportunity for social action in areas like South Aston. AJ (Abdullah), one of our leaders and pioneer church planters who helped me acclimate, spoke of establishing weekly rhythms of pastoral care, prayer, and social action as a church. We wholeheartedly believe that this sort of relief and development work is the precursor to proclamation and a sheer demonstration of the Gospel message in action.
The work encompasses receiving fair trade shipments, organizing and restocking shelves, and providing care and hospitality to over 120 families from various cultural backgrounds. Interacting with the local residents is one of the most rewarding aspects of working at the food pantry. Many are from low-income/working-class families, struggling to get by and make ends meet. Most households come from Muslim backgrounds, but we also meet people from countries such as Ukraine, Greece, Barbados, Jamaica, some of which are asylum seekers and refugees. We hear stories of mothers using their neighbor’s kitchen to cook hot meals for their six children while others struggle to find work. Our lead pastor, Steve, has advocated for many families looking to access local council services and benefits.
Opportunities to advise and pray with people proceed from robust hospitality. Michael, a local who came in to volunteer at the pantry per his social worker’s advice, got into an hour-and-a-half conversation with my friend Coral and me. He had many questions about God and the Christian faith, and at the end of the conversation, he wanted to give his life to the Lord. From that moment on, he has been praying and reading his bible, hungry to learn about Jesus and getting involved in our local church!
Another opportunity that has come about from our ministry in the Food Pantry is language learning. Many we engage with every week speak very limited English, so the Lord led one of our volunteers, a lady called Cynthia, to start an English-speaking class. The class has seen over a dozen in attendance each Friday morning, and people have begun to refer others to the growing community!
Forming Ministry
Coral and his family have broke ground in Walsall, having been approved by a national level Christain Trust to use a vacant church building in an area of great need. As I mentioned in a recent article, the Lord providentially situated us in north Birmingham, near our lead pastor, the Cook family, and Walsall.
My family and I are participating in the Walsall Impact Group, which undertook projects to prepare the space for church ministry. The work includes demolition, rewiring AV, gardening, and clearing loads of rubbish from a dilapidated trailer, multiple sheds, and a weathered marquee the previous tenant left on the property. Coral has been linking up with other churches in the community while praying for the Lord to provide a core leadership team to staff the church.
Coral’s church is 1 of 5 involved in Birmingham and Beyond’s church planting movement, which aims to plant a Jesus-following community in each of the 69 wards. The building will serve as a hub hosting attractional events to serve the local neighborhood and be the base for incarnational outreach in Walsall to help those in need. It will also be utilized for corporate prayer, formal training, and periodic gatherings of all the church plants for broader team-building.
Fathers
On Father’s Day, Steve read a quote from a friend who leads another church within the larger network of Regions Beyond. The quote reflected on what Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthian church:
“For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” 1 Corinthians 4:15 ESV
“The contemporary church has no shortage of communicators, theologians, strategists, innovators, anointed ministers, and leaders, but first and foremost as we are a family that desperately needs fathers (and mothers) who can reveal the father heart of God and bring through healthy sons and daughters to represent and carry the family name well to successive generations.”
What a list of highly sought-after descriptors and credentials. What a poignant reminder of the importance of fathering both in the natural and supernatural sense. It struck a chord with all the men in our congregation, many of which are church planters aiming to function precisely in these gifts—these modes of leadership and pioneering. Have we forgotten the foundational admonishment of the church as a family of families? Discarding (or in certain ways abdicating) our responsibility as fathers and father figures?
This is the ever-present temptation for men ministering in the harvest field. We want to do right by Jesus as the Holy Spirit permits, remaining diligent in our ministry undertaking and militant in our urgency to reach the lost. Perhaps, even before our wavering fatherhood, somewhere along the way, we have forgotten about our being “sons.” Our ambition has grown in reproach and stretched beyond the intended familial discipleship framework.
By God’s grace, I’ve had many father figures in the faith who have mentored me over the years. If you’re reading this, you know who you are! I can also think back to many peers and younger siblings in the faith who have become brothers and sisters in the truest sense. I thank God regularly for my blood-related brothers, one of which is a constant witness to Christ’s redemptive and restorative work, having been adopted into this blood-bought family that is the Church. I pray for my father, father-in-law, and all of my uncles who have yet to experience the full breadth of the Lord’s transformative work in and through their lives beyond confessions of faith and any perceived or actual social, cultural, political, and generational boundaries. (Acts 18:22-27)
I have now arrived at an age in my own life where I marvel at my two (going on three) children growing up in an authentically Christian household. I also contemplate the impact my fathering relationships have had through the years with the youth and young adults I have had the opportunity to cross paths with in and around the Church. Do I truly see each of them as Paul did when his endearing paternal eyes gazed upon the Corinthians?
If this long list of gifts wielded by the gifted is necessary for advancing the Kingdom, then I pray that we relish in the gifts of sonship and fatherhood. They are, after all, the prelude to any social action or spiritual motion we men strive toward in our multi-faceted and often multi-directional ministries.