Skip to main content

Cascades of grace from suspended meals


Ann Morisy's argument - that the rich and comfortable need to journey out and encounter struggle - is very helpful when applied to the suspended meal scheme we run in our church coffee shop.  One one level, this is simply a charitable endeavour whereby hungry people are fed.  We are meeting a need, perhaps not in our immediate area, but in the Borough of Southend: a pressing need for the basic necessities of life among our homeless community.  Morisy argues strongly that churches should not look at these projects simply as 'needs meeting' - there is something more profound going on.

If we as a church see the suspended meal scheme as only a way of providing food to those who need it, then we will seek to do so as efficiently as possible.  Our current scheme could been seen as highly inefficient: hungry people need to travel to us to get the food; we are in an affluent area where costs are high; donating the suspended meal money to a homeless charity which already exists would seem to be a much more efficient use of the money.  The suspended meal scheme has always been about more than that, however.  Giving money is easy; having a meal alongside someone who is homeless is perhaps not quite so easy.  It's perhaps a little awkward and embarrassing.  Going further - maybe getting to know the person who lives a very different kind of life from your own - is harder still.  How do I make conversation?  What if I say something stupid?  We don't have anything in common.  Our coffee shop staff are naturals at making our homeless customers feel welcome, and genuine friendships are developing.  

One interesting observation one of our managers made was that people tend to give more to suspended meals if they are in the coffee shop when one of our homeless customers is there.  A customer will sidle up to the counter and ask discreetly, "Can I please pay for their meal?"  'The homeless' is no longer an alien group of people but someone I can see before me, eating the same kind of meal I am eating.  The vague knowledge that there are people out there who are struggling has now become immediate and real.  And there is something wonderful about acknowledging our shared humanity - our shared need for shelter, company and food - as we eat together in the same place.  

It's not very efficient.  It does meet many needs, however, and not just the obvious ones.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties.  This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks.  The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids).  I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday.  The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children.  I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too.  I decided to carve a simple f...
6 comments
Read more

Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral.  The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness.  During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead.  I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home.  Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that.  But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness?  My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent.  I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity.  I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is? I have hea...
4 comments
Read more

Turn or burn: OCD and evangelism

Recently I came to realise that my psychological makeup, specifically my OCD, had probably influenced my theology and indeed my vocation quite profoundly. I'm an evangelist, which is a word which means different things to different people, so I'll tell you what it means to me.  Being an evangelist means that my principal concern as a Christian minister is for people who don't follow Jesus, and that communicating the gospel or 'good news' to people who haven't heard it a thousand times already is the most important thing I do.  My faith has been nurtured in evangelical churches, and it's probably fair to say that evangelicals place a greater emphasis on evangelism than other Christian traditions.  That's partly because we emphasise conversion and making a personal decision to follow Christ.  In Baptist churches we practise believer's baptism, which means that we only baptise people who have made that personal decision for themselves (which is why ...
Post a Comment
Read more