The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian in Community
I have been volunteering regularly at The Mission for a bit over two years now. For those who are not familiar, it was started several years ago by Vineyard Rolla, and still operates out of rented space in their building. (Their pastor also serves on the board of directors, so there is still a close relationship.) It was originally formed to fulfill a specific need: the high cost of laundromats made clean clothes a luxury for some people in the community. Soon after, showers were added to help the homeless for whom clean bodies were also a luxury. Over time, services grew to include snacks, then hot meals, then overnight shelter during the winter. I started as an overnight volunteer, then when spring came in 2018, I began cooking lunch on Fridays, a day when there previously had not been services. Since then, Saturday meals have been added so that The Mission now operates seven days a week.
In January 2018, The Mission hired its first full-time staff member, Ashley Brooks. The number and roles of staff have grown since then. Not only do they care for people’s immediate needs, but also they facilitate connections to other services and other organizations so that people can begin to work their way out of homelessness and poverty.
The growth has been entirely organic. Of course there is strategic planning, but for the most part, the people in charge (board of directors, staff, and volunteers) watch what’s going on and what the needs are in the community, and respond in a caring way. It’s a hard job, mentally and emotionally. Most of the patrons are at a low point in their lives; when they get past that low point, they no longer need the services provided, so they don’t come around much. Often the patrons have untreated health issues, both physical and mental, that nobody at The Mission is really qualified to treat. I volunteer for just a few hours a week—I can’t imagine being a full-time staff member always burdened by the troubles of the patrons.
The Mission’s success is based on love. As I said, there is strategic planning, but always in response to the needs of the community. The alternative is to imagine what the community might need and build something that would fill that imagined need. That would be self-defeating. It would be like the apocryphal story of Marie Antoinette thinking that peasants without bread could instead eat cake. As Bonhoeffer said, caring more for your own vision will destroy the community you want to help.
I have three or four other projects in my personal life to which this principle applies:
- My home church, First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. We have an aging congregation and an aging facility that does not really serve our needs. The building is all stretched out over a hill, so that there are too many stairs for people who have mobility issues (let alone the distances involved!). I think the sanctuary was designed by a sadist, or else someone criminally insane. But I suppose none of that matters if the congregation continues to shrink due to the age of its members.
- The church where I preach, First Presbyterian Church of Cuba. They have similar, but worse, membership challenges. They do not have an installed pastor, which is why I am able (and needed) to preach there.
- Common Call Campus Ministries. This is a collaborative effort by FPC Rolla, Christ Episcopal Church, and Hope Lutheran (ELCA). We have struggled to maintain active operations. In the past few years, we have twice been reduced to a single student member. We have more than that now, but not much. I struggle to know what students really need and how CCCM can provide it.
- The LGBTQ+ community in Rolla. For a few years now, I’ve had ideas about ways to serve this group. It is essential, though, that my voice is the quietest in many cases. I am not queer myself, so I don’t really know what is needed. A small group of us are working on an event tentatively titled LGBTQ+EDU, targeting October 3. It will be educational, targeting prospective allies in the community and hopefully catalyzing further activities. For example, we have talked about having monthly follow-on events. I would ultimately like there to be a queer community center in town, but that’s further down the road. Like The Mission, we need to grow organically. We need to have a group of people who are connected to each other, at least tenuously, with identified needs that we will fulfill, rather than just a “build it and they will come” attitude.
In a larger sense, the Black Lives Matter movement has some of the same challenges. It is essential that the loudest voices are Black. White people need to grow in their love of the Black community, and Black individuals, and to listen to what they are saying. We are the ones who need to change, but we don’t know how. We need to listen and learn, rather than assuming Black people are exactly like white people with darker skin, with the exact same experiences, needs, and desires. White people cannot simply imagine what Black people might need, in some patronizing way. We need to see the world and ourselves through their eyes.
Love, true love, requires humility, a recognition that other people are different in ways we do not know and cannot even imagine. Each person is loved by God for who they are, so we must also love each person for who they are, not who we think they ought to be.