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One evening as I watched an already worn-out elder struggle to get the ten copies she needed for our council meeting, I started to ponder. Someone’s good impulse brought the copier to our church, but there is something uncomfortable about it, too. Donations like this seem kind but sometimes add further burden to people who are already weighed down. More importantly, they often don’t reflect the generosity of our God. If the “least of these” are Christ in our midst, as Scripture tells us, then why are we giving them our castaways?

I am one of the pastors of a small rural congregation in Michigan. Twenty years ago, our community set out to welcome the wounded—to hold space for those who felt excluded from other churches—and we’ve done just that. But our work is difficult and often painful.

My first pastoral visit to a member of the congregation happened in a behavioral health unit, where one of our deacons had been hospitalized. She has dissociative identity disorder, sometimes referred to as “multiple personality disorder.” One of her alter-egos had slit her wrists and another had called an ambulance. This sort of drama is not out of the ordinary for our church community, and it takes a toll. Many of the people in our community live in the daily crisis of poverty, and many have been through more trauma and suffering by their tenth birthday than I will go through in my entire life.

It is a needy church, and now it has a needy copier.

Only while pastoring a church have I been on the receiving end of donations like this, but nonetheless I have seen this impulse before. While I was working on a farm one summer during seminary, my coworkers and I divided up our harvest each week. The “firsts,” or the best produce, were sold at the farmer’s market because people don’t like to buy funky looking vegetables. The seconds went to those people who had bought shares through the farm’s CSA (community supported agriculture) program. We farmhands were given free rein to take from the remaining unsightly, broken, and marred produce. And what was left over—the fourths—was given to a ministry called “Jehovah Jireh, God the Provider.”

In the wash station, when asked about a wormy cabbage or punctured tomato, the farmer would shout back that it should be donated to the ministry: “Jehovah that ****!” Then the volunteers of Jehovah Jireh would distribute our fourthfruits to the poor, as if from the hands of God.

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Source: Christianity Today

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