Thirty
On Helping Others
“Hello pastor, my children and I are at the Fireside
Motel and we are stuck. We’re trying to get to my
parent’s home in Portland and the car won’t work. We
haven’t eaten in two days and we’re out of money. Can
you help?”
“Kent, I need about $400 to pay the rent. I’ll be
glad to do some work around the church if I can have
the money.”
“Pastor, my neighbors are out of work and their
kids need food money. Do we have a benevolence
fund?”
Every pastor is familiar with requests like those
above. For the small church pastor, especially, these
are some of the most agonizing of all situations.
The subject of this chapter is how giving might be
a blessing and a ministry, not a curse. Here are a
few ideas on helping others.
Miller Avenue Baptist Church is located on Miller
Avenue in Mill Valley, one of the main streets of our
town (about 13,000 people). It is a busy street and I
keep the front door open. I open it up in the morning
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and I close it in the evening. Anyone may come in and
pray and read the Bible. There is a small table in the
foyer with a rack that is generally filled with free
literature along with some Bibles.
Our building is small. My office can easily be seen
from the foyer; it has the word “Pastor” over the door.
The result is people will occasionally knock on my
office door hoping to receive some kind of assistance.
In times past we had a pastor’s or benevolence fund.
We put $50.00 a month into it. By the end of the first
week, generally, the fund was exhausted. If the church
committed $500.00 a month to a benevolence fund,
the money would be gone in a very short time.
Let me illustrate why I feel a benevolence fund is
problematic. The given: $50 (or whatever) to give out
each month. A person asks for some help because they
are in desperate trouble. The $50 is now gone. The
treasurer will not replenish the fund until the first part
of the coming month. Then another person comes in,
someone in the church for instance, and now the pastor
has to report that the money is gone. What suspicions
or feelings of rejection might be generated in the mind
of that member of the church family?
Our church council gives me permission to give
up to $100.00 away without their approval if there is a
genuine need. (I recently exceeded that amount and
got into some trouble.) But I do not like to have such
authority. It is so difficult to determine the authenticity
of a situation since there usually is no time or reliable
means to make inquiries. And certainly, there is no way
to run all of the requests for money though the church
council. If the council investigated all the requests for
benevolence, there would be little if any time left for
other matters.
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On Helping Others
My solution is to only give my money away. I
generally have a five or ten-dollar bill, or maybe even
a twenty-dollar bill, in my desk that I can give. It is
very hard for me to give tithes and offerings to people
who could just as easily be telling me a story. But I will
give a little of my money away.
And I give it away; I do not make a loan. Giving a
loan, particularly to somebody in the church, is a first
class mistake! People, now in debt, have a cloud and a
burden hanging over them. Additionally, people who
get themselves into financial trouble often have that
need exist for quite some time—it is rarely a onetime
fix.
It has been my unhappy experience that a debtor
will leave the church with nothing more than a note
saying they will pay the money back as quickly as
possible. I’ve had that happen enough that I learned
not to loan money. When money is handed out to meet
a need, it should be a gift, whether the money is given
to a person in the church or to a stranger who knocks
on the door.
I don’t mind giving away a five or ten-dollar bill.
And I’ve heard everything: transmission broken down,
engine blown up, electricity turned off, no food in the
house, operation desperately needed, severe toothache,
on and on. My money is not going to make much of a
difference in such a case. I do have a list of
organizations, public and private, that may be able to
provide additional assistance. But I do not make a
judgement on the worthiness of the need. Even when
I think I am being taken, I will often hand over a fivedollar
bill.
Sometimes I must simply say to a person in need,
“I wish I could help”. And I mean those words; I wish
I could fix the world and make all the pain and suffering
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go away. I am doing little more than taking note of the
person’s need and expressing the desire that if I could
I would do something to alleviate the problem.
I set aside roughly $50.00 a month of my own
money that I use for either offerings (giving to people
who ask for it) or I will buy things so I don’t have to go
to the treasurer all the time. Very few people know I
do this, but it has served me well for 15 years.
My favorite way of helping others is to do practical
things. Later I suggest that pastors have a pickup truck;
indeed, one of my specialties is moving and hauling
things with my truck. Sometimes a seemingly small
thing can be a great blessing. I recall a person who
needed to take dozens of plastic bags full of garbage
and other debris to the dump. The job, completed in
an hour, turned out to be a great time of fellowship.
Experienced pastors understand the “ministry of
presence”. Being there, only being present, is
sometimes the entire ministry that is needed, or
wanted. In my earlier years I was a persistent advice
giver. Now my aim is to avoid giving advice even when
it is asked for. All my supposed wisdom and profound
insight may serve only to get in the way and obscure
issues. My concern is to listen and reflect back what I
hear. Pastors are not therapists or social workers though
we dabble in both; it is better to be a loving and caring
friend who can lift needs up to the throne of God in
heartfelt prayer.
We will not be able to fill every need. The reality
is we may not be able to help even in desperate
situations. After we have done all we can we may yet
feel like we’ve failed. Hardly a week goes by but I am
confronted with a sense of inadequacy in the face of
human need. I can’t sell the building nor move
everyone into the parsonage. I am learning to face my
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On Helping Others
limitations and, at the same time, not succumb to guilt
or despair. We will always have the poor and hurting
with us, and we will do our best for them, as we are
able.
It is probably clear that I am far from an expert when it
comes to human need.
Do you have ideas on how to strengthen this chapter,
perhaps some ideas on dealing with a sense of failure
and inadequacy when we have no resources?