Why do I do this work?

Practices and Institutions, Generosity and Mission

Why do I do this work?

I worshipped on Sunday morning at Love First, which is an emerging faith community of the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church. It is a part of an initiative funded by the Duke Endowment to create new communities after our disaffiliations, which were due to the embrace of inclusive language, which itself is about God’s unconditional and all embracing love.

Love First meets for worship at Clyde Central UMC, in Haywood County, a location that has experienced three floods/hurricances and a mill closure in the past seven years. Their pastor is Ray Hausler; he also serves Morning Star UMC, and is a student at Duke Divinity School.

Ray Hausler, Pastor of Love First and Morning Star UMC

Ray is a fourth year M.Div. student at Duke Divinity School, in the hybrid program, which means he serves a church, is in immersion weeks three times a year, and meets online with his cohort. I have taught for a few years in this program. Ray is also a Thriving Rural Fellow, a scholarship funded by the Duke Endowment which supports students attending divinity school and at the same time strengthens pastoral leadership in rural North Carolina.

Kelly Crissman is the director of the Pigeon River Cooperative Parish, which is a collective of seven congregations in Haywood County. They support Wider Table, a meal for persons in economic distress.

Love First announced on Sunday that they had served 679 meals on the previous Thursday. This is a very common metric for this ministry. The kitchen in Clyde Central UMC was upgraded thanks to a significant grant from Maple Grove UMC, a nearby church. That grant was given from a trust established by a woman who believed in the church and the community. It also undergirds responses to domestic violence and youth aging out of foster care, all of this in a rural mountain county. Mike Bailey, their pastor, was instrumental in this.

Wider Table is the name of the ongoing meal. It is sustained by volunteers from a number of the churches and was also envisioned by the District Superintendent, Beth Crissman. Love First, which is at the core of it, was the church that Helen Ryde (may they rest in peace) helped to establish, and Nicole Jones, one of our clergy and now the director of field education at Duke Divinity School, was one of the organizing pastors. And I think of Rob Hutchinson, who was instrumental in the design of the grant for his new faith community, and Amy Coles who now oversees it..

I am grateful to Robb Webb, the lead staff person for the Rural Church Division of the Duke Endowment. I was once Robb’s pastor at Providence UMC in Charlotte and laid hands on him as a sponsor when he was ordained a deacon; his mother Annette (may she also rest in peace) was our lay leader and one of my closest friends. And I thank Dennis Campbell, who chaired the division of the Duke Endowment Trustees at the time of the grant, who was the Dean of the Divinity School at the time of my graduation, and who met with Bishop Connie Shelton of the North Carolina Conference and me, and encouraged us.

In the midst of this let me also note the significant grant from the Duke Endowment made to strengthen a new cohort of our congregations, and especially those in the historically black church tradition, led by Rev. Charlie Rivens. That is another story, it is in the beginning stages, and I hope in a year or two it bears the same kind of fruit.

So on Sunday morning I listened to the word, received communion–I am quite sure the man next to me was struggling with some kind of chaos but we connected–and I made some of these associations. The associations are with people, relationships, institutions. And the practices are generosity, servanthood, evangelism, hospitality, meeting basic human needs, cooperation with other churches, word and sacrament, and risk.

This is why I do this work.