Let’s get the government out of this work, and let’s somehow regain the Biblical principles of mercy ministry and let the 250 million evangelical Christians…get our collective acts together and reclaim our rightful responsibilities in mercy ministries.

(NB:  I was inspired to write this Op-Ed after reading the WSJ article on Paul Ryan and the Catholic view of the poor.)

I was never a very good Roman Catholic.

Christened (sorry, I don’t believe that was a baptism) in Christ the King parish in the Redford area of Detroit in 1938, I attended Mass regularly with my mother and, while she was alive, my Lithuanian grandmother who lived with us for some time.  Once I was about 8, I started walking one afternoon a week to a newer, small parish closer to home (whose name I cannot remember) for Catechism classes.

I hated those classes.  I would walk to that church with a knot in my stomach every week.  Back then I thought it was the nun’s fault, because of their Marine-like discipline in the classroom and because of their absolute refusal to answer any question from any student that would even slightly stray away the church material.

I lasted long enough to take First Communion, but I vividly recall eating some spice drops that morning purposefully to break the required fast!  I didn’t make it to confirmation.  Once I felt I could get away with it, I just refused to go to church any more.  My mother and I never had a good relationship, and I believe some of that stems from the fact that she told me my refusal to go to church broke my grandmother’s heart and that’s why she died.

OK, enough of the therapy session, let’s get to my point.  The one thing I most clearly remember from catechism classes was the teaching (spelled out in The Aquila Report article I just posted) that it was the role of the church to help the poor.  And every Sunday I went to mass I would take with me whatever money I had left from my weekly allowance and put it in the poor box – never in the collection plate.

When I became a Christian (sadly, 18 years later) and began to understand the role of the Church in society, that concept was easily grasped again.  But my early experiences with Protestant churches (most of them PCA, but I have served temporarily in a variety of venues including Conservative Baptist, CRC. RCA, RPCES, and OPC) is that there was no passion to care for the poor.

I learned this first hand as a Navy Chaplain.  During my first two years of active duty as a Chaplain, I was assigned to Destroyers at the San Diego 32nd Street Naval Station.  I had a unique assignment with a squadron that never deployed—their role was to integrate a new class of destroyers into the fleet and get them ready to deploy—so I had more time than most of my contemporaries to work at the Dependents Assistance Board.

Unlike the Air Force and much of the Army, in the Navy the Chaplains always deployed with their units, leaving the families back home.  So those of us based back home worked together to provide assistance.  The Dependents Assistance Board was located one block inside the main gate for easy access, and our job was to provide help to families of units that were deployed (e.g., gone for six or more months at a time).  My second year I served as the Director of that unit.  It took 3 chaplains each day, the director and two volunteers from other commands on a rotating schedule, to meet all the needs.

Dependents would fill out a simple intake form as they waited their turn.  Then they would get time with a chaplain.  The form asked for any religious connections.  And there was nothing we would be happier when the wife/mother would enter the office and give us the intake form than to see the word Mormon or the letters LDS in that religious block.  We would immediately smile, tell the client we needed to make a quick phone call, and dial up (my phone had them on speed dial) the local LDS Stake President.  (Stake is their term for a region, and I recall there were two primary regions that covered most of the Navy families in the San Diego area back then.)

When the call was placed to the Stake President, I would say, ‘This is Chaplain Clements at the 32nd Street Naval Station.  We have an LDS family that needs assistance with….’ (whatever the need was).  And we were told that someone would be there within 20 minutes.

The Mormons certainly aren’t evangelical Christians, but they understood the Biblical principle that it is the role of the church to care for the poor.  Sadly, we had no Baptist, or Methodist, or Pentecostal, or any other faith group office to call to achieve the same results.  So the Navy stepped in to take care of its own.

Shortly thereafter I found myself at Norfolk (every chaplain gets to one or the other if not both San Diego and Norfolk home ports) where I first met Tim Keller.  Tim and I were both members of Mid-Atlantic Presbytery.  At the time, Tim was serving as pastor of West Hopewell PCA church in the Richmond area.  He was seeing the same problem of how to help care for the poor and looking for a way to deal with it.  And in his case, it was acute because of the recent Kepone scandals.

For those who didn’t live through the 60’s and 70’s, there was a major scandal about two chemical companies based in Hopewell dumping the remains from an insecticide they produced called Kepone into the James River.  One of the results was the closing of those plants and very high unemployment rate and thus a large number of poor people in Hopewell.  Tim was surrounded by a need and knew that the church had responsibilities.

Most people don’t know (or at least don’t remember) that Tim’s first move along the road to his current position started by writing a key book that brought the attention of the PCA, and soon many others, to the role of Deacon being so much more than taking care of church property.  That it was essentially the Biblical office of mercy ministry.

Tim wrote the first study guide for training deacons in the PCA—a brown loose leaf binder that I used for many years.  That has since morphed into the current Ministries of Mercy that many doing officer training are using today.  In 1985 he also wrote an accompaniment book called Resources for Deacons: Love Expressed through Mercy Ministriesthat was published by the Christian Education Committee of the PCA (but sadly is hard to find today).

No one who knew Tim back then is in the least surprised about his strong emphasis on the need to provide mercy ministries to the poor today – especially since he now lives in the seventh largest urban area in the world (that number surprise you? – read this).    If you or I lived in an urban center of more than 20 million people we would (hopefully!) have the same concerns. (And, as a quick aside, as an expression of my own opinion and not meant to teach – since that would upset my Presbytery – most of us also understand why Tim supports the role of women in the office of Deacon, as do I.)

OK, way too much rambling reminisces (after all, I turn 74 next week).  But I do have a point.  Well, at least I have a question.  It is this:

Where is the evangelical protestant counterpart to Catholic charities?

Where did we go wrong?  When did we lose this Biblical imperative?  Why are there so many hospitals that carry the name Presbyterian (NYC, 4 in greater LA, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Charlotte, Denver, Winston Salem, Albuquerque – from the first 3 pages of a Google search – and probably dozens more)?  Why are there so many hospitals that carry the name Baptist?I found at least 22 in the first three pages of Google searches.

Evangelicals know how to do higher education.  Evangelicals know how to do elementary education, both Christian and home school. Evangelicals know how to do overseas missions, well, at least a little.  Evangelicals are making an attempt to cross cultural mission/church planting in the U.S.  But where are the evangelicals in emergency assistance, in true mercy ministry.  Is the Salvation Army all we’ve got?

Hmmm…  Maybe the Salvation Army is all we have – for now.  The small church I am serving as Interim Pastor has decided to support the work of our local Salvation Army to help us care for the poor in a town with very high unemployment in the highest unemployment area of the Commonwealth of Virginia – the southwest, mountain/coal field region.

I confess I have mostly questions; I don’t have many answers.  But with a couple of candidates for national political office that come from the backgrounds where they do understand the responsibility for care of the poor belongs with the church, not the government, I think my choice in November is clearly fixed.  Let’s get the government out of at least most of this work, and let’s somehow regain the Biblical principles of mercy ministry and let the 250 million evangelical Christians (according to About.com) get our collective acts together and reclaim our rightful responsibilities in mercy ministries.

Who knows, maybe a newly elected President would be wise enough to appoint Tim Keller to head up some kind of commission to get this started!!

Don K. Clements is a Teaching Elder in the PCA and serves as director of the PEF-related Metokos Ministries (Encouragement to smaller churches).  He also is co-founder and News Editor for The Aquila Report.

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