IDEAS THAT WORK
Helping the unemployed
Jessica Moffatt with Ruby Galloway Farish
January 1, 1987
HELPING THE UNEMPLOYED
My church members were shocked when they read the Tulsa Tribune on August 20, 1986: "A part-time letter carrier who recently was told he was about to lose his job sprayed gunfire inside an Edmond, Oklahoma, post office this morning, killing 14 people and wounding 6 others before taking his own life." Why would the threat of a job loss trigger such a massacre? we asked in our church. Could a tragedy like that be prevented? What can we do? With renewed determination we continued our plans for a workshop for the unemployed. When it was held four days later at First United Methodist Church in Tulsa, twice as many people attended as we anticipated. Dearly there were deep hurts among the unemployed, both within and without our congregation. But we had begun to find that as a church, working together, we could assuage those hurts and offer practical help. Starting up
The impetus for "Jobs First," our ministry to the unemployed, came from church member Bob Johnson, who was laid off in June 1985. "I turned to the church, even though it was embarrassing," he recalls. "I found out there were seven of us without jobs in my adult Sunday school class. Every one of us had degrees and professional skills. We polled other classes and discovered that in each of them 6 to 7 percent were unemployed. "I wondered if they all felt as I did. I had never been out of work in my life. I was forty-eight, so I didn't know if I could find another job in horticulture or in any other area. It was like a death, losing my job. I went through those stages of grief they talk about: anger, denial, and depression." Johnson and four other members of the class became convinced the church can help the jobless in its midst. First, the class members ...
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