DO THE POOR FEEL WELCOME IN OUR CHURCH?
Eddy Hall
October 1, 1989
For two years we were poor. In 1979 I tried earning a living as a free-lance writer, a job that yielded high personal rewards, but low and irregular income. As a result, our family entered a period of poverty.
We had just returned to Oklahoma after three years away. We returned to the same middle-class congregation we had attended before, where many of our friends worshiped, and where we had felt at home. But after attending every Sunday for a year, we still didn't feel a part. We were still outsiders trying to get in.
Why the difference between this time and last?
We were poor. As a poor family attending a middle-class church, we had run into a number of barriers-unintentionally erected-that kept us on the outside looking in.
We had not noticed these barriers in the years we'd been there before. In fact, as we looked back we could see how we ourselves had raised similar obstacles in a youth program we had directed in that church. But however such barriers are erected, they keep the poor from fully participating in the church.
The price tag of Christian fellowship
On the evening of our Sunday school class hayride, Ray Thompson was at our house debating aloud whether his family should go. He wanted desperately to make friends, to feel a part. But the hayride would cost them $4.50-and they had no milk in the house for their three children.
We would have been glad to take them as our guests, of course, but this fell during our "poverty years." Our family couldn't consider going, either.
The time for the cars to leave the church came and went, and Ray continued debating. He still had time to drive to the farm and meet the class there, though to go now would cost a couple of dollars more for gas. In the end Ray stayed home and bought ...
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