Virgil Gulker says: No more "counterfeit compassion."
In Washington and in state capitals, welfare gurus are examining the ability of churches to develop alternatives to the welfare state. In the churches themselves, however, there is widespread confusion about how to help the poor. Correspondent Amy Sherman provides some perspectives from one of the leading Christian experts in the field.
If American Christians recapture a vigorous role in helping with welfare families while Washington retreats, they will probably do so with models developed by Virgil Gulker, 47, who has spent the last two decades equipping the saints for service.
In 1981 Mr. Gulker founded LOVE INC., a church-based organization that recruits Christian volunteers to provide practical services and emotional support to low-income families. Some 4,000 churches nationwide are now involved in the program. He has also written two books, Help Is Just Around the Corner and Helping You Is Helping Me, which show average church-goers how to reach out. Today in his native Michigan, increasing numbers of churches are soliciting Mr. Gulker's services in response to Governor John Engler's plea to the religious community to help shrink the state's welfare rolls.
Mr. Gulker – whose work experience includes a long stint in prison ministry and five years as the director of Good Samaritan Ministries, a Holland, Michigan-based human-service organization – is convinced that the welfare system needs overhauling. He left prison ministry certain that more effort was needed in preventing the family breakdown, poverty, and alienation that produce so many criminals. His contact with welfare recipients through Good Samaritan persuaded him that the system itself encouraged dependency. Now he argues that welfare offices, from day one, must concentrate on getting clients off welfare rolls. And he thinks the church can help make that happen.
But Mr. Gulker also believes the church must change if it is to assume responsibilities for so many welfare families.
Church leaders must wake up to the practical implication of the sweeping reforms being considered, he says: Pastors are "either not reading the newspaper or they're in denial. They don't see what's coming. I'm saying, people, it's gonna come right to your doorstep. What are you going to do?"
Churches, he adds, need to build systems within their congregations to recruit and train members for meaningful relationships with individual needy families. Mr. Gulker has little patience for what passes as outreach in many churches – opening food pantries and delivering holiday food baskets. Such efforts "demean love [and] counterfeit our compassion by finding an expedient way to express our concern."
The church can distinctively serve the poor, he explains, by promoting relationships in which basic life skills can be taught, emotional support provided, and spiritual transformation kindled. These things, not material goods, are crucial for changing behavior and effecting permanent change. According to Mr. Gulker, "If inviting people to accept Christ is not our long-range goal, then we're simply setting up a different kind of welfare system [that] distributes commodities and continues dependency."
Mr. Gulker's latest effort in training Christians for service is Kids Hope USA, a church-based ministry that links adult volunteers in one-to-one relationships with at-risk kids in Western Michigan's elementary schools. The emphasis on kids is not surprising: The Gulker backyard sports a trampoline, a spacious playhouse, and a badminton net. At the office, he stores his business cards in a miniature "Radio Flyer" red wagon and decorates his walls with cards and posters made by his two daughters, ages nine and twelve.
One of Mr. Gulker's biggest challenges is preparing volunteers for a more intensive engagement in the lives of the poor than they've ever experienced. Kids Hope volunteers often experience real pain in this ministry. One volunteer's child began drawing pictures that revealed she'd been sexually abused. Another ended up with his mother in a shelter for abused women, and a second assigned child saw his own mother hauled off to jail.
Such pain is part of demonstrating true compassion, Mr. Gulker argues. For too long the church has simply given things to the poor without building relationships with the poor. "It's very easy to do wonderful things and change nothing," he shrugs. "The church in our time needs to embrace people that are lonely, hopeless, and broken; we need to love. That's our distinctive. That's where the church can have a profound impact."
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