Every day churches across the country respond to the economic crisis by supporting families in need, assisting those in search of a job, and reaching out to people on the back streets of America. At no time is the credibility of the church greater and the message of the gospel more powerful as when individual congregations and worshiping communities work together to meet the needs of their own community and the wider world. The Justice Revival that Sojourners is sponsoring in Dallas next week has the simple and challenging mission to be a gospel witness to the city, by helping the church be the church.
Rev. Dr. Sheron Patterson, senior pastor at Highland Hills United Methodist Church and a Justice Revival convener described her own church’s response to this call recently in an op-ed she wrote about the Justice Revival in The Dallas Morning News:
Something is happening at my congregation in the Highland Hills neighborhood that I’m sure is happening at tens of thousands of churches all across the country: Week by week, the line of people seeking food from our food pantry grows longer. Here on the city’s often-overlooked southern fringe, economic security is tenuous as best: One in four residents lived in poverty in 2007, before the national economy imploded. But something else is happening as well. Every Sunday, members of Highland Hills United Methodist Church drive vans to downtown Dallas and return with 40 to 50 homeless men and women who have accepted the invitation to become part of our worshipping community. Our guests receive breakfast, a shower, Sunday school, worship, lunch, clothing, money. God blesses our limited funds to meet their needs.
She goes on to share how their efforts are part of this larger movement to bring God’s healing and transformation to Dallas:
But something greater still is happening at Highland Hills UMC and in hundreds of other churches across the Dallas area. In Catholic churches and Baptist churches and Bible churches and Pentecostal churches, in churches of every denomination, from mega to minuscule, among worshippers of every race, culture, theological and political persuasion, a great movement is stirring. It is called the Justice Revival, and it is about bringing justice to our city – not just social justice, but biblical justice.
The foundation of biblical justice is authentic relationship: not just handing out charity (although charity is vital, too), but walking in humility with those whom – if only we knew it – we need as much as they need us. Biblical justice also means speaking truth to power when power has distorted our economic and political relationships in ways that breed misery and despair.
Hundreds of churches and thousands of people of faith in Dallas will live out the call to biblical justice next week. And they have agreed on concrete goals to create 25 partnerships with the most underserved public schools in the city and to advocate for 700 units of permanent supportive housing for the homeless. In place of misery and despair these people will be instruments of God’s hope and justice.
