Ministry with the poor and middle-class self-hate

My name is Morgan Guyton and I’m a recovering middle-class self-hater. I also love hanging out with poor people and I want to love it for the right reasons instead of using it to build a Pharisaic pedestal from which to judge my own kind. I just heard a presentation from Alan Rice on ministry with the poor at our Virginia Conference 5 Talent Academy that knocked me flat on my back. I went to the front of the room trembling afterwards and gave Alan my card saying I wanted one day to plant a “Bethany church” (a church led by the poor instead of doing ministry to the poor). This wasn’t just a spontaneous response to a bombshell speech but a dream that has been marinating for a decade. I wrote that I’ve worked with “urban youth” and I’m bilingual and I know how to rap (silly I know but it was in the heat of the moment). And yet the agonizing thing I realize is that God has gifted me to minister with “my own” people and He’s definitely not going to let me be a shepherd among poor people until I get over my white middle-class guilt and my need to be a hero.

Occupy the manger #4: Good news to the poor (Isaiah 61)

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
    to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor
and the day of vengeance of our God. [Isaiah 61:1-2]

Occupy the manger #1: God’s poverty

For the duration of Advent, I’m going to be focusing my blog posts on the concept of “occupying” the manger of Jesus, or making it our central focus in a time when so many things are competing for our attention. Every week in Advent, there is an Old Testament reading, a psalm, a gospel reading, and an epistle reading. I will be looking to these for inspiration as well as Mike Slaughter’s book Christmas is Not Your Birthday, which we are reading together as a congregation. My first devotion comes from Mike Slaughter’s book.

How We are Saved from Being

I know better than to view the comments section of online news articles as a barometer for the moral health of our country, since people who have the need to “sound off” in response to news articles generally represent a more acutely depraved subset of the population. But the responses I read today to an article about middle-class homelessness in Los Angeles offer a helpful illustration of the basic attitude that Jesus came to save us from having.