Gratitude and Lament for Coats

We helped more people than ever. Why am I so sad?

This post is more personal than usual and is intended for those who, in some way, have supported our ministry and/or this year’s coat drive our church hosted.

Some words of gratitude and lament regarding this year’s coat drive our growing church hosted here on the Near Westside.

First, thank you to everyone who made this our best coat drive yet. We helped more families in our community than ever stay warm this winter while experiencing the generosity of Jesus. Thank you to our core team members who volunteered their time and energy to serve. Thank you to all our friends at Matchbook Learning who partner with us to serve these families. You are an inspiration to me.

Our church hosts many supply drives of different kinds throughout the year. We believe that the generosity of God through Christ in the gospel gives us reason to be generous while expecting nothing in return. The coat drive is the largest of these efforts and requires months of prep and overtime to make it happen.

These efforts grow each year thanks to your support and the Spirit drawing more people into this church. We serve more people and meet more significant needs with each passing month, including rent assistance, car repairs, legal needs, utilities/bills, and groceries. Because of you, we get to steward kingdom resources in Jesus’ name for the good of those He loves.

Still, as these efforts grow, I find that my heart and the hearts of our growing church are getting even sadder and heavier. I left our coat drive feeling exceedingly sad, even though we served more families than ever. Why? Should we be feeling proud? Should we be celebrating?

I’ve posted here before about my philosophy regarding ministry and social media. Something feels terribly wrong to me about posting the names, faces, and details of our neighbors for others to see. My neighbors’ vulnerabilities and intimate details belong to them, not my social media friends. While most ministry professionals would advise promoting our results, numbers, stories, etc., on social media in order to gain support, this approach seems to us to be unhealthy and unwise.

Yes, our church likely would be growing faster if I made it a point to share these things regularly. However, I remain unconvinced that size, numbers, or speed are good metrics for being faithful to Jesus. As my friend Greg recently reminded me, Jesus could heal ten lepers and only one would return in faith (Luke 17:11-17). Indeed, he could feed thousands only to be abandoned by almost all of them (John 6; see verse 66). Faithfulness cannot be measured by worldly metrics but by the integrity of our hearts as we follow Jesus into the broken, sinful, despairing, oppressed places in our communities.

With each passing year, our family and church develop deeper relationships with members of this community we love. We are invited into their joys and sorrows, and they are invited into ours. We know the crises our beloved neighbors are facing. We know their grief and sorrow. We know their prayer requests. We walk with them in insurmountable trials and suffering. We also know their joys, their freedom, and their victories. We know all of this precisely because we have committed our lives to being in, with, and for this community for the long haul.

Mercy, indeed any genuine ministry, cannot be a spectator sport but must result from lives being poured out for the sake of others.

So, even as our ministry efforts grow, our awareness of needs gets even greater. Our hearts are more weighed down. And whatever help we can bring feels increasingly insignificant in light of the many-layered needs our community and neighbors face. It is difficult to imagine that congratulations or celebrations are in order when a few new coats are barely a drop in the bucket of needs for most families.

At Christmas, we celebrate that light has broken into darkness through Jesus (Isaiah 9:2, Matthew 4:15-16). From a human experience, as we follow Jesus, the darkness gets darker, and the light gets smaller. The reality of suffering and oppression - whether socioeconomic or spiritual - breaks our hearts even more. Our efforts in ministry, however “successful” they might seem, are not reasons for self-congratulation but for crying out to Jesus to come and bring the restoration he has promised.

I am thankful for each one of you who supported this coat drive and this church, not because you were told numbers and details accompanied by pictures and faces, but because your heart breaks with ours and longs for people to know Jesus.

I hope your partnership with us, and the ministry of your own local church, moves you closer to Jesus this Christmas, both in joy and sorrow.

Light has and is coming. Peace, Justice, and Righteousness have and are coming. The King has and is coming.

And he’s almost here.

One more word of thanks. Neva the Near Westside Elf is the secret sauce of this family and ministry. This year, she sorted hundreds of donations in our garage in between keeping the chaos of this family of six going. You are loved and cherished by many, especially this gaggle of Heinys.