faith in action

The boys (and girls) in blue

Last year, I visited the United Methodist Building for the first time as a Micah Corps intern. Each year the group from the Great Plains pays a visit Washington, D.C., to learn a little more about advocacy and what the United Methodist Church is doing at a general level. This week they came back, bringing their blue t-shirts and a little nostalgia with them.


One of the first things you learn as a Micah intern is the difference between mercy and justice. Just in case you haven’t heard, let me give it a quick rundown: Mercy is like giving a hungry man a fish, but justice is teaching the hungry man how to fish and then also making sure that the man has equal access to a lake and fishing resources. Just giving the man a fish does solve the immediate problem, but the man will still be hungry tomorrow. Teaching the man to fish and making sure he has equal access opportunities not only benefits him on a long-term basis but also the community as a whole.

Both mercy and justice are necessary, yet mercy ministries are by far the more popular. It makes sense– positive change is instantaneous, mission trips are almost always accompanied with a chance for tourism, hearts are touched on both sides, etc. But what about justice work? It’s not very often that you see positive change after one week of hard work, but we need justice ministries if we ever hope to seriously eradicate systems of injustice. Not only that, but the church should be so eager to advocate for and with those whose voices cannot be heard that it is repeatedly at the forefront of the discussion. Yet, for some reason, there has been visible pushback to The United Methodist Church’s stance on immigration, which says:

We call upon all United Methodist churches to welcome newly arriving migrants in their communities, to love them as we do ourselves, to treat them as one of our native-born, to see in them the presence of the incarnated Jesus, and to show hospitality to the migrants in our midst, believing that through their presence we are receiving the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The church has always made it a point to take some sort of caretaker role in society, providing shelters, schooling, and more. Help has not always been requested, and there are certainly instances in which the church did not take that role in good faith, but at the root of it all is a sense that the church is a capable guardian and it has a responsibility to act as such. That sense is still there; I can personally recall multiple occasions in which the local police directed hitchhikers to the church parsonage because they needed help and they knew that the pastor could figure something out for them. So why must that come to an abrupt halt? Why shouldn’t the church continue to work for justice? The verse Micah 6:8 (NRSV), from which Micah Corps takes its name, says, “…and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

The Lord is only asking us to do three things. How could we mess that up?