I thought I was lucky when I left my job. I had some savings and no other mouth to feed except my own. Fast forward to now things are really tight but I’m too embarrassment to talk about it so I just joke around. Its also the reason I haven’t mentioned it in church, I just can’t deal with them. Its hard enough when you hear, “what you haven’t found a job yet,” from your own family. So I’m glad stumbled upon your website this month and several of your posts. It gave me a chance to vent and clear my head.

I’ve been reading about how I need to go to networking meets or get togethers. Not sure where they would be or even how to find them. So thanks to this post, I actually tried the third option. It seem like it was going to be a miss but after several tries I hit the mother load. There is junior college I actually went to, that host meetings along with a list of churches in my county that also have meetings. Though a few of them at a ungodly hour in the morning. I have to wait until after the holidays to get started but hopefully its the step in the right direction.

Mori

Thank you for your honesty about the issue of religious support for unemployment. In my present position I deal with people almost daily that have nothing, and are going from church to church trying to make ends meet. I also have strict guidelines that I am required to follow when deciding when to help others, but I also have to do much of it by “feel”.

As a member of a church staff, I have seen how many of my collegues respond to unemployment, and it’s not pretty. Many want to either not deal with it at all or want to just throw money or food at them quickly (or tell them they have neither) and get them out of the way. Everytime someone comes into my office I have a painful feeling in my stomach, knowing that without this position I am not far from being in their shoes. I also am not only willing, I many times take part of my day to sit and listen, pray with, and find solutions that I can to help out.

That’s not to say that our congregation is the best at dealing with the issue of unemployment. We do help in many ways, but many times at an arms length, or at least in a way that is as “clean” as possible. We host a homeless shelter in conjunction with other churches during the winter months, but after our two weeks are up we pretty much go back to our ivory towers and try to forget the problem exists.

The reason I personally got involved was because of both my position and my heart. I believe that we must do all we can to help, but I also know that we must be careful to not be an enabler. We need to be available to listen, to hear the struggles, to help materially as we can, and to, if nothing else, help to make the person regain some of their pride and honor. That can be done by truly listening, truly being “with” that person in their struggle, and strive to find ways to help where we can.

I have seen over the past year three situations where persons have not only begun to put their lives back together, but also begin to break the cycle of homelessness and unemployment. Is it an easy struggle? Absolutely not. Is it time consuming? Absolutely. But, is it worthwhile? In many cases I believe it is, but unfortunately not in all cases.

For the church to be the church it needs to be available to help those who are hurting, and I feel the church must do that to be in keeping with our understanding of the Gospel. How will that play out? In many different ways, but hopefully always in one that is affirming and supportive.

Barry

I would encourage anyone who has not gone to a networking group because they thought it was going to be a prayer session to call the leaders of the group and find out how the group operates. I do think think that anyone would object to starting a networking meeting with a prayer ( some of the groups do and some dont) but in any case I have found the prayers inspirational even if they have a different orientation than what I am used to.

Greg

Chris – still plenty of embarrassing things I haven’ written about. I didn’t want to write this post earlier… it wasn’t until I had a reader ask me about it that I realized how important the information could be for someone else

Billie – that is an excellent resource… I’ll blog separately about that later. Thanks for the kind words (note to everyone else, Billie Sucher is a career expert, I reviewed her book last year, and she has been one of my heroes since!)