Our congregation is the recipient of an ELCA World Hunger grant. We use these funds to serve meals out of three programs at the church:
Ozark Atoll’s event-focused meals in the Marshallese community;
weekly meals with the mutual aid organization May Day serving meals among the unsheltered at local parks;
and a monthly Sunday suppers program, which serves a monthly meal in rotation with other congregations in a church at the heart of a food insecure neighborhood.
We decided to take our staff team to the annual ELCA World Hunger conference this year. Albious and Jessica lead profoundly impactful hunger ministries. Jessica founded the international Little Free Pantry movement (the first LFP anywhere went up on our church driveway), and Albious directs Ozark Atolls, supporting the Marshallese community in Northwest Arkansas.
This happened to be the 50th anniversary of ELCA World Hunger.1
At the 50th anniversary celebration of ELCA World Hunger, a conference host asked us to raise our hands, and then keep them up, for the years we’d been supporting ELCA World Hunger. I kept mine up to the 45 year mark, remembering the card stock I’d used in first-grade Sunday school during the Lenten season to stuff quarters each day as our Lenten almsgiving discipline.
We used various containers over the years collecting coins for hunger, from cardboard boxes to jars to the tubes that resembled Tootsie Roll Candy Banks.
As a child I imagined hunger as primarily an international phenomenon. Our Lenten offerings went to feed (in my mind) starving children in Africa. As I learned more, I began to understand that ELCA World Hunger did more than just feed people; they also engaged in development work, building wells to gain access to clean drinking water, funding strategies in local communities to build agricultural sustainability, etc.
I did not imagine that anyone right around the church was food insecure. I don’t think I could have imagined that, and I don’t remember it being a topic of concern in the church.
Skip to 2024: Food insecurity in our community is far more widespread than most people realize. Whether it’s the many snack packs the public schools send home over the weekends to keep hungry children fed, or the fact that our Little Free Pantry empties and fills and empties and fills and empties and fills as many as 8-10 times per day… the indicators are clear. Many of our neighbors are food insecure. Almost every day neighbors stop by church, and among the various needs, many are simply hungry.
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Now, I will admit, at the ELCA World Hunger conference I learned the cadence of our congregation’s hunger appeals is different from many ELCA churches. We rarely if ever publish fund-raising appeals for international aid. We certainly think of our feeding ministries as international (Ozark Atolls in particular, but also the global impact of Little Free Pantries), but we don’t focus a lot of attention raising money to send TO ELCA World Hunger.
I came away from the conference pondering the varying impacts in local congregational ministries of a focus on fund-raising for international aid vs. addressing hunger in context.
Mike Rinehart, Bishop of the Gulf Coast synod and my former youth pastor (long ago in a land far, far away—Iowa) offered an opening sermon in which he highlighted that during the 50 years of ELCA World Hunger’s existence, the number of undernourished people plummeting, but that recently those numbers plateaued and in fact more recently the number of hungry people has increased:
this should/could force some difficult question. Most crucially, we’ll have to ask: Will the same practices that sustained us those first fifty years work during the next fifty years?
Even more difficult: Is it possible the very practices we’ve been engaging in to date are now contributing to the reversal?
A lot has changed in the world, including a global migration crisis, climate change, new wars along old/new geopolitical fault-lines, and an economic system that has eventuated in a newly emerging and difficult to address precariate.
In our congregation, we focus local at least in part because we want to fix things. Often what seems impossible to repair in the larger context can at least more effectively be addressed in the local context, and sometimes that’s scaleable.
We prefer to do this work in deep solidarity with community partners. Mutual aid is huge for us.
Attending the conference, I realized perhaps a majority of ELCA leaders attending the conference were focused on raising funds in their local contexts for international aid, whereas our congregation was hyper-focused on mutual aid in the local context and only impacting more international concerns through political advocacy (or through direct, international but localized gifts for specific situations—for example, we sent a large gift to the church in Eastern Slovakia to support housing Ukrainians, because of a personal connection we have to that region).
I believe there is a LOT of work to be done truly decolonize aid, especially international aid, even while I recognize that much of the development work ELCA World Hunger funds is transformative and life-saving.
One of the guest lecturers for the conference, Cibele Kus, highlighted this dynamic in her lecture on the concept of diakonia. I cannot adequately summarize her excellent lecture, but a core point is that we need to reconsider “service” in de-colonial terms, part of the reason much of the theological communion chooses to refer back to the New Testament term diakonia, which is inadequately translated as “service.”
Think about who historically has been a servant, and the class and colonizing aspects of the term, and you can see the problems immediately.
Kus highlighted The Lutheran World Federation study on diakonia, which I also recommend.
Overall, the conference left me reconsidering how we as a little Lutheran Church out on the margins of our denomination might be both more and less distant from our denomination than I have been thinking. It was a dialectically confusing experience.
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A few random insights:
1. Grant-learning: Always make a personal connection with your grantors. It’s worth it.
2. Why Arkansas? (As Lutheran, As Marshallese) Both Albious and I got asked, for very different reasons, Why Arkansas? I always get asked as a Lutheran from the Midwest, and get tired of disabusing Midwesterners of their superior assumptions about the South. Albious always gets asked why the Marshallese moved to Arkansas. The answer is: for jobs, because we bombed the fuck out of their atolls with nuclear testing, and climate change is resulting in dramatic sea level rise.
Settled: I wanted to build these Sacred Shelters as soon as humanly possible on our church property.
Young adult fellowships: ELCA World Hunger has many fellowships to employ young adults for a year in advocacy work. I think our congregation needs to look at this model.
Surprise major presence: AMMPARO 3.0. I was pleased to be able to network with the AMMPARO leadership. Started in 2015, this is essentially the migrant advocacy and sanctuary network of our denomination. As a sanctuary church, we are a member congregation. AMMPARO had a major presence at the conference, and I see it growing significantly in the coming years.
World Hunger leaders encouraged congregations to begin studying the draft social statement on Civic Life and Faith.
Not sure what it was about 1974, but that was that was also the year Reconciling In Christ (Lutherans for inclusion) was started). Just two years prior was the ordination of women in the ELCA. 50 years ago was quite an era.