Our Ministries

Ministry in our community is taking place inside and outside the church - through people's jobs, volunteer work, artistic pursuits, relationships, families, etc. Over the next few weeks, we'll be publishing reflections from people at Druid Hills about their ministries - however they define them. We want to acknowledge, learn from and support the various ways that our community embodies its faith. Look for new posts every Tuesday and Friday, and send an email if you'd like to contribute!

Here's an initial post from Beatitudes Society fellow Emily McNeill:

Back at Union Theological Seminary, where I just finished the first year of my M.Div., I’ve been involved with the Poverty Initiative, a 7-year-old organization dedicated to building a movement to end poverty. That founding mission, which takes inspiration from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, is a bold, audacious vision. The folks at the Poverty Initiative are certainly idealists, but they’re also seasoned organizers who are committed to this work for the long haul. Already in my few months working with them, I’ve witnessed the transformative impact that their coalition building and leadership development have had on people from poor communities around the country.

Willie Baptist, a veteran homeless organizer and the PI’s scholar-in-residence, constantly drives home the importance of developing leaders, not primarily among outsiders who want to help poor people, but within poor and marginalized communities. Through PI’s Poverty Scholar program, hundreds of low-income community organizers from urban and rural areas around the country have gathered to build relationships and learn from one another’s struggles. This network understands the interconnectedness of the issues facing their different communities, and they support one another. This May Day, when United Workers staged a major action to draw attention to worker abuses on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, fellow Poverty Scholars from the Poverty Initiative and Domestic Workers United of New York City, the Media Mobilizing Project and the Philadelphia Interpreters Collective of Philadelphia, and an anti-mountaintop removal activist from West Virginia were all in attendance.

When the Poverty Initiative hosted Strategic Dialogues this past spring about media and religious strategy, I saw even more clearly the importance of these relationships. Not only was the weekend about sharing best practices and planning next steps, it was for so many people a time of spiritual and emotional rejuvenation. The Poverty Initiative, though it’s housed in a seminary and has a number of seminarians and clergy on staff, is not explicitly religious. Throughout the weekend, though, it was clear that for the religious and non-religious participants alike, that gathering was a spiritual community. We were immersed in conversations about the things we valued most and about our visions for how we could create more just and loving communities. Perhaps most importantly, this community shared in each other’s victories and bore one another’s sorrows and fears.

My most meaningful experience that weekend was helping to lead a worship service on Sunday morning. At the end, people shared both requests for support and commitments to support each other. People committed to pray for one another, to share stories, to take phone calls, and to support actions. Many people returned home to deal with intractable problems of foreclosure, wage theft, youth violence, and environmental degradation, but they returned reminded that they are part of a group larger than themselves and have a support system that extends across a nation.