The following is from Mike Hanck, pastor at Salem Lutheran Church in Toledo, Ohio, and Stanley Smith, a community worker at Salem Lutheran Church in Toledo. Below is a transcript of a presentation they gave together at the Emerge Solutions conference in 2024. Click here to watch the full presentation
My name is Pastor Mike Hanck. I’m entering into my 10th year of ministry in Toledo and at Salem Lutheran. Hello everyone. I’m Stanley Smith. I’m also a community worker in the Salem Lutheran community.
Today we’re talking about utilizing faith communities for the purposes of lifelong accompaniment for people experiencing poverty. What we’re really talking about is the way that a faith community, any faith community, can be a base for engaging in the work that Bridges Out of Poverty communities do. And I think that faith communities are often an underutilized asset, and maybe we don’t know how to incorporate them or that spiritual component. It’s a little bit more of a fuzzy area than trying to figure out how to use a nonprofit or a governmental entity.
When we think about faith communities, there might be some things that immediately come to mind that aren’t so positive and that contain a little bit of reality to them, maybe criticisms that have been earned through time in history. And so when you hear “faith communities,” you might think that it’s an exclusive club, that it’s a closed off group of people. You might wonder, Will I be accepted because of my sexual orientation or race? You might think that there’s hucksters involved or that it’s an outmoded and dying institution. And so there are instances of that in society and in history, but today, that’s not what we’re really getting at. While that’s a reality in our world, and while those are things to be mindful of because we want all people to be well taken care of, we want things to be done well. We want people to be treated with respect and goodness.
In the Bridges work, one of the different rules is how food is used. And so for us, food is used extensively in our community. Toledo, Ohio, has the highest concentration of people experiencing economic poverty. And I say economic poverty because although maybe our folks don’t have a lot of money, they might have other resources. We have very smart people in our community, and we have generous people in our community. But one of the common factors of our community is that people maybe don’t have a lot of disposable income. And so because of that, it’s a beautiful moment to be able to share food, to use food to build relationships, and then also to use food to gather other resources that we don’t think of as religious—all for the sake of community.
Not only do have plants, but we show people how to grow their own food so they can be more self-sufficient. When you’re talking about neighborhoods where people can’t afford to eat healthily, this is a great example of showing where people come in and learn how to cook healthily and live better and live longer.
As a church, what if we started thinking of gathering as a way not to just impose belief on people, but to use resources in a way that’s faithful? I mean to use that term in more of a secular way, but it’s still faithful to the purpose, which is to bless people. But we’re doing that in a more generous and wide fellowship.
Faith communities are made up of people. It’s all about relationships. Relationships are central. And that’s what faith communities are. They aren’t the buildings. And so it’s a revolutionary thought, I think, to say it’s not about doctrines first. If somebody is interested in that, that’s great, but it’s about people first—regardless. And so if we think about it in that way and we’re able to help these communities think about it in that way, and if we engage with them in that way, then we have a wide opportunity to work for communal good and to do the work of all the different resources that are out there.
To sum up, what if instead of thinking about religious institutions or faith communities as closed off segments of the population, what if we started thinking about that in a wider sense: a more generous fellowship and a more generous sense of belonging? And what if we didn’t think that was impossible?
