Deacon Reflection: A Two-Way Bridge

By The Rev. Beth McKee-Huger

Last month our Old Testament reading was from Jonah, how God called him a second time to go to Ninevah and tell them that “if you don’t change direction, you’ll end up where you are going.” “If you don’t repent your sins, you will be destroyed.” People listened, repented their sins and God forgave them. Jonah did not deserve any credit for that repentance and forgiveness; he just spoke God’s message—finally—after previously running the other way.

I was ordained a deacon almost 25 years ago—finally--after some hesitation to answer God’s call to ordained ministry of spreading the good news of God’s Kingdom, of lifting up the lowly and telling the mighty “if you don’t change direction, you’ll end up where you are going.” My ministry is advocacy for everyone to have good places to live, and if our communities don’t change direction with the gap between people’s incomes and the cost of housing, we will end up where we are going: increasing homelessness, illness and injuries from substandard housing, and instability.

As a deacon, I am a two-way bridge between the people who are hurting in the streets and the people in the pews who are wanting to do something but aren’t sure what or how. For decades as a social worker and community organizer, I have been privileged to have “street cred”—credibility with people experiencing poverty and maltreatment. As a deacon, I have been humbled and grateful to gain a voice in the church and broader community so I can carry the message of people’s pain to those who have the authority to do something about it and help them create new ways of responding.

For example, one group of tenants in seriously deteriorating apartments had the courage to tell their stories to college students making a video called “If you could hear us, would our voices matter?” Of course their voices and lives matter to God, but they haven’t mattered to their rental owners or the decision-makers who disregarded them until some of us raised our voices to amplify theirs. Now a new buyer has assembled the financing to purchase and rehabilitate their apartments. As, gradually, policy-makers and institutions begin to actually hear the voices of those surviving in uninhabitable situations and begin to change direction, it is God’s work of forgiveness. I am just the messenger.

One Sunday several years ago I was reflecting on the day’s reading about God’s call to prophets to announce God’s warnings to the people; if the people don’t heed, at least they will have heard the message. I had been asked to write a monthly column for the Greensboro News & Record and I heard God saying to accept this way of speaking out for God’s children in need and to a much broader audience than sermons on Sunday mornings.

Over the past four years I have had the joy of visiting most of the parishes and missions in the Greensboro and Winston-Salem convocations, joining Bishop Anne, Bishop Curry, Bishop Lee, and now Bishop Sam for confirmations, ordinations and celebrations of new ministries. I have fallen in love with every church I go to and thank God for the grace you share with your communities. Worshiping God with you fills me with gratitude for our ministry together. I am grateful that God kept patiently nudging me, like the story of Jonah, until I answered the call to become a deacon.