By Bruce Nolan
Religion News Service
Saturday, July 5, 2008
TIPP CITY, Ohio It is not the fact that Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church sits in the middle of a Midwestern cornfield that makes it notable. Nor even that its pastor preaches in jeans and sandals to a working-class congregation sipping coffee in shorts and T-shirts.
More to the point: Of the hundreds of American churches, ministries and local faith-based organizations that for almost three years have poured themselves out on behalf of wounded New Orleans, few have matched the sustained commitment of this megachurch 15 miles north of Dayton.
Over 2 1/2 years, Ginghamsburg has sent 41 teams of volunteers to help rebuild the parts of New Orleans that were damaged in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina.
They are still coming. Five teams have gone so far this year; six more are booked.
"We'll keep coming until people tell us to stop," said Craig Maxwell, Ginghamsburg's director of global missions. "And we'll keep promoting it, to make sure people know the need is still there."
The Ohio volunteers come out of a faith community so ferociously committed to aiding the poor, whether in Dayton or Darfur, that its pastor, the Rev. Mike Slaughter, 56, regularly admonishes his congregation, "You get no points for coming to church on Sunday."
Instead, the life of Ginghamsburg is mission work, sending church members as far away as Thailand and Ghana "to be the hands and feet of Jesus," one of a store of "Slaughterisms" his congregants quote during breaks from hanging drywall in New Orleans neighborhoods.
"That's our DNA," Slaughter said in an interview. "You love God by serving people. The poor have a special priority with God. . . . If it's not good news for the poor, it's not the gospel."
Like other volunteers, Ginghamsburg workers often talk of being shaken by the scope of the disaster and the depth of need even now. They are exhilarated by the rush of instant gratitude from people they help.
"People at work think we're nuts," said Gale Pence, 57, who works for a building supplier in Dayton. "Let's see, you're taking a week's vacation, paying money to sleep on an air mattress and working for free?''
"And we say, 'Yep.' "
About 4,400 attend services at Ginghamsburg each week, although the number of enrolled members -- people who have completed a three-month orientation class and promised to tithe 10 percent of their income -- is closer to 1,200.
When new members are introduced, they are expected to announce their choice of mission work. They are imbued with another Slaughterism: They are not "volunteers," but "servants."
The difference, congregants say, is that volunteers serve at a time and place of their own choosing; servants obey the call of a master.
"We don't volunteer as a matter of convenience," said parishioner Bruce Heft, a school bus driver who will make three trips to New Orleans this year. "We serve."
The church has so systematized its mission offerings that each year it publishes a glossy catalogue of 11 distant mission opportunities, including Chicago, New York, New Orleans, Jamaica, Thailand and Haiti. Volunteers pick a trip and pay a fee ($275 for six days in New Orleans; $2,999 for 11 days in Thailand), meet a trip leader, become oriented, and go.
Slaughter came to Ginghamsburg 29 years ago at age 27, inheriting a sleepy crossroads church that he jokes grew to 60 from 90 during his first year. Yet Slaughter had ideas and energy and jolted the tiny church. "He's not a nurturer; he's a gooser," said Dena Helsinger, a registered nurse on a recent New Orleans trip.
Today, the church has a $6 million annual budget and employs about 120 full- and part-time staff. It holds five weekend services that feature lavish multimedia technology and upbeat Christian music.
Inside the church, the mood is joyful and dress is casual. Congregants arrive in shorts, grab a free pastry or cup of coffee, chat with friends and wander into an hourlong service. There is no cross inside the multi-purpose sanctuary nor soaring above the angular, red-brick building.
Congregants sing, worship and listen to Slaughter's message in chairs that will be stowed away so the building can be put to another use later in the week.
Not surprisingly, Ginghamsburg's culture reflects Slaughter's iconoclastic vision of a community of faith.
"I believe Jesus is absolute truth, but I don't believe Christianity is absolute truth," Slaughter said. "I believe Christianity as a religion has become something significantly different than what Jesus was about."
Although Ginghamsburg's culture emphasizes Scripture and each believer's personal relationship with Jesus Christ, it is firmly embedded in the liberal evangelical tradition that dedicates itself to social justice rather than battling over hot-button cultural issues.
Yet Slaughter says it is pro-life in the broadest sense, throwing itself at the service of the poor and dispossessed.
Since 2005, Ginghamsburg has raised $3 million to aid the victims of the genocide in Darfur, raising more money each year than the year before.
It started four years ago when Slaughter admonished his congregation with typical bluntness that "Christmas is not your birthday. Stop acting like it." He asked them to halve their holiday spending and give an equal amount to the poor in Darfur. His flock responded.
Which illustrates another much-repeated Slaughterism: "Live simply so that others may simply live."
Bruce Nolan writes for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.
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