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12/8/2024 0 Comments Dec. 8, 2024 - Heed the Messengers![]() Old Testament Reading: Malachi 3: 1-4 The Gospel: Luke 3: 1-6 An article in Seven Days magazine this week highlighted a completely different way to “Be Church”. Joe Sexton wrote about Enough Ministries in Barre, Vermont - a Southern Baptist church set up by Dan Molind to serve the homeless and addicted. Molind retired from the military and came home to Barre wanting to make a difference. He became an ordained minister and started his ministry as a soup kitchen in 2014 in a space lent to him by the American Baptist Church. He began to hold services there as a start up church he called Garden of feEden. It started small, sometimes with just his family at worship, but eventually grew beyond their storefront soup kitchen space. His philosophy is simple, “All of us, whether handing out the food or accepting it, are imperfect, even broken, people. Your failings do not define you. The broken still have value. Your former lives are not some imperceptible, irretrievable dream. Saying yes to Jesus can give you a new life.” He believed if they come, we can build it, about his new church. He was right. In the beginning he visited crack houses, drove people to rehab, helped them find housing and, although not a drinker, visited bars to talk to people about Jesus. He has administered Narcan to help save people from overdoses dozens of times. Fifty-six people have died of overdoses in Barre in the past decade. Molind hopes his church can provide help and hope. As his ministry grew, Molind received another gift from the American Baptist Church. In 2019, First Baptist Church on Washington Street in Barre was down to about a dozen worshippers. They offered their beautiful church to Molind who moved his congregation of 50 right in with a number of the First Baptist members joining them. He named it Enough Ministries and moved the soup kitchen to the basement installing blue lights in the bathrooms to make it harder for those still actively using drugs to find a vein to shoot up. The church was very active in helping rebuild Barre, distributing food and help, after the July, 2023 floods. Pastor Molind is a messenger preparing the way for people not only to get to Jesus but to find their true selves, to find life. He purifies them not with a refiner’s fire or Fuller’s soap, but with love and acceptance for who they are. That love then transforms many of them. He feeds their bodies first, then their souls. He has baptized dozens of people with addiction issues by the Baptist practice of full immersion and many of them do feel transformed. As one man explained, “As I came out of the water, something was different. I can’t explain what it was, but something changed for me there. I just respect life itself now.” After each person is baptized, they write their name and a favorite Bible verse on one of the wall’s of the church building. One man wrote simply, “God loves us all.” And yet as Molind’s church grew and attracted new members, having up to 80 people on a Sunday, he felt it became more mainstream, maybe too formal for the dispossessed. So he decided to begin again, hiring Chuck Clark last spring to start a ministry out of the church’s basement for those who were not comfortable coming up the stairs to the more formal sanctuary. Clark continued what Molind had started, knocking on doors of emergency use motel rooms, talking to people at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. He now holds services in Enough Ministries’ Basement in the Soup Kitchen under a large sign that says COFFEE: Christ offers forgiveness for everyone everywhere. Clark can relate to those he is reaching out to as a former cocaine addict himself. He found Jesus and has been working to help plant new churches, like this one for addicts, for a long time. The hope is that this will become a church of its own moving out of Enough Ministries’ basement and into its own home next year. They have received funding from a national church planting organization to make that happen. The idea is to find a building where the people are - maybe next to a Dollar Store - that does not look like a church, as that is intimidating for some. Molind and Clark are voices calling out in the wilderness. Their work in going to the addicted, meeting them and sharing Christ’s love with them where they are essentially breaks down the barriers - the mountains and hills that they felt separated them from not only Christ but hope and help. They fill not only the valleys but the bellies of those in need and they smooth the road to God, allowing those that society has often forgotten, those that might have felt crooked, to stand up straight believing in themselves and God and finding salvation. They are truly messengers preparing the way to Christ. This advent season as we prepare our minds and hearts to recall the birth of Christ, the gift of God’s love to the world, we also need to consider how we are each called to be messengers in different ways. We may not feel the huge calling that Pastors Molind and Clark feel to minister to the addicted or forgotten, but we are all called to prepare the way for God somehow. It might be that we are called to smooth the ways of our own doubts to open our hearts to God who loves us through those questions and contradictions. It might be that we are called to break down the mountain of fear that has been built up in someone who has been harmed or rejected by a church in the past, inviting them in to show them the God we know: who loves and accepts everyone just as they are. It might be that we are called by our faith to help straighten the path to help for those just trying to survive the present challenge of navigating the labyrinth of life’s struggles whether that be the need for food, shelter, strength, or support. It might be that we are called to roll up our sleeves to help in delivering meals, or volunteering at a food shelf, to deliver furniture, muck out a basement after a disaster or to make time to visit the lonely. Jesus accepted people as they were, helped and healed them as needed, and inspired them both to feel God’s love and to share it thereby bringing peace to their own bodies and minds. Our faith similarly inspires us to action. Each of the actions that we do to help others, helps lighten their load and take down the barriers which they might feel separates them from Christ. Like John the Baptist, we all have a job to do in preparing the way for Christ. In a challenging world, we can be the voice in the wilderness, even if it is for just one person at a time, even if for now, it is just to call ourselves out of the wilderness. What are you being called to? What are we as the United Church of Ludlow being called to? Listen for the messages, then be the messenger preparing the way. Amen. Pastor Michelle Fountain
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