Helping Hands Ministries is the beautiful story of a will in search of a way. Thirty years ago, my family lived in this wonderful community as I served First Baptist Church as pastor. Our Elizabeth was a third-grader at the Primary School, our Josh was in four-year-old preschool and Andrew did not seem to be a remote possibility. Elizabeth is now in her 17th year of teaching special education, a pastor’s wife and mother of three of my grandsons. Josh is in his 8th year of work as a physical therapist. He and his wife, Jen, also a physical therapist, have blessed us with two more grands, a girl and a boy. Andrew is still surprising us and enjoys his work in banking. I can’t believe my children are grown. And I can’t believe that Helping Hands, born during my time here, has lived and served and grown for thirty years. I knew it when it was just a kid! Let me share a few memories of those early days.
First Baptist, like many other churches in this area, faced a great challenge in seeking to minister to families in need. We wanted to be faithful to our calling to share our blessings with others, but we also wanted to be wise in how we helped. I was constantly frustrated in my efforts to be both compassionate and responsible in responding to the needs that came to our attention. I didn’t have the time to get to know the families and their situations well, so I wasn’t confident that the needs were always real. I also lacked perspective, because I didn’t know whether we were the first or the tenth community church that helped a particular family. I engaged several local pastors in a discussion of how we could do a better job of helping. The way to improve our ministry to families in need, we decided, was to combine our resources and centralize our information in a shared community ministry that would specialize in learning about a family’s situation, evaluating their needs, and responding to them fairly and compassionately. That’s how the dream of Helping Hands Ministries began.
As I talked to community folks about this dream, I was thrilled to learn that a number of Woodruff area businesses and civic groups also wanted a better way to help people. They, too, weren’t organized to evaluate a family’s situation and respond in the best way. Their interest allowed our dream to grow. Helping Hands would be more than a handful of churches sharing resources to help the community. We would be a community-wide partnership of churches, businesses, civic groups, and individuals who cared for people. I was overwhelmed by how many people wanted to partner with us.
We had a dream but, as always happens, a few challenges stood between the dream and the prize. Officially, there was no “us” with which to partner. We didn’t have an organization. We didn’t have a location. We didn’t have tax exempt status. We didn’t have any staff or employees. At first, we didn’t even have a name! Other than that, things were great.
As we stepped up to wrestle with these challenges, I could have written the words of the worship song, “God will make a way, where there seems to be no way.” There is no other explanation for what happened.
I enlisted a group of citizens from our community to serve as our organizing committee and, later, our first board of directors, though they didn’t yet know exactly what they would direct. As they say, we were building this plane as we flew it. That first group shared a compelling vision and boundless energy for what we wanted to do. I’ve never seen a diverse group of citizens work together with such unity of purpose and harmony of spirit as that group.
Because of my vast legal experience, watching reruns of Matlock and Perry Mason, I contacted the IRS on behalf of our group and received a generous stack of paperwork I would need to complete and return to be considered for tax-exempt status. I am a bit of a writer. I’ve written sermons, Sunday School lessons, drama scripts, and a few books. But that application became my one and only work of fiction. I didn’t lie. I did nothing to mislead the IRS. But many of their questions asked for much more than I or anyone else knew at that point. “Project and itemize your budget for the next five years.” We didn’t yet have a budget, so my answers were a blend of imagination and wishful thinking. But my semi-fictional application had a happy ending, as we were granted tax-exempt status and could allow our donors to write off their donations.
But where would this new ministry be located? We had no money to pay rent. No church had the space to commit to such an undertaking and we didn’t want Helping Hands to seem like any one church’s adopted ministry. Then we saw a news story in that bastion of journalistic excellence, The Woodruff News. I’m proud to say that I wrote a column for that newspaper, whenever the Spirit moved me and Milton Smith had space to print it. The story that caught our attention was that the Woodruff-Roebuck Water District was building a new office on the outskirts of town. What, pray tell, we wondered, might they want to do with their old location on Chamblin Street? After working behind the scenes through “diplomatic channels,” our board attended a Water District board meeting to ask permission to use their old location until they sold it. They very graciously welcomed us to use the facility with the clear understanding that they might sell it at any time and we would have to find another location, possibly within a few months. If my math skills are working well, Helping Hands has now been at the Chamblin Street location for about three hundred and sixty months. The vision and generosity of the Water District gave our ministry a wonderful home.
We had a vision. We had a place. We even had the blessing of the Internal Revenue Service! Now we faced the challenge of finding the most important resource of a helping ministry, volunteers, especially the person who would talk to families and decide what help we could offer. Our first interviewer was a retired pastor and missionary named Jesse Smith. When we interviewed Jesse for the job, volunteer though it was, he quickly told us that he had enough experience in helping ministries to, as he put it, “separate the greedy from the needy.” Jesse also made it clear to us that whether a family received a bag of groceries or not, they would get an earful of the gospel. He very naturally respectfully found opportunities to share his faith with the people he helped. He got us off to a good start and kept us mindful that what we were doing, we were doing in the name and spirit of Jesus.
About the time Helping Hands celebrated its second birthday, I rotated off the board of directors and, soon after, moved my family and ministry to Charleston, SC. Though at a distance, I’ve been cheering you on ever since. I’m proud of Helping Hands. I’m proud of what thirty years of support says about the faith and values of this great community. I’m grateful to have played a part in those early days. And, like the children I was busy raising thirty years ago, I’m so proud of how you’ve grown and the many ways you’re changing the world by being Good Samaritans to those whose lives have broken down along the way.
I turned 65 this year so, like many new Medicare recipients, I’m ruminating about how I’ve invested my life, sorting out the treasure I cherish from the junk that must have seemed like a good idea at the time. I treasure my involvement with Helping Hands because of how long and how well you’ve served the easily and often forgotten brothers and sisters of Jesus. Happy birthday, Helping Hands, and may God grant you many many more.