No Strings Attached: Micro-Grants As Incarnational Ministry

BY REV. SARAH HOWELL-MILLER

PHOTOS BY MARCI BRUNO

Rev. Donnell FitzJefferies with a young member of the congregation.

Marci Bruno

When a tornado with winds of 135 mph ripped through Greensboro in April 2018, it destroyed homes, businesses and schools, and left one person dead. St. Matthews United Methodist Church did what many churches do in the wake of a natural disaster — they started a relief fund.

When the congregation at St. Matthews collected more money than they expected, they started to think outside the box. Some of their church members had lost homes or were hit hard otherwise, so Rev. Donnell FitzJeffries and his congregation gave out micro-grants to some of those members.

These micro-grants, of up to $1,000 each, had an immediate impact on the individuals and families who received them.

As FitzJeffries and St. Matthews looked beyond care for their own congregation and saw how the broader community and schools around them had been affected as well, they decided to expand the reach of the micro-grant program.

A member of St. Matthews was the principal of Hampton Elementary School, which was destroyed by the tornado and is now closed. Social workers at the school helped pinpoint students in need, and these children and their families became some of the next recipients of the St. Matthews micro-grants.

This different form of giving affected the church as well, and they decided to keep a line item in their budget for disaster response of this kind.

FitzJeffries notes that with climate change creating increasingly unpredictable weather, we can expect more storms like this in the future. St. Matthews is prepared to meet the need when the time comes.

While some congregants wanted to give to organizations and nonprofits, others supported expanding direct giving to families in need — as FitzJeffries put it, flesh-to-flesh* outreach. These grants were no-stringsattached, for whatever the families needed. The idea is that they see a need and follow the lead of the people experiencing it — so in some cases, that meant giving gift cards instead of cash, since not everyone has a bank account. St. Matthews is in a lower-income area of Greensboro, and their response to the need around them shows respect for the wisdom and experience of those who have the need, rather than a preconceived notion of what would be most helpful.

St. Matthews celebrates Holy Communion.

Marci Bruno

This kind of flexible, contextual response is only possible through authentic relationships, which FitzJeffries says is the most important part of what they are doing at St. Matthews. The church’s disaster response fund isn’t just about the dollars given — it’s about the lives touched and the relationships built. Their goal is to be people who know people, to connect to their community and then connect them to something greater — recognizing that this relational ministry reflects God’s very nature.

Rather than insulating within the walls of their church, the congregation of St. Matthews is going outside and joining with God at work in the world. As FitzJeffries put it, the church is a gathering place, not a locked-in place — and that gathering should, as our United Methodist mission statement says, create disciples for the transformation of the world, not just the transformation of the church. May we all be so transformed to engage in incarnational ministry both within the walls of the church and outside of them.

*Incarnation means made flesh!