Can You Help? Yes you can!

Can You Help? Yes You Can!

I once heard it said by a cranky uncle that there are three great evils in the world: organized crime, organized labor, and organized religion. While I am prepared to concede that there is some truth in this, it must also be acknowledged that great good can result from organized religion at least. Much depends upon the purposes for which religious people organize themselves.

If they are organized for the purpose of strengthening families, for promoting peace among peoples, for ensuring that food, clothing, shelter, and medical care reach people who desperately need them, then this is indisputably the sort of thing God must have had in mind when the church was established. Few of us, however, are trained as family counselors, international diplomats, famine relief workers, and such. Only occasionally do opportunities arise for us to be involved directly in efforts to address these problems. What are we to do, then?

OH NO! THEY'RE GOING TO ASK FOR MONEY AGAIN! Well, sure. Of course. What is money, anyway? I work hard at grading papers, designing widgets, fixing stuff, driving a bus, or whatever, and the value of the work I do is redeemable at the end of the week or month through the medium of money. I use it to buy what I need. I can also pass some of it on to my church, so that people who are trained to deal with the more urgent needs of other people can use it to buy the things they need to do their work and to sustain themselves. So, at least some of the mundane, everyday work I do here in central New York creates the means by which other people are able to attend to the needs of children at the Gateway home, or to the improvement of race relations in Los Angeles, or to the aftermath of war in Bosnia, or of famine in Africa.

So yes, we ask for money. After all, this is a most important way we have organized ourselves to help God's people just about everywhere. There will be occasions when we can help more directly, and we'll all want to be there for these occasions, but in the meantime we can help a great deal simply by sharing some of the fruits of what we do every day.

Call the hotline of the United Methodist Committee for Relief (UMCOR) at 1-800-841-1235 to learn where help is needed now. You can then write a check payable to the Clinton United Methodist Church or to "Advance GCFA." The Advance project name and associated code number should be written in the lower-left corner of the check. The check may be mailed to the church or placed in the collection plate on Sunday morning. It may of interest to note that the entire amount of the contribution--ONE HUNDRED PERCENT--goes to the designated project, not for administrative overhead.

S.P.

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