The primary focus of Joe and I remains to help the Church make connections with the neighborhood, and right now we’re trying to do that by attempting to reestablish the Downtown Dubuque Christian Outreach, or else start a new association that can get our parishes working together. We feel that with each parish trying to reach out and build a community with the citizens of the Washington neighborhood, it would help if there were a sense of community among the parishes themselves. Working together and coordinating their efforts, they would be much better able to reach out to the members of the community.
When the Downtown Dubuque Christian Outreach was dissolved, there was about $1,200 in the treasury, and now Pastor Achtemeier is sitting on that money and wants to get rid of it. This of course is a good problem to have, and it would be a nice resource to be able to use once we resurrect the old alliance between the parishes. On October 19, Joe and I plan to go to the mission/stewardship community meeting to talk more about this with Pastor Achtemeier and others.
When I met last week with Pastor Achtemeier and she was talking about different ideas for connecting with the community, something she mentioned in passing, but that I thought was a very good idea, was setting up some kind of tutoring program. At Salsas the other night we talked about this, and about how Dana Livingston is involved in the Dubuque Multicultural Center, which has a tutoring program. I plan to meet with him in the next couple days to talk about how we could get 1st Presbyterian and some other parishes involved in this tutoring as well.
The main reason that I like the idea of tutoring so much is because we would be able to reach out to kids born into an environment that isn’t conducive to success—starting with success in school—and help them to do better in school, ultimately (hopefully) improving their chances of pulling themselves out of the low-class or impoverished situation into which they’ve been born. This to me is even better and more productive than soup kitchens because it does something to help bring about the end of a person’s poverty, rather than treat the symptoms of poverty. It goes back to the old saying: give someone a fish, they’ll eat for a day; teach someone to fish, they’ll eat for a lifetime.
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Ed-
ReplyDeleteI think your tutoring idea would be a great way to do service connected to the Washington neighborhood. I wonder what your pastor would think about making it something the church would use as recruitment. Dr. Waldmeier always talks about how a very small portion of the parishes come from the Washington neighborhood, so maybe you could use these opportunities to put on display what the church/churches of the area have to offer Washington neighborhood residents. This would be a good opportunity to serve both the church and the neighborhood.
Steven