ACNA 6 Initiatives Highlight: Matthew 25 | By Kevin Walthall

Archbishop Foley Beach has identified six ministry priorities for the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). These priorities are enshrined in Six Initiatives. The Initiatives “serve those at the local level by coming alongside them with support, resources, and networking. Through this, ministry in the prioritized areas is more readily promoted, coordinated, and lived out across the Province.” The Six Initiatives are: Partnering Globally, Serving the Marginalized, Fostering Diversity, Planting Churches, Cultivating Generosity, and Developing Leaders.

This quarter, we highlight Matthew 25: the initiative to serve the marginalized. It is a matching fund program to help Anglican congregations and dioceses in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico kick-start ministries and programs that will reach the most vulnerable, marginalized, and under-resourced in our communities. 

“Incarnation” and “proximity” are key words for Christine Warner and Matthew 25 as an organization. During Advent we celebrate that in the incarnation, God came near to us.

It is perhaps the most backwards miracle in Christianity. Most ancients assumed there was a single deity behind their pantheons, holding natural and supernatural forces in harmony - but this singular being of pure light and spirit was assumed to be too lofty for the material world. If this Great Spirit were to fix humanity, it would raise humanity up from the pollution of the material world and into the world of spirit. Instead, God descended, light dwelled within substance, and there was no shadow, no resultant darkness from the conflict of light and matter. God got into the mud with us.

The incarnation is built on this scandalous premise: the incorporeal God adopted the same carbon that composes the best, worst, and most mediocre of humanity. God took on human weaknesses, God wept at human funerals, God celebrated at human weddings. After the Fall severed humanity’s connection to God, an omnipotent divinity could have simply fixed humanity’s faults in one big miracle, changing rogue creatures into something more angelic from the top-down. Instead, God preserved human nature and united the divine essence to the human essence in one person: Jesus Christ. In the incarnation, God created a new way of being. 

Jesus Christ, the backwards miracle himself, then taught us to partake in a backwards kingdom where loving the poor, naked, and alone is loving God. In the Matthew 25 initiative’s experience, this means being bottom-up rather than top-down, doing slow, steady work that will last instead of quick fixes. It means entering into human realities instead of chasing abstract issues. It means entering into focused relationships and callings, and with humility and authenticity doing what we can to serve as human ministers of God, rather than as social engineers of at-risk demographics. 

The Matthew 25 initiative connects people and resources engaged in a broad range of ministry, from serving combat veterans to advocating for creation care. Matthew 25’s partners are serving on both sides of the Rio Grande, and the organization’s grant program has given over $2.5 million in grants to what it calls “practitioners” – individuals and groups formally or informally serving the “least of these” and “contending for shalom,” Matthew 25’s motto. 

One such practitioner planted a church on a First Nations reservation, helping to break cycles of exploitation and poverty by serving single mothers and sharing in that community’s lament. Another grows food in South Carolina for people experiencing food insecurity. “Parishes of the Poor” offer so many programs to people experiencing homelessness that government agencies have come to rely on them. Matthew 25 matches the creativity and entrepreneurship of its practitioners with expertise and experience found elsewhere in the network.

The goal for aspiring practitioners is not to save the world, but to befriend people, know them, and build them up. The Matthew 25 ethos is not to start with problems and search for solutions, but to start with people in God’s image and empower them to use their giftings and callings. “When we come close to suffering, when we become friends with someone, then it becomes personal. Then we see their God imprint,” Werner says. At that point, immigrants and refugees cease to be issues and start being people. Their realities matter. The God-given gifts of the materially poor begin to materialize.

“Social justice” isn’t a term Matthew 25 is ready to surrender – after all, Christian social justice far predates any modern zeitgeist – but Christ’s incarnation makes Matthew 25’s work distinctly different from secular social justice. Without Christ, the suffering in the world is overwhelming. Warner remarks that as a people, we are increasingly aware of injustices and suffering and prone to despair, Gen Z in particular.

“Secular justice work will lead to burnout if you aren’t sourcing your soul with something beyond,” Warner says. “Messianic complexes get burned pretty quickly because the gap between the needs and the resources are great.”

“If you aren’t tapping into the resources of eternity, then justice becomes a zero-sum game. Mercy and forgiveness have to be in the mix.”

Some evils can never be made right. There is no undoing abuse or racism. Without Christ’s restorative justice drawing from divine wells of forgiveness, seen in Isaiah 58, Matthew 25, and elsewhere, we are left to assume justice means the punitive justice found in Western law. That type of justice ensures we get speeding tickets, but doesn’t lift up widows and orphans. It might award payment in return for injuries, but it does not bring low the hills so that the valleys might be filled. This type of justice is suitable for government, but Biblical justice is to love “the fatherless and the widow… the sojourner, giving him food and clothing,” (Deuteronomy 10:18), “[seeking] the lost, [bringing] back the strayed, [binding] up the injured, and [strengthening] the weak,” (Ezekiel 34:16). Our cultural idea of justice is often limited to a dispassionate system of punishing evil. God’s vision for justice found in Scripture is dynamic and personal, deeply concerned with equity and giving life. God’s justice cannot exist without love.

Contending for shalom means so much more than what we might think of as “charity work.” It means restoring the image of God in souls still yearning for the harmony of Eden. Warner shared,  “We have a sacramental worldview, and with that an incarnational worldview. Charity work often speaks to a patronizing, ‘I have the goods to give to those people’ and it’s limited in its transformational power. There are many forms of poverty. The charity mentality is a good beginning step; it’s not nothing. But our theology moves us into places of mutuality and exchange.” Matthew 25 practitioners try to put people first, appreciating the complexity of humans struggling with homelessness or hunger as opposed to identifying people solely by their struggles.

Warner longs for Anglicans to be known for their justice and mercy, “contemplative activists” drawing from the Anglican tradition of prayer as they contend for shalom. This Advent, as we celebrate the wonder of the impossible made possible, Warner appeals to us to walk and drive around our surroundings, praying for eyes that would see people who often go invisible, and for ears that would hear voices that often go ignored, and enter intentionally into our own neighborhoods and cities. Let us seek to continue bringing the Kingdom of heaven to earth as we love as Jesus loved.

If you are a part of an Anglican ministry to the vulnerable and would like to find out more information about M25 grants, contact M25.

Here’s how you can pray for Matthew 25:

• Pray for Matthew 25’s February 22-24 Gathering in El Paso, Texas, that the Lord would bring more practitioners forward.

• Pray for Matthew 25’s leadership to continue fresh in the face of suffering.

• Pray that Anglicans everywhere would be known for their justice and mercy.