INSTEAD OF naming "A Person of the Year' for 2005, The Gleaner Company yesterday broke with previous trends and named five faith-based organisations as joint top recipient of its annual Honour Award.
These organisations are: The Salvation Army, Food for the Poor, The Adventist Development and Relief Agency, Pentecostal Tabernacle Church in downtown Kingston, and the St. Andrew Settlement, an outreach in Majesty Gardens pioneered by the St. Andrew Parish Church.
The conferring of the Gleaner Honour to these five awardees will no doubt serve as a fillip to many other churches, faith-based organisations and para-churches that have embraced a similar vision of rendering ministry to some of the nation's most disadvantaged. It is also sweet encouragement for the many volunteers and lowly-paid staffers of these organisations. The award no doubt will be regarded as even more special as it comes not from within the religious community, but from The Gleaner, a secular organisation that offers independent news.
Indeed, it must have been hard for the judges to decide on which churches and faith-based organisations should be made to share the top prize. This is so, as there are many churches and church-type organisations giving service outside the glare of camera lights and press coverage. Indeed, there is a pervasive culture among many of the Christians who head these organisations to give assistance discretely, i.e. 'not allow the right hand to know what the left hand is doing.'
The granting of these awards knocks on the head the mythology that "the Church not doing anything." It would be most interesting for an economist to compute the dollar value of the range of services typically offered by the average Jamaican church - not to mention the five awardees. It is particularly hard to find a church in Jamaica that does not have a range of ministries that offers significant socio-economic assistance to the community it serves.
But there is strength in unity. We would hope, however, that more churches would band together to take advantage of economies of scale so that they can be even more effective in ministering to the needs of communities. Such socio-economic interventions are strategic for the curbing of crime and the maintenance of social order. For those who would say that the church is not doing anything, just imagine what would happen if the churches shut down their ministries. It is then that the present level of crime in the nation would be regarded as kid's play.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
