In the Bible James notes that taking care of widows and orphans is at the very heart of true religion (Jam 1.27). Later Paul, in a letter to his protégé Timothy, gives details on how the church should see to that duty (1Ti 5.3-16). His words are perhaps unexpectedly lengthy and detailed; he wants this done right.
Widows with family, he says, should be cared for by their family (1Ti 5.4, 16). That’s sensible. Further, the widow needs to be at least 60 (1Ti 5.9)—presumably because a younger woman would have a reasonable chance of getting married again (1Ti 5.11)—and have lived in a way that demonstrates the genuineness of her faith (1Ti 5.9-10), something that would obligate the church to see to her care.
How does this work in our culture? I’d like to share a story from my experience.
In a church where I was on the elder board, one of the elders got a burden for the widows, something he just couldn’t get out of his mind. We put him in charge of putting something together that would bring some discipline to our approach, particularly so that no one would fall through the cracks of our care.
Soon we had a list of all the widows in the church. There were 35. I was surprised at how many there were. Then an elder and a deacon interviewed each one: how are you doing? What do you need? How can we help?
We were all surprised at what we learned.
We expected to find financial need; that was certainly a primary concern in Paul’s day. There may have been a concern or two in our congregation, but for the most part that was not a problem. They told us that their husbands had had life insurance, and they had enough to live on. Some, in fact, were in better shape financially than they had been when their husbands were alive.
But that is not to say there were no needs. You know what they told us?
“We need purpose. We need to be needed. We need something to do, a reason to get up in the morning. We need to belong.”
Wow.
Two thoughts struck me immediately.
First, we were completely uninformed, misinformed, on the situation in our own church. It was nothing like we thought.
And second, how could we have missed such a serious need?
We took immediate action. We asked the widows to come up with ideas on how they could organize and serve. That would address both the need to belong and the need to be needed.
And their first idea surprised us. They suggested that they clean the houses of new mothers.
I’ll confess that I wasn’t too keen on that idea. Widows are often, um, older than the population median, and were they up to it? Physical labor?
Well, it turns out that living that long helps give a person good sense, and they were wise enough not to take on tasks that would be too much for them. And their time with the new moms gave them opportunity to share mothering wisdom with the first-timers, and they delighted in the chance to hold the newborns and marvel over their little fingers and toes.
It was a win all around. Listening to people, and trusting their good sense and creativity, is a good thing.
I suspect that widows’ ministry will look a little different in every church, but we can be sure that we will give account to whether we have attended to that need.
Do you know what happened next?
That elder? The one with the burden? He died, and his wife became a widow. And she stepped right into a ministry that was ready to help her with grief support, and a need to be needed. Eventually she became the de facto leader of that widows’ ministry, until she remarried some years later.
Isn’t providence good?
Photo by Free Walking Tour Salzburg on Unsplash
