Matt & Anna Shenk
Which Parish Area you live in? City North
If you could describe your pandemic experience in 3 words, which would you choose? Grueling, Fruitful, Resiliency
Tell us about For Richmond. When did you all get involved with it and what is your vision for it? The vision of For Richmond is to unite the Church for the flourishing and transformation of Metro Richmond and is grounded in Jesus’ prayer for unity in John 17.
Practically, we spend our days connecting and equipping Christian leaders to collaborate around the deep needs of our community. Currently, we work with about 130 churches across Metro Richmond and have initiatives around foster care, education and racial justice and healing.
How has For Richmond responded to the past 7 months— the pandemic, the racial unrest, the election…the list goes on! When we launched For Richmond two years ago, we had no idea how important it would be to mobilize the Church in the midst of so many crises. Within a week of the national shutdown, 80 churches designated COVID response staff who met weekly in each locality with government leaders to meet needs and pray for those leaders. In Richmond City, we saw 40 churches – including Third - step up to serve at RPS Food Distribution sites, resulting in 7,000 volunteer hours and over 1.5 million meals distributed. In the other localities, churches served vulnerable residents including the elderly and immigrants and refugees. Our “Love Your Neighbor” campaign resulted in 300 families adopting their block, providing prayer and practical supports to over 3,600 households. During this summer’s racial unrest, we were able to host a Pray, March, Act gathering on Monument Ave. for 200 pastors and ministries leaders and then a training series with Arrabon for 65 senior pastors on how to navigate complicated emotions and conversations that arise when we talk about the sin of racism in its various forms.
This fall we’ve been able to help many of these churches start Be the Bridge book studies to help our region develop a shared and biblically-grounded understanding of restorative reconciliation. In recent weeks we’ve enjoyed helping host a virtual book discussion with Christians around the city on the new book, Compassion & Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Civic Engagement. It’s been encouraging to see followers of Christ from both sides of the political aisle learn how to have courageous and civil conversations and we hope that this is something that continues well beyond the November election.
What do you want to share with the Third community about what you’ve learned or witnessed during this time? We’ve discussed this topic quite a bit. Our work puts us in contact with dozens of pastors every week. We’d love for people to have a better understanding and more empathy for how difficult of a time this has been for pastors. Seminary doesn’t prepare them for when to reopen a church during a pandemic, and we’re regularly hearing about pastors getting angry feedback for not reopening soon enough or for reopening too soon. We know that pastors are getting frustrating emails and phone calls because they didn’t say enough about the racial unrest or because they said too much. People are getting upset at pastors because they’re not saying enough about politics and that same pastor can hear that he/she is being too political. All this is happening while churches are trying to figure out if giving is dropping, how to have different types of services to accommodate people, etc. … and normal things like hospital visits, deaths, births, and marriages haven’t stopped. Add these things on top of the stresses of being a spouse, perhaps having kids who are struggling themselves, and dealing with the same uncertainties we all are–it’s amazing that pastors aren’t leaving their churches. It’s our sincere hope that before people criticize or give suggestions to their pastors, that they put themselves in their pastor’s shoes. It would also be a great time to give pastors and church staff an extra week of vacation to rest and be refreshed!
What do you think this time has afforded us that we wouldn’t be doing or seeing otherwise? We’ve heard more stories of people getting to know their neighbors better, and we’ve enjoyed this firsthand. Being at home more is a great opportunity to get to know your neighbors and have some wonderful conversations on the front porch or at the fire pit.
We’ve also been encouraged by how many of our white Christian friends have used this time to dig deeper into Richmond’s racial history and to read books from contemporary African-American Christian authors on how we address racism in its various forms.
What is your prayer for our church community right now? We pray that we would be known as people who love the Lord passionately and who love our neighbors incredibly well. We pray that we are known as a community of people who may be imperfect but who strive to reflect Jesus to others and provide a positive witness for Christ to the world around us. We also pray for a spirit of unity in our church in the midst of so much division in our nation.