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Churches, Take Note: There’s Talk of Cutting Social Security
Photo courtesy Marco Verch
By: Herb Reece
I’ve
been saying for many years that America’s churches have abdicated to
the federal government their responsibility to provide for the needs of
their widows, widowers, and others. Biblically speaking, the church has
the responsibility to guarantee the well-being of those in its midst
with long term pressing needs. (See, for example, 1 John 3:16-18; Titus
3:14; Acts 4:34, 6:1-6; 1 Timothy 5:1-15, etc.) The church has
increasingly been marginalized in American culture because it has been
disobedient in this role. For example, how many churches do you know
with a “widow’s list” as described in 1 Timothy 5?
In its place, the federal government has stepped in to provide a
Social Security “safety net” for the elderly and disabled. For decades,
that safety net has worked fairly well. Social Security is one of the
government’s most popular programs. But with a national debt standing at
over 22 trillion dollars and another 1 trillion or so being added to it
every year, the federal government is going to have to cut something.
Recently, President Trump has proposed cutting Social Security and Medicare.
Republicans on Capitol Hill say
Donald Trump may be willing to cut Social Security and Medicare if he
wins in 2020, reportedly describing the potential move as a “second-term
project.” (Yahoo News, August 29, 2019)
I’m not here to get into politics, nor to discuss the merits and
demerits of cutting Social Security. What I do want to say is that
America’s churches have a golden opportunity to step up to the plate and
assume their biblically mandated responsibility once again. If every
church in America took financial responsibility for replacing any cuts
to Social Security for just five of their widows, that would be 1.5
million widows the church would be helping.
Replacing for its widows the money the government cuts from Social
Security may sound like a radical concept. But it’s not a radical
biblical concept. It’s just the church doing what the church is supposed
to do.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.
Herb Reese is an author,
public speaker and President of New Commandment Men's Ministries. Herb
has a B.A. in History from UCLA and a Th.M. in Pastoral Ministries from
Dallas Theological Seminary. He has done post graduate work in The
History of Ideas at University of Texas, Dallas and in Church
Administration at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. After serving as a
pastor in three churches in Texas, Illinois and Colorado over a period
of twenty years, Herb founded New Commandment Men's Ministries, a
ministry dedicated to helping churches recruit, train, organize and
deploy teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single
parents. Herb has served as President of New Commandment since 2003 and
has helped over 900 churches develop men's team ministries in 49 states
and eight foreign countries.
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