How do you care for federal workers losing their livelihoods and vocations?

On Sunday, Feb. 16, people gathered after worship in our church’s fellowship hall. It looked, in many ways, like a regular potluck. A large pot of soup was set on the buffet, someone dropped off a bag of clementines, and people brought lots of baked goods. As the food came in, folks who know our church kitchen as well as their own pulled out plates and serving utensils.

There was a mix of people — some of the 125 folks were members of our congregation, but many were neighbors, friends and co-workers. Word had gotten out.

Earlier that week, we sent out an all-church email with the subject line “Organizing Against Cruelty.” It was one way we could respond as the church to the radical disruption in our community caused by the new presidential administration.

Our church, a 375-member PCUSA congregation, is located about 3 miles from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. We have 15 to 20 families in our church whose livelihood depends on work for the CDC, which was among the first targets of spending cuts by the new administration. The agency had become a “public enemy” during COVID because it advocated for restrictions on personal freedom in order to save lives. Now I was receiving emails and text messages from people afraid of losing their jobs.

You don’t cut “an agency.” The CDC is not nameless or faceless. It is a collection of rather remarkable human beings. I am a pastor for some of them. They sing in our choir, play games with our youth group and lead our congregation as elders. They also keep humanity safe from illness. In my experience, they are people of deep faith, who love God and others — commitments that align with their work at the CDC.

My CDC-affiliated congregants were not prepared for this. They all know that when a president is elected, priorities can change; several had shared stories about job pivots under a new administration. But they are stunned that a president could demonstrate such disregard for something as foundational to the common good as public health, and they mourn the loss of the programs they have worked so hard to build.

“Those of us in global health and development are not in it for the money or to push some sort of radical agenda. We want to ensure that people do not die of things like contaminated drinking water, measles, polio, mosquito bites or HIV,” one of our CDC-affiliated congregants told me.

The people I spoke to for this essay asked to remain anonymous, fearing repercussions.

Virtually all their work has been put on hold as they await impending cuts. There has been no explanation from the administration about where there is waste or fraud at the CDC or why the positions being eliminated are not essential to public health — some of the reasons the administration has given for the cuts. It’s randomly inflicted harm.

“The field of global health and development is being decimated like a toddler swiping at a Jenga tower,” one congregant said. “I feel such grief over the lives of U.S. citizens and people across the world that will be lost or irreparably harmed by these changes.”

They are grieving the loss of lives and the loss of programs that have proved to work. They also are grieving the loss of their vocation. Each knows their calling is aligned with the ministry of Jesus, an itinerant healer, who made healing the sick a sign of the inauguration of the kingdom of God.

“My career is truly how I live out my faith — using my hands and feet to care for those whom the world would rather forget,” one told me.

Another said, “I’m a resilient person. My job is hard — I travel to places where I deal with health emergencies, and so I work all the time with people experiencing real trauma. I can deal with a lot of things — I usually just put my head down and think, ‘We’ll get through this; it can’t go on forever.’ But this feels different. I’ve never had my fundamental worth so questioned.”

What can a church do in a moment like this? Pastoral care, for one. Not only the one-on-one engagement with the pastors but also the strength that comes from belonging to a community of people who love you. That is the real help in a time of trouble. We need to be seen. We need to feel valued.

When authority figures question your worth and have the power to make you feel worthless, you need a community of people that affirms a truer narrative: “The work you do is amazing. You are amazing.”

Some of our church’s retired members are among those who now stand outside the gates of the CDC holding signs saying “We love the CDC” and “Protect Public Health.” Several people have mentioned how much this small gesture of support buoys their spirits.

Our finance team at church has a reserve fund ready to help members who lose their jobs pay their bills and rent. We are also quietly preparing for a loss of income if our CDC members are fired.

The Organizing Against Cruelty community gathering was a second kind of response, bringing people together to act. In the first few weeks of the new administration, many people expressed something like, “This feels terrible. What can I do?” Older adults especially may not be online and may not be plugged in to networks for action and activism.

At the gathering, we invited people to share resources with one another — one hungry person telling another hungry person where to find bread.

We talked about how to contact our legislators and what groups are active in our community. We set up breakout rooms for specific needs — support for transgender poeple, caring for immigrant neighbors — and a room for federal employees to share their experiences and talk without fear of recrimination.

While this role for the church, as a steward of the power of grassroots organizing, is important, there is another, perhaps paradoxical role the church can play: we can hold our human suffering as part of a larger story.

One of my CDC members said, “Lent always feels timely, but this year, my soul desperately needs it. Observing Lent helps prepare for loss, and the reminder that Christians have been marking this season through different crises and times of fear and change is welcome at this moment.

“We don’t have to do everything perfectly, but we do have to take care of each other, knowing we will all meet the same end that Jesus did on the cross.”

Not all suffering is redemptive, and the suffering of my congregants and other federal workers right now feels particularly unnecessary. But the church, when we are faithful, helps us understand that our suffering is woven into the great story of God’s love.

Our sensitivity to this suffering helps us be agents of healing. When I asked one CDC employee how she is holding up, she said, “It’s awful. … But I know that I am going to be fine.”

She told me about her volunteer service with a partner organization supporting refugee families and said, “There are so many people who are much more vulnerable in the face of this cruelty than I am. It’s them I’m worried about. I’m going to be taking care of them.”

As a pastor, I went to plenty of meetings where we wrestled with how to attract visitors. We talked about lots of ideas, but I never actually asked a visitor.

Last year, I became a visitor.

I had transitioned out of parish ministry to work with organizations representing Catholic, Orthodox, and more than 60 Protestant denominations and movements. Inspired by my new role, I began visiting different congregations. Over the course of a year, I worshipped in a cathedral and a storefront church, in the great outdoors and a retirement home. I visited one church because I noticed it while sitting at a red light and was welcomed as a guest of honor at another when I went to hear a colleague preach. Along the way, I witnessed ordinary and extraordinary moments in the lives of many different congregations through the eyes of a visitor.

We enter the season of Advent recalling how difficult it was for the Holy Family to find welcome. It is also a moment in the church year when visitors are more likely to cross the thresholds of our sanctuaries. How might we help them find the welcome that the Holy Family was denied?

While I have taken too many theology classes and attended too many fellowship hall potlucks to be an ordinary visitor, I still take a deep breath as I walk into an unfamiliar church. Entering as a visitor, I notice things I missed when I was wearing a stole. I hope these experiences will help clergy and longtime members consider a visitor’s perspective of the place you love and what you can do to welcome the stranger this Christmas and beyond.

1. Help me find the entrance

Churches have a habit of not using their front doors. One church I visited holds its early service in the fellowship hall. When I arrived, I walked up to the door closest to the parking lot and realized it went into the kitchen. That didn’t feel right, so I walked the length of the building to the second door. Entering there would have required me to walk by the band. No, thank you!

One of the hardest parts of visiting a new church was navigating the space between the car and the pew. Clear signs helped me feel welcome, and that calmed at least one anxiety.

Take action: Starting in the parking lot, imagine a visitor trying to find the sanctuary. What doors are most obvious? Are there any turns that don’t have a sign? Bonus points if you walk through with a friend who has never been to your church.

2. Help me follow the service

It was my first time attending an AME service, and my transferable knowledge was at its limit. In this church, members of the congregation go forward for the offering and place their gifts in a small replica of the church. I have no idea how I would have navigated that moment had the woman sitting next to me not leaned over and explained what was about to happen.

Churches that used prayer books brought a different kind of challenge. There is something deeply hospitable about being handed an open hymnal or prayer book with a finger on the right line. Bulletins with explanatory notes also helped me find my way.

Take action: Consider what elements of your service are hardest to follow and encourage the congregation to look for visitors who may need some guidance in those moments.

3. Welcome warmly but gently

I have come and gone from churches without speaking to a soul and have had a member chase me down in the parking lot for a conversation. How do you welcome visitors without scaring them off? I found that the way I was welcomed back mattered.

When I visited small and aging congregations, it was common for folks to tell me, “We hope you come back.” Perhaps it was all those new-visitor conversations I had as a pastor, but I always felt some pressure with that invitation. It was clearly heartfelt. But it also felt a little wistful, as if I were the key to the future flourishing of the congregation.

One Sunday, I was given a different invitation: “You are welcome back any time.” In that simple sentence, I felt all of the welcome and none of the pressure. It said that they would continue to be the church as they always had. If I wanted to be a part of that, the doors were open.

Take action: Discuss as a hospitality committee when you have felt most welcome in a space and why. Then identify welcoming conversation starters to engage visitors.

4. The website is where it’s at …

I Googled most of the churches I visited. As with your doors, think about what questions visitors are asking as they pull up your website. Make that information easy to find. The first thing I looked for was what time services were held. It’s also helpful to say something about parking if it isn’t obvious or abundant.

A change to a church’s normal routine doesn’t always make it to the website. Sometimes the surprise was delightful, such as when I unexpectedly walked in on a combined Episcopal and Mennonite service. The theology nerd in me was in paradise. At other times, it meant showing up to locked doors or an empty parking lot.

Take action: Ask someone who doesn’t attend your church to look at your website and share feedback. Add updating outward-facing communications to the to-do list for special Sundays.

5. … AND it’s not why I came to your church

When I started this visiting adventure, I went to churches where I already knew someone. It wasn’t the Facebook posts or community events that drew me. It was a relationship. The best advertisement for your congregation is the people in the pews. Most of these folks didn’t invite me directly, but I knew where they attended. When I was ready to visit, I reached out.

Take action: Tell your members they matter! Equip them to answer questions like where to enter and whether child care is provided.

This Christmas, may we extend the welcome that the Holy Family longed for to the strangers who are sitting in our pews.

A world made out of love: Creation

When we talk about the Trinity, we talk about love: the three persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an ever-moving, ever-giving dance of love.

When we talk about creation, we also talk about love: the love amongst the three persons that spilled out into sun and sea and you and me.

Theology has a couple different terms to talk about these loves and how the Trinity works in relation to itself and in relation to what has been created.

When we think about that dance of love that Father, Son, and Spirit spin and move in, the inner life of these three persons, we are thinking about the immanent Trinity. When we say “immanent,” we mean “internal,” “innate,” “inside.” This is a pretty mysterious concept, because there’s only so much we can know and say about what goes on inside the Godhead apart from what we can see in the world around us.

But we can say a few important things. The apostle John put it neatly in his first letter to some early Christians: “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8). God does not simply have love, or give love. Love is not simply an attribute of God; it’s God’s whole being.

And God chose to allow that love to burst out of God’s very own self.

‘When God began to create the heavens and the earth …’

This is where we begin to see the economic Trinity at play — the Trinity in its relation to what is not God, in relation to what God has created. God could have chosen to just remain as the immanent Trinity forever, having nothing to do with that which is not God. The love flowing freely between the persons of the Trinity would have been enough for God. Father, Son, and Spirit were not sitting around sulky, moping, in need of praise and adoration.

Creation wasn’t necessary.

Our world did not need to exist. Everything we see and smell and taste is excessive: an outpouring of God’s love. God didn’t need to create humans or frogs or planets to satisfy some whim or to appease some lack. God didn’t need us.

But God wanted us.

There’s a phrase attributed to St. Augustine: Amo; volo ut sis. Translated from Latin, it reads: “I love you; I want you to be.” Imagine, for a moment, God whispering this as the heavens and the earth began to take their shape, as Adam was formed from the dust and breathed into life. “I love you; I want you to be.”

God needs nothing — but God wants us to be. And in creation, God wanted to share the love that is God’s own self and being. In creating, the love within the Trinity flooded over into every nook and cranny of the cosmos, every inch drenched in it.

‘… the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep …’

So God didn’t need to create, but God chose to, freely. That’s a statement we need to make when we talk about creation. There’s another piece to it, though: that God created out of nothing.

When we humans “create,” we use paints, bricks, computers, thoughts in our minds: things that already exist. When God created (in the truest sense of that word), God used … nothing.

The term theologians use to describe this concept is (you guessed it) a Latin phrase, creatio ex nihilo, which translates to “creation out of nothing.” This sets God apart from any one of us, and it sets God far beyond the reaches of any technology or tool we might develop. Only God can take nothing — a void of voids — and create.

The scholar Janet Soskice puts it like this: “Creatio ex nihilo affirms that God, from no compulsion or necessity, created the world out of nothing — really nothing — no preexistent matter, space, or time.” This concept of “really nothing” is essentially impossible for us to fathom. How can we imagine this kind of emptiness? What creatio ex nihilo does is force us to confess just how transcendent, just how “other,” God is.

But it also shows us another key thing about God.

Many centuries ago, in an English town called Norwich, a woman lived inside a church.

The woman, who became known as Julian of Norwich, lived the life of an “anchoress,” voluntarily secluding herself in a cell within the church walls so she could devote herself to prayer and worship.

She spent many years there, sifting through and making sense of some remarkable things that had happened to her. She wrote a book, “Revelations of Divine Love”— the first book written by a woman in the English language — about a series of “showings” she had received from God during a severe illness. These showings were often dramatic and graphic, showing the suffering Christ in vivid detail, but one of them included a simple image.

And in this vision he also showed a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball, as it seemed to me. I looked at it and thought, “What can this be?” And the answer came to me in a general way, like this, “It is all that is made.” I wondered how it could last, for it seemed to me so small that it might have disintegrated suddenly into nothingness. And I was answered in my understanding, “It lasts, and always will, because God loves it; and in the same way everything has its being through the love of God.”

God is transcendent and “other,” yes. But God also knows us and sustains us in a profound and personal way. This is not a watchmaker God that some philosophers have spoken of: a God who puts together a watch and then steps back to let it tick away. God is not aloof. We last because God loves us. We couldn’t exist without that love — the enveloping love of a God who is both utterly beyond us and beside us.

To emphasize that God sustains us and all of creation, theologians often reference the idea of creatio continua, another fancy Latin phrase that means that God constantly upholds all of creation.

God did not simply, at one time, desire to create the world. God always wants the world; he consistently calls what he made “good.” God actively re-creates the world in every single moment. God always wants us, and everything, to be.

What happens when we start to forget some of these ideas about creation?

Much of Christian theology ends up being centered around the person and work of Jesus Christ — which makes sense, considering the name “Christian.” The attention we give him is well-deserved, after all. But sometimes the way that focus plays out results in some long-term damage — like when the doctrine of creation starts getting squashed.

A weak theology of creation is bad news for creation. If we focus so much of our energy on ourselves as humans, on what God has done for us, and we don’t pay much attention to the rest of the universe that God made, we end up staring at a tiny piece of the big picture that is God’s love and care for the world.

A Native American theologian named George Tinker knows this all too well. He writes about the ways Christian missionaries preached the gospel to Native Americans, giving it the usual Western-church spin of humanity’s fall from grace, their sinful nature, and their need for redemption. For traditionally oppressed and marginalized peoples, however, the emphasis on humanity’s sin and their need for a savior doesn’t sound like the best news. “Unfortunately,” Tinker writes, “by the time the preacher gets to the ‘good news’ of the gospel, people are so bogged down … in [their] internalization of brokenness and lack of self-worth that too often they never quite hear the proclamation of ‘good news’ in any actualized, existential sense.”

Tinker calls for us to start sharing the good news from, well, the beginning of it all: that first “in the beginning.” He asks for us to “take creation seriously as the starting point for theology rather than treat it merely as an add-on to concerns for justice and peace.”

When we begin to neglect the significance of creation — what it says about God and God’s love — we can find ourselves getting so wrapped up in our own lost-ness and need that we forget just how loved we have always been, just how valuable everything and everyone around us is. When our theology becomes centered on “just Jesus and me,” our sisters and brothers — our whole planet — suffers.

What might it look like to take creation seriously, then — to remember how God holds us tight and close, wanting us to be?

What might it look like to remember that we live in a world that God wants?

God’s creation is vast and expansive. God does not choose to be God only for God’s own self — God is the One who delights in extending love and life to others. God’s good world — created and sustained by God’s loving-kindness — is worth knowing and celebrating and protecting.

Luckily for us, God chooses to reveal to us more of what we, creation, and God are like. That’s what we’ll look at in the next chapter.

From “Napkin Theology,” by Emily Lund and Tyler Hansen. Copyright © 2023 by Emily Lund and Tyler Hansen. Excerpted by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved.

At the outset of its Opening Doors capital campaign in 2016, leaders at Austin’s Covenant Presbyterian Church made a pledge: Once the congregation had paid off its remaining $7.5 million in building debt, some of the yearly savings from debt service would go to broaden its missional work, both existing ministries and new endeavors.

Celebrating its debt-free status in January 2019, the church began honoring its promise, using $100,000 of that year’s surplus to erase more than $16 million worth of secondary medical debt that had burdened Austin’s poorest residents.

The following year, its missions committee awarded another $100,000 in grants to four community organizations addressing homelessness in Texas’ capital city.

Task forces within the church brainstormed ways to engage the issue, suggesting everything from establishing a lecture series to opening one of Covenant’s buildings as a missional outpost in the middle of the city.

Ultimately, Covenant took a hard look at its vision statement and decided that the solution wasn’t going to be one big idea driven by the church but a multitude of smaller efforts fueled by the passion and expertise of its 2,000-plus members.

“Our vision statement is ‘Encouraging one another to follow Jesus wherever we live, work, and play.’ What if we fund that?” Daniel asked. “The best gift we can offer is our people, rather than a program. What if we invested in our people to seek to live this out? What if Covenant became an incubator for lots and lots and lots of individuals to explore these kinds of callings themselves?”

Built on the idea that God has called Covenant Presbyterian to be “a love letter to the city of Austin,” the Institute for Missional Formation established the Love Letter Fund, which will award up to $100,000 each year to social justice projects led by Covenant’s members.

The projects must improve the lives of Austin’s most vulnerable, be sustainable beyond the church’s initial investment and, perhaps most importantly, provide tangible ways for members to use their gifts to follow Jesus’ example.

The Love Letter Fund committee received 17 applications in December 2020 for the initial round of funding, and in August, the church announced its first grant recipient: a nonprofit founded by three church members dedicated to offering low-interest microloans to refugees, recent immigrants and other underserved populations who might not qualify for traditional business loans.

Though none had prior lending experience, all three have backgrounds in either finance or business development, and all three “started with a burden: ‘What does God want to do in my life, and how do I solve this bifurcated life?’” Daniel said.

And that’s the beauty of the arrangement, he said. The projects, which will change from year to year, flow not from the church’s clergy or session or even from its missions committee but rather from individual church members who have the expertise and desire to do good in the community— but may need some coaching and a little seed money to get started.

The people are the plan

“It’s not about us. It’s not about our program. It’s about being an invisible catalyst behind our people,” Daniel said. “Our plan is whatever you come up with next.”

Too often, church leaders are in survival mode, “lurching toward quick fixes” in search of one all-encompassing mission that will solve the world’s ills and energize the congregation, said Tod Bolsinger, the executive director of the De Pree Center’s Church Leadership Institute at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Covenant’s approach sidesteps the common misconception that the church as an institution is the solution, no matter what the problem is. Instead, Bolsinger said, Covenant has focused on discipleship, inviting individual members to use their unique skills — skills that church leadership may not have — to identify needs in the community along with creative solutions that the church can help support, though not necessarily lead.

“The goal is not to just launch some new things but to ask as we become more in tune to our neighbors, ‘How might the charism of our congregation help? And how might that inspire us to change?’” said Bolsinger, who advised Covenant as they created the Love Letter concept.

That transformative component was critical for Covenant Presbyterian. The 60-year-old congregation in downtown Austin is not the first to offer financial backing for creative social impact ventures, said Daniel, who pointed to similar programs at First Presbyterian Church Houston and First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta. At least during this pilot phase, Covenant grant applicants are required to be members of the congregation.

“This is specifically so our people have to wrestle with their own call. Our people have to own it; they have to roll up their sleeves,” Daniel said. “It’s not just about who in the world has a good idea to help other people. It’s about our people’s discipleship. It’s a commitment to the formation of our own people, not just other people.”

Unveiling the Love Letter Fund during a Sunday service last October, Daniel noted that the old model of church participation — “If you build it, they will come” — is collapsing.

Worship services are no longer the feeder system for all the church does, he said, and waiting for people to come into the building to experience God’s love isn’t going to work. So the church was trying something new.

“You’re the idea. You’re the plan,” he told worshippers. “We’re going to invest in you, the thousands of gifted people in the Covenant orbit, to experiment and try something new [so] that you might be able to make a difference.”

That willingness to experiment is abundant in entrepreneurial settings but sometimes less so in faith institutions, said Bolsinger, who leads workshops aimed at helping churches adapt their ministries to a changing world.

Through the Church Leadership Institute, he has begun working with about 40 other churches in an 18-month program that uses much the same process he introduced at Covenant, Bolsinger said.

He preaches “adaptive capacity,” the ability to evolve and meet new challenges through learning, facing loss and navigating competing values — like attracting more people to the pews versus having an impact on the neighborhood, he said.

As part of that process, Bolsinger urges congregations to identify “pain points” in their communities and then learn how best to address those through “safe, modest experiments” that play out over time. That takes patience and works best in churches where a great deal of trust already exists between the congregation and the leadership, he said, churches where overnight results aren’t necessary to keep everyone engaged. It also requires clergy who can tolerate efforts that don’t work as planned.

“You’re changing the conversation from, ‘Is this successful?’ to, ‘What have we learned?’” said Bolsinger, who is also a senior congregational strategist and associate professor of leadership formation at Fuller. “This is a really different process and approach, but the goal is the same: for people to experience the love of Christ in the midst of broken places in the world.”

Daniel assembled what one Covenant member called “an all-star cast” of creative thinkers and business-savvy professionals to spell out how the Love Letter Fund would work and what criteria would be used to judge applications. Another three dozen or so church members, including attorneys, accountants, marketing executives and writers, volunteered to mentor applicants and help them navigate some of the complexities of launching a startup.

Proposals ran the gamut, from a medical student establishing a COVID testing program for Austin’s homeless residents to an attorney who wanted to help low-income families preserve generational wealth by providing low-cost wills.

In addition to providing a solid business plan that addressed an unmet need in Austin, applicants had to show how the project would contribute to their faith formation and how it would continue beyond the life of the church’s initial grant.

Using those criteria, the committee narrowed the initial pool of written proposals to three or four finalists, who then pitched their ideas in oral presentations, said Ethan Burris, who is the chair of the Center for Leadership and Ethics at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business and serves as chair of the Love Letter Fund committee.

Steve Goldsmith, a committee member and software executive, said it was refreshing, as a lifelong churchgoer, to have his faith and work worlds “collide.”

“I’ve done Bible study. I’ve done prayer groups. And this is the first time — I’m in my late 40s — that I’ve felt like I can really engage with my whole capability and not just be in spectator mode,” he said. “I’ve gotten so much out of it.”

The group’s favorite proposal was submitted by Shirin Keshavarz, a businesswoman and Iranian refugee who had launched a catering business during the pandemic preparing her grandmother’s Persian recipes and delivering them to friends, neighbors and the less fortunate.

She proposed expanding her home-based operation into a prep kitchen — and eventually a food truck or restaurant — and hiring other women refugees so they’d have a source of income and marketable skills.

But in April 2021, days before the church was set to announce Keshavarz as its inaugural Love Letter Fund recipient, she learned that the breast cancer she’d beaten several years earlier had returned, this time at stage 4. Keshavarz died in June.

Meanwhile, another group of applicants had decided to forge ahead with their idea, even without the Love Letter Fund grant, working to improve their business plan in light of feedback they’d gotten during the process. Still mourning the loss of Keshavarz, a beloved member of the congregation, the committee invited that group back to make a follow-up pitch.

Calling their idea the Margin Institute, the group proposed creating a nonprofit that would grant low-interest loans to recent immigrants and others who might not have the credit and collateral to qualify for funds from a commercial lending institution.

Dan Michel, an accountant and partner in a wealth management firm, said he started thinking about the concept after reading an article about government-backed lending in distressed communities. That led to a conversation about microlending with fellow church member Dan Pucci, who has a background in business development and had done mission work with Indigenous people and with inner-city populations.

Michel and Pucci knew each other from one of the church’s small groups; another member of the group overheard the two talking and suggested that they meet with Matt McMichen, an accountant and controller at a health care solutions firm who had experience in startups. The trio was breathing life into their idea right about the time Daniel announced the Love Letter Fund concept, and participating in the application process helped them refine their business plans, Pucci said.

In August, Covenant awarded its first Love Letter Fund grant to the Margin Institute. And in mid-October, Margin made its first loan — to one of Keshavarz’s adult daughters, who is pursuing her mother’s dream of running a catering business that employs women refugees.

“This is exactly how I want to give back as a Christian,” said Pucci, a day after Margin awarded that loan. “Twenty-four hours ago, it hit me — this is all coming together for all the reasons God wants us to be here on earth, walking the walk he wants us to walk.”

Michel said he now plans to retire from his full-time job at the end of the year and focus his efforts on Margin, which already has about 10 potential clients referred to them by Refugee Services of Texas and several area congregations.

In addition to initial investments from its founders and seed money from the Love Letter Fund, the Margin Institute hopes to attract missions funding from other congregations and be certified as a Community Development Financial Institution, making it eligible for matching funds from the U.S. Treasury.

“We set out to help people change their lives. And sure enough, along the way, I’ve been exposed to people I never would’ve been exposed to and heard stories I’d never heard before,” Michel said. “It has absolutely been phenomenal for me. I don’t know how that’s not transformational.”

At Covenant, they’re tweaking the Love Letter Fund process using feedback from the first round of applicants before starting another cycle in the spring. For instance, they’re planning to match grant applicants with mentor “navigators” within the congregation earlier in the process to promote “greater connective tissue” within the church and lead to stronger proposals, said church member Jewel Crosswell Stone, a former strategy consultant at Deloitte who now works full time for an Austin nonprofit that provides low-cost loans to low-income women entrepreneurs.

Stone had never worked in a church before but was recently hired part time at Covenant to help with the Love Letter process; before that, she offered volunteer guidance on microlending to the Margin Institute team.

They’re also examining ways to create a more meaningful experience even for those who don’t ultimately receive grant money so that they still gain from the process — whether it’s a better-defined vision, a list of next steps or simply a deeper understanding of how to live out their faith, Stone said.

“I appreciate so much the humility it takes as a church to see a need and be willing to recognize that they’re not the ones to necessarily solve it,” she said. “They’ve been deliberate about bringing in people with a variety of experience, but not necessarily church experience. There’s a ton of humility around learning and just no ego.”

Goldsmith and Burris said the committee has tried to balance being good stewards of the church’s money with taking calculated risks in the name of spiritual formation. 

Some of the Love Letter Fund projects may not work out, Burris said, noting, “You don’t make big, massive changes in the world without taking some risks and making some failures along the way.”

For now, Stone said, they’re using “soft metrics” to gauge success of the program. Are applicants tapping into creative thinking? Are the projects sustainable, and do they provide tangible benefits to Austin’s most vulnerable populations? Does the effort promote stronger connectivity within the congregation? And do members of Covenant feel empowered to use their gifts to make a difference?

Goldsmith noted that the answers to those questions may be years down the road. Churches need to have “a longer-lens desire” to sponsor programs like this, because — just as with a mission or a child care operation — it’s a long-term commitment, he said.

Along the way, grant recipients will be asked to share their experiences with the congregation, Daniel said, including what they’re learning about the Austin community and how the effort is affecting their individual faith journeys.

The entire process is creative, collaborative and limited only by the imagination of Covenant’s members, Daniel said.

“The cool part about this is you have no idea where this is going to go. We say to our people, ‘You’re the big idea,’” he said. “They’re going to come up with something I never dreamed of. There’s something so empowering about that.”