This memory came to me last night..

I remember this one time, we (the ladies of the core group) were shopping for some clothes for camp I believe, and we decided to go to Goodwill. We were looking thru the racks of T-shirts and one of the ladies found a old VBS t-shirt from one of our previous VBS's. The oldest woman who was with us got so flabbergasted, she immediately snatched it up and saw there was a few other of our Church shirts and bought them all with this logic "we need to buy these shirts, we don't want some outsider wearing "OUR" church shirts". I remember being a bit thrown back by this, I mean it's just a shirt, or it was to me. But this type of thing would repeat itself thruout my stay at the church several times. I remember just a few years back, my family was scary broke, so i was researching different ways to help us save money and one of the ways I found was the most amazing blessing, Angel Food Ministries, a weeks worth of groceries for $30. You cant beat that. Well I was so blessed by this I of course was sharing this with everyone I could. So my friend who had grown up to marry the youth pastor wanted to start, but he couldn't lower himself to go to another church and pick it up, so I was doing it for her. I eventually suggested that our church should consider getting involved in this ministry, the youth pastor's wife thought it was a great idea, but didn't want to take it to him herself, so i did. Big mistake. I was told that we didn't want to let "outsiders" in our church, people we didn't know coming in our church. As if I had spoken blasphemy against God himself. I apologized and tucked my tail and left, stunned. How could a church not want to help others in need? Isn't that what a church is supposed to do? Now let me run this by you the reader, we are claiming that we are a church, an outreach, but we don't want outsiders in our church (so how do you expect to grow as a church body?)????? Isn't that the picture of IRONY?? We can't send people to help feed the homeless, donate money to a shelter, send people as missionaries to help spread the word of God, BUT what we can do is take up a collection to send the youth pastor on a "Baptist History" trip across many states, asking for thousands of dollars so he can tool around the U.S looking at old markers of men who died doing something to "better" the Baptist name, spending thousands of dollars to have some guy recreate a painting of certain Baptist's in their best moments, putting up horribly ugly gaudy grave markers to commemorate certain men out in the middle of only God knows where that will never be seen by men other than those who were there when it was put down. They have their priorities so ass backwards. My heart has always been to help, and to be in a place where they wanted nothing to do with this was just one part of me wanting to leave!