When Caring Gets Complicated
A Personal Story from CM: John Heflick.
A few weeks ago, I preached from James 1:27. It’s one of those verses that is much harder to live out than read:
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” NIV
I highlighted the two phrases around “orphan and widow”: “looking after” and “in their distress.” James doesn't simply call us to care about vulnerable people. He calls us to move toward them, be proximate, stay present, and keep showing up when things get messy.
As a church, we try to live this out in a variety of ways. We often pick up families from local shelters for church. Volunteers have led much of this for years, and our children's ministry has stretched to care for children whose lived experiences have been anything but stable.
Recently, we had a situation that hit the proverbial fan. One of our core volunteers developed a relationship with a woman at a partnering shelter. She cared about her, participated in her baptism, cared for her children, and wanted to help her navigate a hard season. But the relationship became complicated.
There were things happening that required boundaries. We needed to help mom see that there were healthier ways for the family to interact and healthier ways for her to connect with our church. It was not about an egregious act. It was the ordinary—and difficult—work of navigating trauma, expectations, and relationships. Nothing unusual.
The volunteer had brought me into the situation, and we talked about how to proceed. Yet, on the way back to the shelter, she tried to talk with the resident about some of these concerns one-on-one. The resident walked away. The volunteer followed. It was going fine until it wasn't.
The Aftermath
Our relationship with the shelter was strained.
Suddenly, the very thing we had been trying to do—care for someone “in their distress”—had become really complicated.
I’ve been doing this long enough to remember, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” (Rahm Emanuel)
We’re at the first stages of conducting an autopsy of this situation, not simply to determine who was right or wrong, but because failure exposes what success can hide. Here’s how I see it right now.
What Did This Experience Expose?
1. We didn't adequately prepare our volunteer for this level of engagement. I thought we had, but reality took apart my assumptions.
We asked someone who cares deeply to enter a relationship with someone carrying significant trauma. It turns out the volunteer carried scars of her own. Triggers were happening in both directions. There was sincere love offered and shared, but love isn't the same thing as preparation.
Someone can have the right heart and still not understand how trauma affects trust, communication, parenting, authority, or relationships. We need to prepare volunteers for actual people—not generic versions of “widows and orphans.” We also need to do better at helping volunteers understand that these relationships may reveal something within them, too.
2. Our partnership with the shelter wasn't sufficiently defined for the moment when things went wrong.
We've had a long-term financial relationship with this shelter, but only recently did we move into a more interpersonal partnership. We had clarified what should happen when a volunteer and resident have a difficult interaction. But when their staff changed, we didn’t ensure everyone understood that agreement.
An MOU did not prevent the incident. Paper doesn't create trust, but consistently revisiting the agreement might have reinforced communication pathways and expectations. Good partnership agreements aren’t just about vision and outcomes; they outline how we will stay in relationship when things go wrong and they require consistent check-ins.
Eventually, our autopsy will need to include our partner. For now, I am trying to stay on our side of the street:
What can we own?
What can we learn?
What do we need to put in place?
And what do we need from them?
3. Our attempt at including this family in the life of the church wasn't as fully developed as we thought it was.
We were kind, welcoming, and relationally inclusive. Our volunteer introduced her friend to others in the church. Our children's ministry cared for her children and stretched beyond its normal capacity. There was genuine suburban hospitality. And yet, our systems didn’t connect this resident to the life of our church. Our system had an on-ramp, but not enough relational infrastructure to carry the weight once things became difficult.
Our volunteer often experiences deep community within our church, but she needed more from our department and others within the church. I knew about the situation and coached her, but looking back, I should have asked more proactive questions. She was trying to connect this resident into the life of the church, but in the way she understood. That left obvious gaps. We’ve lamented and processed with the volunteer, but that only goes so far.
4. This exposed a chasm in how the church and the shelter understand care for volunteers.
This was not simply a communication problem. We had different assumptions about what happens when a volunteer is struggling in a relationship with a resident. When the situation escalated, the organizational process moved faster than the relationship could bear.
The answer cannot simply be, “Our way is right.” Neither can it be, “The partner organization knows best.” Partnership requires humility to listen and courage to speak. It requires us to advocate for the people we send, protect the people we serve, recognize that both can be vulnerable, and build relationships strong enough to hold disagreement.
5. I wonder if this exposed a limitation in our prophetic imagination.
The practical theology of James 1:27 needed more breathing room. “Care for orphans and widows in their distress” can become a mobilization strategy:
Find the need. Find the volunteer. Make the connection. Serve the person. Tell the story. Repeat.
But I don't think that is the full biblical vision.
Jesus tells a story about a banquet filled from the streets and alleys. Isaiah imagines God gathering people from every direction. Paul describes Jesus breaking down the dividing wall of hostility. Revelation ends with God's dwelling among humanity and a city where the nations find healing.
The biblical story moves toward a beloved community: diverse people around a huge table, a new kind of family, a place where power is challenged, inequities are addressed, strangers become family, and those pushed to the margins are not merely invited to receive something from the center.
They belong. They contribute. They have voice and agency. They help shape the community, and the community is shaped by them.
The Challenge
That changes the question for Community Ministers. Our first question is often, “How do we get our people out there to serve?”
What if we didn’t stop there? What if we dared to ask: “What kind of people and what kind of community are we becoming through this engagement?”
The end of mobilization is not simply assistance or even salvation. It is all of us being formed into the image of Christ as we share our lives together.
If volunteers go into shelters, schools, neighborhoods, recovery communities, food pantries, prisons, and other places of need and come back unchanged, something has been missed. If the people we serve encounter the church but never gain voice, agency, belonging, or meaningful participation, something has been missed. If the church always gets to be generous and the other person grateful, something has been missed. The Kingdom is bigger than all that.
Going back to our current situation, we imagined a church that could welcome a family from a shelter. God's imagination is bigger. We imagined a volunteer helping a family. God's imagination is a community where everyone is being formed into Christlikeness and everyone has something to give and receive. We imagined successful outreach. God's imagination is a people who increasingly look like the Kingdom they proclaim.
That is harder, because the street is not merely a place where we take Jesus. It becomes one of the places where Jesus teaches us who we are… really.
What’s Next?
I don't know yet how this particular story ends. We will sit down with the shelter's leadership, listen, and talk honestly about what happened and what each of us needs to move forward. I hope for reconciliation, restored trust, growth for the volunteer, greater stability and belonging for the resident and her family, and a stronger partnership because we were willing to have a difficult conversation.
Our mobilization team will take steps toward a different conclusion next time. We need more trauma training, better partner communication, clearer expectations, consistent processes, and better structures for caring for volunteers in difficult relationships. And we need to keep teaching our church that outreach and evangelism do not exist to produce a successful program. They exist to form a people.
Maybe that is the point.
Our theology cannot remain safely above the street. It has to come alive within all the dynamics that make our worlds complicated, creative, and confusing.
Our goal as Community Ministers is not perfection. Through living out the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus again and again, we are becoming a people who actually look like Jesus—together. And we’re leading our entire church to also join in on this street level discipleship.