An Open Letter to Pastors and Church Leaders
Ministry is hard. I know that. I really do know that. I was a missionary. My late husband was in Christian ministry for over 30 years. My father, father-in-law, and two brothers-in law have served or are still serving as pastors. My heart is with you. I wish your job was easier.
I think I can guess your feelings when you read this site. I’m asking you to take on another task. How can you do one more thing? It just doesn’t feel possible.
Yes, I’m asking for something. I’m asking for churches to take the chemical toxicity issue seriously. I want the church environment not to make people sick and I want people who are already chemically ill not to be left alone and isolated. Why do I dare ask for this, knowing how hard your job already is? I ask for these reasons:
1. It’s good for your own health and wellbeing. Reducing the amount of toxins in the church environment benefits everyone and is especially beneficial for the people who spend the most time there. Just because you don’t react immediately and obviously to chemical contaminants doesn’t mean you aren’t being harmed. It just means your body doesn’t give you an obvious warning, at least not yet.
2. It will make your job easier in the long run. Neurotoxins found in common products affect bodies and brains. I truly believe that If you clean up the church environment, people in your congregation are likely to be less irritable in committee meetings, less likely to take offense at what staff or fellow church members do and say, and less likely to fall asleep during services. I believe you’ll have fewer people to visit in the hospital and more healthy people available to fill ministry positions.
3. It may not be as hard as you think to take some initial steps. You have to buy soap for the bathroom anyway. It’s not harder to buy a fragrance free product than a fragranced one. A large part of your congregation probably already uses some sort of video technology to communicate with friends and family members. It isn’t hard to use the same technology to include the homebound in a Sunday School class. As I suggest in my Church Checklist, every step matters. Just take one step, then later take another.
4. No one else is going to pick up the slack. Recently, someone in one of my support groups reached out to a church for help and got the response, “Why don’t you contact our sister church instead?” There seems to be a tendency for churches to believe that someone else is meeting the needs they aren’t. Small churches seem to think that big churches should take the lead because they have more resources. Large churches seem to think that smaller churches should take the lead because they don’t have as much bureaucracy to deal with.
5. It makes sense to open the church doors to people who really want to enter. Society is full of people who don’t care too much about attending church, and church leaders can spend a lot of time and energy figuring out how to attract them. Why not use some of that effort to find a way to include people who desperately want to attend, but can’t because of products used in the church environment? When I’m watching a church webcast and I hear and see the efforts made to attract people, I often think of a parable recorded in Matthew 22. When invited guests showed no interest in attending a wedding banquet, servants were told to go into the streets and invite everyone they saw. There are a lot of us waiting “in the street” who would love a true invitation.
6. People who’ve suffered a great deal and held onto their faith are the kind of people that make a church stronger. The Christian MCS community is full of some of the most inspiring and godly people I know. Sometimes I hear their stories and I think about what was said of others commended for their faith in Hebrews 11:38: “The world was not worthy of them.” If you don’t make a way to include these brothers and sisters, your church is missing out. You really are.
7. It’s Biblical. That’s the bottom line, of course. Leviticus 14 indicates that God doesn’t want us to ignore toxins in the environment. Matthew 25 and Ezekiel 34 remind us that we’ll be judged for how we treat people in challenging situations. People with MCS have very significant physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. A study published in the Journal of Multidisciplinary Healthcare noted that medical outpatients scored 23.5 on a life satisfaction scale, elderly patients averaged 25.8, and people with MCS scored 14.86. Small steps, like providing a fragrance free Bible Study or prayer group in a safe environment, can mean more than you can imagine, and being shut out can hurt more than you know. The people who shared their thoughts in a survey I wrote about earlier say it well.
You have a lot on your plate already. I get it. If you and your congregation are being harmed by toxins, though, every other aspect of ministry suffers. This matters.