They Need Volunteers… but Atheists Need Not Apply

I usually try to say something witty and funny, but I got nothin. This just disgusts me to the core.

They’re not really a food bank. They will give you food but I guess only after you listen to a spiritual message. I hate such organizations.

I did volunteer work at a food bank run by an evangelical church. I never told them I was an atheist. I just deflected their questions about my faith. I didn’t exactly lie; I just told them my family was Jewish and let them assume that I was too. After a year of trying to convert me to Christianity, they gave it up as a bad job and told me I couldn’t do volunteer work with them any more. They said that since I wasn’t a member of their church like all the other volunteers, I was a “disruptive influence.”

I would love to know of the 120 homes that they couldn’t give help to, and send them a little flyer explaining that the church refuses to help because they have an agenda. You would think the backlash on that would be pretty severe if the people found out why their family could not be helped. Dollars to doughnuts that the church would rescind their statements after such backlash, too.

What ever happened to doing things out of the goodness of one’s heart?

If an individual receiving food regularly tells them that they have no interest in joining the Church, do they stop delivering? How many are attending the Church simply so they can eat regularly?

Groups with these rules to be or become Christian appear to prefer coercion and bribery to kindness.

He’s unusually up front about admitting that actually helping the less fortunate is merely a means to an end, and not an end unto itself.

Wow, I guess I never realized how decent our local soup kitchen is, if that’s the predominant opinion. I’ve been volunteering there for a couple years now and nobody ever once asked or seemed to care. We make excellent food there, too (I’ll stop bragging on them now.)

I hope one of the less insane determined charities puts those families on their list too, just to make sure they actually get something.

The whole idea behind a food bank is to help people. If other church groups are to busy to help those who are truly in need that’s sad.
It is not easy for us to waltz into a church and try to hide who we are to help people nor should we have to. The people being helped probably could care less and are grateful to have food!

Not like we wear Godless and Good shirts while working with a church.
Doesn’t it say anything that despite our religious difference we set that aside for people who need us? True kindness is in your heart not your god.

I wonder how long they feed non-christians if they don’t convert?

It is clear that the church members’ motives are clearly not to do the right thing but to force their beliefs onto the hungry while dangling food over their heads.
This is completely immoral and unChristian if I have ever seen it. How appalling.

This is indeed a disturbing trend. There have been too many independent soup kitchens and food banks in the U.S. alone getting into the prosetylization practice lately since the Salvation Army’s financial woes began in the mid 90’s.

I know those guys are run by the Anglican church, but at least they keep to the concept of taking volunteers from anywhere possible and see such as a blessing. Such a shame they had to shut down many of their rehab centers and homeless shelters only to be replaced by more predatory based churches with much lower rates of success.

Many of these smaller independent faith based rehab centers, kitchens, and food work a little differently than old Sally did.

The Rehabs for example require less in donations because they are in the practice of stealing welfare checks to fund operations, it’s not uncommon for a church based Drug and alcohol treatment program to require the addict to apply for benefits and turn them over to the churches accountants to cover the operating costs, and use these people as a compulsory source for free labor.

Salvation Army still does such a program through genuine donations and sales at their thrift stores with the help of volunteers from their programs, volunteers walking in off the street and paid employees–they did not discriminate based on religious affiliation and self regulated with respect for the local laws.

These modern independents on the other hand are disturbingly corrupt in such subtle ways, they are exclusionary, they get their funding from questionable sources, and skirt the law wherever they think they can get away with it in order to justify their methods.

On their website they are asking for donations. Would they reject money from atheists? Let’s hope they are consistent.

Ttownbeast, where have you been? The Salvation Army lost a lot of its popularity for doing just that:

http://www.ombwatch.org/node/817

Even before that, I always stayed the hell away from the Salvation Army (I will not shop their store no matter how much money I’d be saving) due to their evangelizing.

http://www.salvationarmy.org/ihq/www_sa.nsf/vw-sublinks/A53144E4CF9C743B80256DF5006531E9?opendocument

The guy blatantly admits that they’re only feeding the hungry to recruit for the damned church. Real caring of them, ain’t it? It’s too bad that there’s no way to find out who’s going hungry because of it so Atheist and others (I’m sure they don’t take Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or even other Christian denominations either from what they’re saying) can pick up the slack and get food to these hungry people.

@muggle~Evangelism was always part of their mission but primariliy through charitable acts there are different kinds of evangelism not just the “join us or else” variety–they have always had that recruitment program which is there for the purposes of recruiting the administrators (known as officers) but their hiring policies have always been quite lenient you still don’t have to even be christian to be a truck driver, a service clerk, a bell ringer, a store manager, etc there are still opportunities for advancement you just cannot become an officer unless you actually are of their flavor of Christianity because that is strictly the church side of the operation and it is a title of ordainment the same as any other church–would you bitch if you were working at a Catholic church doing maintenance work as a devout Atheist and start demanding that they make you a priest?

The church is secondary to the purpose of charity in general, and at least they were offering goods and services to fund their operations rather than stealing welfare checks like the new crop of faith based shelters, rehabs and food banks do.

I don’t know how exclusionary Sally is these days I do remember my pop worked for them for a number of years and he was a very vocal Agnostic (he didn’t know or care either way), I’ve volunteered my time with them off and on since I was 12 and never was forced to sit through a sermon or forced to participate in a prayer or any such thing-such activities were considered voluntary because they still helped no matter what you believed in or not. There was no preaching at the yearly company pic nics for the employees families some got into groups and prayed a little but not required. Otherwise most of the day was spent like any other company pic nic was.

I am not too crazy about your link to the OMB article it lacks a very important thing called references. Citation of sources is s very important matter to confirm data when writing an article, at most it is nothing more than the writers opinion based on some limited data.

I am only telling you what I have seen with my own eyes though you can dismiss and generalize all you like as is your right.

I’m a born-again Christian in the US Pacific Northwest. I am disgusted by Bensemann’s behavior. It IS NOT Christian. Christ would have been horrified by this man’s behavior, and would harshly reprimand him as he did the Pharisees for their similar behavior.

I have many Athiest friends, and was raised as Athiest myself, holding on to my convictions until I was 30 years old. But when I took on faith, I DID NOT TAKE ON STUPIDITY or UNKINDNESS AND JUDGEMENT. I am specifically NOT qualified to judge ANYONE of other faith than mine, and if I have TRUE interest in serving the poor, I welcome assistance from people of ANY faith or non-faith.

What Bensemann is doing is clearly NOT ministry to anyone but “the choir.” It’s certainly NOT ministry to the poor and needy.

“He said the aim was to increase church involvement, and having the food delivered by non-religious volunteers would defeat the purpose.”

This really should have been bolded. It’s not often you catch them openly admitting that their goal is NOT to help the poor, but to increase church attendance.

I would hope that the aim of a food drive would be to feed people. Looks like I was mistaken.

The area I live in is served by an “Interfaith Food Bank” to which nearly all the churches ’round here belong. The local Salvation Army and one of the larger churches donates storage space, and all the churches and the S.A. donate volunteer help, as well as monetary and in-kind donations. Overall it’s a pretty efficient operation, with very little in the way of ongoing expenses.

For a while, I helped them out by picking up day-old bakery items from a couple of supermarkets and delivering them to the food bank, every morning they were open, which was 3 or 4 days a week depending on the need. (I was between full-time jobs at the time and had a little spare time in the mornings.) When I offered my help, no one asked me what church I belonged to, they just asked if I had a car, I said yes, and they gave me that assignment. That was it. And they were happy to have my help.

It wasn’t until about 3 months went by that anyone involved realized I was a godless agnostic heathen. But once that was revealed, honestly, no one cared at all. Not one person so much as blinked at my contribution.

I continued that for another 2-3 months or so until I had a full-time job again and could no longer drive for them in the mornings. I have, since then, helped out on occasion, such as the weekend before Thanksgiving when they’re giving out holiday meals and they need a lot of hands to help assemble them. Usually I also have “turkey duty” (i.e. I’m the one who retrieves the turkeys from the freezer as folks arrive, and lugs them out to their cars) which I find quite fun — even if my hands are numb and cold by the end of the day.

At any rate, at no time did anyone in the operation say anything about my agnosticism. I never heard any complaints or comments, and — to my knowledge — there haven’t been any comments behind my back. When they need an extra hand, they call, and if I can help, I do. That’s all there is to it.

If the folks at my local Interfaith Food Bank can handle the contributions of this godless agnostic heathen, then I can’t see any rational reason why any other food bank can’t also accept the help of any other non-believer. If there’s work to be done, and willing hands to do it, it’s illogical to turn it away.

Legend has it that the “All Blacks” got their name when they arrived at a match in England with some Maori on the team a stodgy old Brit exclaimed “bloody hell, they”re all blacks”.
Being a proper team, the NZ’s took it and ran with it, rugby you know.

This spirit of acceptance has apparently died, pity. Sad, but consider: The U.S. used to have a constitution.

I am absolutely shocked. I’ve been involved in/used several faith-based charity services, and religion and church involvement was never an issue. I even asked specifically if it was a problem if I wasn’t a member of the church. I was told no. Of course, it was a hippie mountain town.

As far as the Salvation Army, I’ve had a relative stay in one of their shelters before and I’ve never heard if religion was considered. All he had to do was help clean up. Not that he was in his right mind to understand any religious witnessing.

As someone who lives not far awayfrom Christchurch, I’m tempted to go there and talk to these people in person but I don’t have time. I sent and email.

On a related note, here’s a really good atheist store I found. Well, primarily atheist and science stuff…

Aristotle’s Muse

Maybe wearing an atheist T-shirt won’t change the world, but then again, maybe it could.

Nothing prevents atheists from starting their own food pantries and doing “good works.” I don’t know how it works in NZ but in the USA most food pantries are about 90% funded by government grants and the original intention (after WWII) was to keep farmers afloat. The churches (usually) volunteer do the management, buying and distribution. There are rules about evangelizing because it’s a Faustian arrangement. It certainly isn’t what God instructed us to do. It seems a small request that the volunteers at least be of the faith doing the distribution. Even so, I’ve seen Muslim students volunteering at ours (the schools all have graduation requirements for “volunteerism” which sort of defeats the concept).

Dani,
No offense taken, but is your comment just your interpretation of the news story that we have all read, or do you actually have specific inside information about Bensemann’s intentions, and which priority is on top for him, increasing membership or feeding people?

I wouldn’t want to be unfairly jumping to conclusions about him, but one more opinion from afar is of no help in getting at the truth. So is this actual knowledge of yours?

The bottom line from the story seems to be that people were left hungry when there was help available. One way or another, I hope that Christians and atheists in the Christchurch area and around the world can work together to get the job done.

Edit: Reading your comment again, I think you were saying that you think that Bensemann was not specifically excluding atheists as unsuitable for delivering the food; he was just getting his two priorities, promoting membership and feeding the hungry, in an order that seems upside down to most folks. I think that you could be right.

To be clear, I’m not offended by the possibility of him excluding atheists per se, I’m offended by his upside down priorities. We must help people by whatever means presents itself.

This just means Christians can be as idiotic as anyone else…

@Kelley: I’m atheist, and I’m not looking for a handout… you might want to check your statistical sample size…

BTW, did you personally ask the thieves if they were atheist or Xtian? You just assumed that if they were morally deformed enough to steal from a food pantry they were not only not churchpeople or Xtian but were atheist? Hhmmmmm…

I don’t agree with that church, on turning away volunteers.

But why don’t you all start your own food banks, instead of spending your time complaining about how others run theirs? No matter how wrong their methods may be.

Complaining feeds no one.