WEEK 5 - MARGINALIZED PEOPLE
The prayer spotlight falls this week on people who are often overlooked or even mistreated. Pray that the Lord will make us His vessels of love, hope, and justice. Pray for those among our Alliance family who do the important work of chaplaincy—bringing the message of Jesus to people in their most challenging times, when they need to hear that message the most and may well be most responsive to it.
DAY THIRTY // SINGLE-PARENT FAMILIES BY AMY ROEDDING
Blessed are the merciful…
- Matthew 5:7a
One topic the Church has struggled to address is single-parent families. A recent Christianity Today article notes, “In 2018, there were more than 16 million single parents in the U.S., and nearly half (40%) of births in the U.S. were to unmarried women.” I work with both the women’s and children’s ministries at my church, and I realize I don’t know any single parent families who attend our church. Why? Single parents tend to be in a lower income bracket; so if the church isn’t near where they live or doesn’t provide a way to get to church, they will not attend.
Life of Single Mom Ministries notes that two-thirds of single mothers do not attend church. It’s as if we have an unreached people group within our communities that we, whether intentionally or not, overlook. Dawn VanderWerf, who started Single Parent Missions in 2012 after her husband was incarcerated, writes, “Single moms and fatherless kids are like the ‘widows and orphans’ of this generation.”
In Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount we are given an image of what believers should look like: merciful, meek, poor in spirit, caring about righteousness and justice, and mourning with those who mourn. In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard notes that preceding the sermon, “Jesus was demonstrating the Gospel of His Kingdom . . . by healing people, and huge crowds were coming. He demonstrates it by acting with God’s rule from the heavens, meeting the desperate needs of the people around him.” Shouldn’t we be acting on this need in our culture and communities?
PRAYER POINTS:
1. Pray that God will forgive us for overlooking these “modern-day widows and orphans.”
2. Ask God to give us a burden for the single-parent families in our communities.
3. Pray that God will enable us to think of creative ways to serve single-parent families in our communities.