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2004-04-20 issue:

Finding a place

Jubilee Ministries offers food for body and soul.

by Laurie L. Oswald

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Lebanon County, Pa., his boyhood home, is the last place Clair Weaver thought he wanted to live as an adult. But it’s the very place he feels most at home in following God’s call for his life.

Hearing that call to “come home” many years ago was difficult for Clair, now executive director of Jubilee Ministries. Some congregations belonging to the Lebanon District of Lancaster Mennonite Conference sponsor the ministry that reaches out to people in and around Lebanon Valley. Many of these people have been involved with the prison system and have needs related to their transition back into community life.

Clair, who loved being a respiratory technician, wanted to pursue the medical field further. But God steered him in another direction. So when people asked him to become executive director at Jubilee 14 years ago, he gave up his professional love to reach out in love to disenfranchised people: troubled youth, prison inmates, people addicted to drugs and alcohol, those who can’t make ends meet financially and those transitioning from prisons into the community.

“After I left Lebanon County as a young man and went into Mennonite Voluntary Service in Florida, I thought I’d never come back to this area,” says Clair, who was pastor at Lebanon Christian Fellowship, one of six Jubilee-sponsoring congregations that grew from people coming out of prison. “I just felt I had changed too much to fit here anymore.

“But then the parents of Betsy, my wife, needed us back in the area, so we came home to Pennsylvania and settled in Pottsville for a time, then Hershey, where I worked in local hospitals. We later moved to Lebanon, where I did home-care respiratory therapy for the Good Samaritan Hospital, after which my boss and I started our own medical supply business.”

But increasing struggles with Medicare costs and competition caused them to sell the business. While being pastor, Clair did some part-time work in a doctor’s office and part-time administration at Jubilee before he became the full-time executive director in 1990.

“My life is shaped like a funnel, where God just kept narrowing my options until I ended up at Jubilee full-time,” he says. “My people within the congregation helped me make one of the toughest decisions of my life. I really loved the medical field, but after praying and talking this out with friends, I knew Jubilee was where God wanted me.”

Struggler helps other strugglers. Struggling to find his place in life has shaped Clair into a man who can help others find their place, too. For example, he works with Howard Melton. A participant in Jubilee’s after-care program to transition people back into the community after incarceration, Howard lives at Jubilee House and works at the used-clothing and furniture store. Part of the yearlong after-care includes working in one of the Jubilee’s used clothing and furniture stores or at a construction site.

“I’m really nervous about getting back into the world, but working here, under the good care of a supervisor, is helping me relax,” Howard says. “It’s really hard to get back into the regular routine of life, after all the drama I’ve had in my life.

“I left my family and drank day and night for years and years. As it got worse and worse, I met people from the Jubilee prison ministry who helped me to see that God could forgive me. They also helped me read the Bible and to learn to know Jesus Christ.

“After I got out of the Marines, I’d been in 15 to 18 programs to help me with my alcohol problem. But Jubilee and Jesus are the first ones who really helped me. This place is special. It’s not just a program. They really care about people here, about your personal relationship with God and your relationships with others. They don’t want to fix your life. They want to offer you Jesus.”

Jubilee ministries are fruit on the vine of Jesus. Caring about all aspects of Howard’s life and the lives of others is the driving motive behind Jubilee, Clair says. Jubilee believes its food, clothing and shelter ministries are  “fruits on the vine” of the life of Jesus Christ, which is the reason Jubilee exists, he says. Jubilee strikes a balance between offering food for the body and food for the soul.

The after-care program in which Howard participates is part of Jubilee’s community ministries, which primarily serve those related to the criminal justice system. This branch of ministry provides pastoral counseling to hurting and seeking people, material assistance, a craft group for women, Faith House—a temporary shelter for families owned by Lebanon Church of the Brethren and operated by Jubilee—and a summer camp for children whose parents are in prison or on parole.

Jubilee also supplies several chaplains for the region’s state prisons and trains volunteers to visit the prisons and share God’s love through worship, Bible studies, mentoring, discipleship classes, stress and anger management and counseling, he says.

“We found that many of the chaplains assigned in these prisons were more concerned with politics than with inmates’ souls,” Clair says. “We send chaplains into these facilities who care about the inmates as people and who have the ability to share Jesus.”

And Jubilee offers low-cost clothing and furniture items in its stores, and a Christian coffeehouse, Café Beracah, in downtown Lebanon that helps prevent a life of crime for youth and adults.

The Jubilee used clothing and furniture stores in Lebanon and Palmyra help support about 46 percent—or about $450,000—of yearly operating costs for Jubilee ministries. The total budget has grown from about $100,000 15 years ago to about $1.2 million in 2003.

Other sources of support—in donations and volunteers—include seven Lancaster Conference congregations: Lebanon Christian Fellowship, Gringrichs Mennonite Church, Krall Mennonite Church and Freedom in Christ Fellowship (a church plant reaching out to young people at the café) in Lebanon; Meckville Mennonite Church and Schubert Mennonite Church in Bethel; and Roedersville Mennonite Church in Pine Grove.

Volunteers from these congregations and other groups desire to reach people’s hearts with Jesus—the most important source of life and goodness that Jubilee offers, Clair says.
“The biggest challenge is reaching people’s hearts so that they truly know Jesus,” Clair says. “We have discovered that in teaching about Jesus, only about 10 percent of the people in prison make a firm commitment and stick with it for the long haul.

“On the flip side of that, our biggest joy is when someone really commits himself or herself to Jesus. There’s a guy who for 40 years was an alcoholic and a drug abuser. Just recently a light bulb went on in him about God’s love. And he came in to see me; [he was] just glowing. I knew he’d had an experience with God.”
 
Laurie L. Oswald is news service director for Mennonite Church USA.

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