by Guy Page
With everything inside of me, I raise a ‘Hallelujah!’ for “Acts of the Apostles,” a story in this week’s Seven Days about a new church in Barre ministering to and comprised of drug addicts, starting with former cocaine abuser Pastor Chuck Clark. Written by national heavyweight reporter Joe Sexton, ‘Acts of the Apostles’ profiles the hard lives and real hope of the congregation of addicts, the history of the new church founded by retired Army Col. Dan Molind and Clark, and civic leaders like Mayor Thom Lauzon, a police detective, and the Pruneau-Polli Funeral Home operators who pick up the bodies of overdose victims. Here’s one paragraph from the don’t-miss-it article:
“But the flame started by free food became a considerable fire, and soon chairs and speakers had to be placed in the street outside the kitchen to accommodate the congregation. The Gospel was straightforward: All of us, whether handing out the food or accepting it, are imperfect, even broken, people. Your failings don’t define you. The broken still have value. Your former lives are not some imperceptible, irretrievable dream. Saying yes to Jesus can give you a new life.”
Vermonters of faith often look askance at Vermont news media for their failure to report, or even understand, the importance and impact of the Kingdom of God. In her column this week, 7D publisher Paula Routly admits that “Seven Days rarely writes about faith, not simply because we live in one of the most secular states in the nation. Seventy-five percent of Vermont adults seldom or never attend religious services, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with 66 percent in New Hampshire and Maine.
“More likely we avoid the topic because journalists are trained to be skeptical, to concern themselves with verifiable facts and evidence, datasets and test results. We want proof.
“Joe [Sexton] got over that in 2007, working on a yearlong project for the Times about a Pentecostal church in Harlem. He recalled, “All it took was a determination to take believers seriously, to be comfortable writing about the idea of the miraculous, to realize that such churches in fact had their own array of empirical evidence: mouths fed, homes repaired, lives rescued.
“Those hard facts are every bit the equal of the documented good achieved by government programs and modern science.”
Seven Days specializes in the lengthy, in-depth feature news story. In both topic and delivery, they’ve outdone themselves this week. Worth the read.
Chuck Clark is perhaps the second-best known pastor named Clark in Washington County. His son, Aaron Clark, is the author of yesterday’s commentary on abortion and natural law, founder of Imago Christi Church in Montpelier, which recently merged with Crossroads Christian Church in East Montpelier. Clark serves now as Associate Pastor at Crossroads. Like his dad, he ministers to people in addiction at Crossroads, along with his many other preaching and teaching duties. – Editor (and elder at Crossroads Christian Church)