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INTRO:
Roswell UMC near Atlanta invites hundreds of job seekers to their job
networking ministry each month. Church member Katherine Simons says she
hopes other churches will begin their own ministries to help those who
are out of work.
SCRIPT:
(Locator: Roswell, Georgia)
Katherine Simons/Job Networking Coordinator, Roswell UMC: “Every
second and fourth Monday of every month we meet here at Roswell United
Methodist Church to offer our job-networking program.
People just come walking in the door. They’re nervous. They don’t know
what to expect. One of our job seekers recently told us that they came 3
times and sat out in the parking lot. And this was the first time they
had ever actually gotten out of the car.
They’ve run out of hope. They’ve run out of resources. They’ve run out
of direction. And they come in here and talk about ‘How can you help
me?’”
Jay Litton: “We have you at each table with a volunteer facilitator.”
Katherine Simons: “Our whole church can gather around people and offer
some solutions. And we just cover people with prayer from the minute
they walk in the door. We have 360 volunteers. We have a lot of people
so that no one has to feel like they have to be here every single time.
We have a lot of back up. We’ve been training other churches because
they’ve been asking, ‘How do I get this going?’ And I constantly remind
everyone you can have a complete career ministry with just a handful of
volunteers. When we started we just had one volunteer, one person who
was meeting with job seekers to talk about what issues they were running
into. And that’s a whole career ministry.”
Speaker: “Let me tell you what he said to let go of.”
Katherine Simons: “Two years ago in conversation with the North Georgia
Conference about how we could promote this, give more information to
people to encourage them to start up career ministries. We put this book
together called, Loving Your Neighbor, 34 writers, all the volunteers
that passionately told their story about why they do this. We then had
our conference and our materials together so that we could meet with
all-sized churches—churches that only had 200 members and churches that
had several thousand members. There’s one theme in this book. Every
single person has written about the exact same thing and it’s loving
your neighbor. None of this happens unless you are willing to reach out
and really love your neighbor. When we talk to volunteers about what
we’re looking for the most from them, we’re asking them just to love
these people when they walk in the door and everything else will follow
after that.”
Participant at table: “It’s interesting how you don’t miss people until they’re gone.”
Katherine Simons: “If The United Methodist Church gets behind this and
grows it and promotes it, we can change people’s lives and our country
in a way that will impact us for years to come. Together we can change
our future."
TAG:
Roswell also partners with the Crossroads Career Network. To learn about Roswell’s Job Networking ministry call 770-993-6218.
Also, see: Career Care at Church
Posted: October 24, 2011
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