I learned something new recently. In the middle ages, a woman who joined a monastery had to give a dowery, a payment, to the monastery. The effect was that most nuns or sisters were noblewomen or belonged to the upper class. Poor women need not apply. Of course, I was offended by this. How dare they exclude people! At first I figured that this exclusion of the poor was a feature of  the very rigid class structure of the middle-ages, but it’s true today. The poorer a person is, the less likely they are to belong to or attend a church or even talk about religion. Every study shows that.

There aren’t any rules to exclude the poor from churches, but there are actions that provoke it. My grandmother, who grew up in a very poor family, said the girls at her church mocked her because she wore the same white dress for her first communion on Easter Sunday as she had for her confirmation of Palm Sunday. Fifty years later it still bothered her.

How are persons today received at church if their clothes look a little shabby? I am haunted by something I saw as a teen. I was with some relatives visiting a church for a choir concert when a disheveled man settled down in a pew. In minutes a team of ushers arrived to remove him from the church.

I think every church has to look at itself and ask whether it is acting in ways to keep the poor from their churches.

Read Luke 14:12-14 and remember: God loves YOU and everyone else, including the poor, unconditionally.

Wayne