Good Works: Hospitality and Faithful Discipleship
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
For over forty years, the community of Good Works, Inc., has shared life with its neighbors in rural southeastern Ohio, a region with high poverty rates and remarkably resilient people. Offering friendship to those without a support network and shelter, care, and community to people without homes, those involved with Good Works have made it their mission to embody the gospel in innovative ways. What insights can be gleaned from Good Works, and how might these lessons be applied to our own communities and churches?
Keith Wasserman, the founder and executive director of Good Works, and Christine Pohl, a scholar of hospitality who has written extensively on church and mission, explore challenging insights from the story of Good Works and how it has grown over the years into a unique expression of discipleship in the body of Christ. At the heart of this community’s story are connection and mutuality. Good Works functions not as a charity or social service agency but as a place where everyone has the opportunity to both serve and be served. And although worship is a central paradigm for life at Good Works, Keith and the leaders of the community regularly partner with non-Christians from all walks of life who desire to help.
Christians who hunger for lifegiving involvement in their local communities—wherever they might be, and in whichever circumstances—will find inspiration and guidance in this quiet but powerful Appalachian ministry. Short prayers and questions for reflection at the end of each chapter make this a book to be studied and shared among those who know that love of God and neighbor is the starting point, but who aren’t sure where to go from there.
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- Introduction
- Worship as Our Paradigm for Mission
- Integrity Matters
- Keeping Perspective
- A Community of Friends
- Leadership in Community
- How Are Good Works Good?
Good Works is an inspiring and beautiful book full of wisdom. It weaves together Christine Pohl’s decades of insightful scholarship with the practical, lived wisdom of Keith Wasserman and the community of Good Works, Inc. This book helps us all go deeper into Jesus’s call to hospitality and faithful discipleship and to be inspired to live more faithfully ourselves.
—L. Gregory Jones
Wasserman and Pohl invite us to pull up a seat at the table of friendship where laughter and tears flow freely and where people who are counted as little in the eyes of the world discover they are seen and known. Good Works welcomes us into their home and introduces us to a family where all are embraced.
—Michael Mather
Good Works offers a profound paradigm for ministry whereby work with those at the margins is only ‘good’ to the extent that our own character and relationships with God and others are good. Turning the usual metrics upside down with refreshing power, Good Works illuminates the profound difference between ministry and social service agency.
—Chris Rice
Keith Wasserman is founder and executive director of Good Works, Inc., a nonprofit ministry that, for more than forty years, has worked alongside people in rural Appalachia to build a community of hope among those struggling with poverty, isolation, exclusion, and homelessness.
Christine D. Pohl (1950–2023) was professor emerita of Christian ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary. She authored numerous articles and books, most notably Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us and (with Keith Wasserman) Good Works: Hospitality and Faithful Discipleship.