FOR Reverend Garnett Roper, it is important that the church advocates for the social wellbeing of members within its community and complement the existing social services offered by the state.

It is for this reason that he and other members of the Portmore Missionary Church in St Catherine which he pastors, have implemented a number of social programmes to help improve the lives of those in the Portmore area.

“We believe that church has to approximate the ideals of Christ. It has to show its faith by what it does. So you pick the people who are being left out and are being left behind and you start with them, whether it be the disabled, or the children who are wards of the states or in foster care, or the people in the inner city who don’t get the social services,” said Rev Roper.

One of the communities the group has zoomed in on is Reids Pen in Greater Portmore, which they have been visiting for the past five years. The church has implemented a number of social interventions in the small inner city

community, which is characterised by high levels of unemployment and poverty.

A team of volunteers goes into the community every week to interact primarily with the children in an effort to instill positive values and to foster fellowship.

“A lot of mentoring is taking place, there are the weekly meetings, there is the welfare assistance and so on, but we try to keep it below the radar because we don’t want to pretend to be doing more than what we are doing,” Roper said.

One of the volunteers who has been going into Reids Pen is Sonia Lowe. She took early retirement from her accounting job so she could spend more time with the children.

Since meeting them three years ago, Lowe said she has been unable to tear herself away from the children.

“My focus is on the children and my heart goes out to them,” she said, adding: “We have lovely children in Jamaica and sometimes they just need a little attention and a little love.”

So, every Saturday she and members of her team host the “Good News Club session”, a two-hour programme similar to Sunday school classes.

“Church is not about sitting in a building on Sunday and having fellowship with other Christians. Our role in society is to bring out the great commission which Jesus gave,” she said, referring to the Biblical account of Jesus instructing his disciples to take the Gospel to all the world.

In addition to Reids Pen, Reverend Roper said the church has been maintaining an active presence in the Portmore fishing village and in Bayside where they hope to gradually roll out some social intervention programmes to assist residents. That notwithstanding, a number of them are already improving their lives through the church’s micro-lending scheme.

The scheme was introduced by the church eight years ago and makes loans available to members of the community as well as the church who need start-up money to finance a business or for personal undertakings.

“We seek to mainstream people and that is the easier way rather than to make them dependent on the church for continued hand-outs,” said Rev Roper.

One person who has benefited from the scheme is Nicole Pain-Elliot, a schoolteacher who borrowed $100,000 seven years ago.

“I was getting married at the time and I needed help,” she said, adding that she also wanted to be a part of a savings scheme.

In addition to these two initiatives, Portmore Missionary has been working with members of the deaf community.

Rev Roper, who had helped to prepare the position paper arguing for drivers licences for deaf drivers a few years ago, said that his church has found various means to reach out to the community. He said he has married, baptised and trained some of them for employment over the past few years.

“My own view is that we should not let them go find their own little niche. I think we should integrate them and normalise them, so we have a member working at the church in the office,” he said.