A little kindness goes a long way. At least that’s what Josh Hatcher believes. Hatcher is the Outreach Pastor at Open Arms Community Church, and he says that recently, he’s had an epiphany. And he thinks it can change the world.
“Something is missing in my life, and in the lives of those around me,” says Hatcher, “and I’m not quite sure when, but it’s gone.” That something, according to Hatcher, is community.
“We live in a day when people don’t even know their neighbor’s names. To be honest, I don’t know all of my neighbor’s names.”
Hatcher says that in January, he was shoveling snow from his driveway, when he thought it would be nice of him to shovel his neighbor’s driveway as well. A couple hours later, he had shoveled all the driveways on his dead end street.
“I know that central to my faith is this concept that radical acts of kindness can change the world, and as I shoveled snow, I got to thinking, what if everyone did this? What if 1000 people decided that they would do something nice for someone today? It blew my mind!” says Hatcher.
That thought started to take shape as a plan, as Hatcher concocted what he calls a “Big Hairy Idea” to rebirth community in Bradford and beyond. “It’s actually pretty simple. I want one thousand people to commit to do one kind deed a day for another person for a year.”
Hatcher thinks 365 thousand acts of kindness would transform the community. “I think kindness is a spiritual encounter, whether you are Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Hindu, or Wiccan. I think everyone holds kindness in high regard, but I think we get distracted sometimes by our own agendas, and it keeps us from really living in community.”
After hearing a story on Public Radio about a man whose body sat mummified for more than a year in his apartment, Hatcher was moved to action. “I just thought, there are people within one block of my house who have no one to talk to, no one to stop by to see if they are okay. That would be horrible to be all alone.”
A trip to New York City, and a silent subway ride further cemented his convictions. “Sociologists talk about this new trend that they call ‘Crowded Loneliness’. It’s when people are right in the middle of one of the largest concentrations of people on the planet, and they have no one to talk to,” says Hatcher. “Shame on us for thinking we are too good to reach out to the people around us!”
Hatcher started work on a website, onekindness.org, where visitors can hop on, and enter their kind deeds for the day. “It’s not about people tooting their own horn. In fact, we screen the deeds and take out any identifying information before they are posted. I just think a centralized place to track those kind deeds would be fun, and it would encourage people to be more conscious and deliberate about showing kindness.”
Conscious and Deliberate is exactly what Hatcher is looking for. “Most people already do nice things for other people. Some of us already do them almost every day. What I want is for people to get in the habit of looking for needs around them that they can meet.”
He quotes a song by the Rock group Nickleback
If everyone cared and nobody cried
If everyone loved and nobody lied
If everyone shared and swallowed their pride
Then we'd see the day, when nobody died
“To make a difference, we’ve got to be conscious of the world around us. And we’re going to have to spend some money,” says Hatcher. He says that not all kind deeds cost much, if anything, but he encourages people to look for the needs of those around them that need to be met.
“It might involve buying a couple extra cans of soup when you buy your groceries to give to the Salvation Army. It might involve volunteering a few hours at the Friendship Table, or bringing your old maternity clothes to the Twin Tiers Pregnancy Care Center. It might also mean giving away your old car to the young couple down the street that can’t afford to buy one right now. Some of us have little, some of us have a lot, but no matter our station in life, we can all give something.”
OneKindness.org is a ministry of Open Arms Community Church, but Hatcher says that doesn’t mean that it is exclusively Christian in nature. “I want this to be an organic thing, rather than an organized thing. I do not want OneKindness.org to be it’s own non-profit, I want it to be a lifestyle that people adopt. But there are advantages to working with a 5013c organization, which is why it’s part of Open Arms.”
Hatcher says that he believes Christianity should be all about kindness. “But that does not make this a religious thing, or an exclusive thing. Anyone, whether they follow Jesus or not, can be a part of this. I follow Jesus, and so I try to do what He did. That doesn’t mean that everyone else will. But regardless of your religious preference, the fact is, Kindness is a good thing, and if we want Bradford, and the rest of this world to be a better place, we’ve got to start showing a lot more of it.”
He also makes an open apology for a lack of compassion shown by others that share his religious background. “I can’t count how many people that I’ve talked to in the past year that have been hurt by people calling themselves Christians: Christians who have acted judgmentally, selfishly, thoughtlessly, and even cruelly. I want to say on behalf of what Christianity stands for, that I’m really sorry. For some reason, people keep screwing it up. It’s wrong the way that some people act in the name of God. And I think it’s about time that Christians start following Jesus, and quit being mean. There’s no excuse for it.”
As for his “pie in the sky” vision, Hatcher says, “I’ve always been a dreamer. I know that I cannot change the world. I don’t have any illusions of grandeur. But if I can make life better for the people around me, and encourage others to do the same, I think the world will be changed, not because of what I did, but because of what we all did.”
For more information please contact Josh Hatcher
joshhatcher@openarmsbradford.org
onekindness.org
openarmsbradford.org
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Tuesday, April 24, 2007
