I Became a Social Worker to Serve the Church — Elizabeth Vendley

Lesson Transcript

We have something called the social work standards and ethics that we have to, certain competencies that we have to go by. They're all wrapped up in Matthew 5:6 and 7. Conduct your life in a way of integrity, in a way of love, in a way of looking at yourself first and pouring out to others. There you have it. You're doing social work. Hmm. All right, well, Elizabeth, welcome back to the podcast.

So you're a social worker in the city, and you also have a pretty fascinating testimony and story, which we're doing that as a whole separate thing that'll be released before this one. So you know people can check that out if they want to get more of your context. So we're not going to get into that part, but I do want to get into another piece of your, well, your life story, and that is being a social worker and focusing on that and exploring what is your role there. So let's start with some basics.

What is a social worker and what exactly do you do? I mean, I've never interviewed a social worker before. I feel pretty clueless about this, and I feel like I have a lot to learn. So yeah, tell me. Yeah, it's, of course, it's a topic of choice for me, a preferred topic. So because I did come from a worldly society or average American society, I had a couple of years of college in before we came to the Anabaptist faith.

Then there came a point where I knew that I was going to have to take care of myself financially and that my body might not always be able to be able to take care of people. I worked in the field of disabilities, and so I wouldn't always be able to physically take care of my folks. I needed a way to make a living that I could do past age 65. So that's just some pieces that fed into my pursuing social work.

I got my four-year degree, a bachelor's degree, which is four years of college in biblical studies, and human services was my minor that just got tagged onto that. And that's when I became interested in the idea of how social work can serve the church. And that put me on fire, and I ended up going to graduate school, and in May, I received my master's degree in social work. So I am now working towards full licensure. That takes a year of supervision, and then I will be a licensed clinical social worker. Hmm.

So what do you do exactly? Like, what is a social worker? Currently, I work as a behavioral consultant. I work with children that have intensive behavior issues. So I go into the homes and I look at what's going on, and I come up with a, I assess, I evaluate, come up with a treatment plan, say, this is how we're going to go after this bug, keep all the data, teach people what to do and how to work with this child, and bring them to where they want to be, best case scenario.

The beauty of social work to me, and what really attracted me, is it is such a wide, wide variety of things you can do with it. At first, people hear social worker, and they think of a lady with a clipboard, you know, taking children off to foster care. You know, it's got some real negative connotations. And in an urban area, it has really negative connotations. Where I live and serve in my church is an urban setting.

So it's like, hmm, you know, it does look a little odd, and I realize that, and I just acknowledge it and work through it. But a social worker can do that, can work for the county or whatever and protect children in need. A social worker can do so many things. Work in a hospital, helping people to find the resources they need, get grandma into a facility, get some find a rehab, get finding services for people. In the disability area, I can manage group homes.

I can help people to find, get the services they need, what government programs they can and cannot get, what programs are appropriate for them. You can work in a disaster situation, helping people to figure out, okay, a tornado took my house. Now what do I do? All right, well, let's get you this aid. Let's plug into this. As well as the component of sitting with the person and processing the difficulty. You know, then my faith can come in if they're open to that.

You know, and well, why would God let, you know, a flood take my entire house away? Why would God do that? You know, you can work in a hospital with dying children. You can, it's just, it's huge. You can work in an academic setting, teaching or school counselor. You can work with the police department in helping to get through their difficulties. You can come up with a mobile shower for homeless people. It's wherever God calls you. So that, that clinched it for me. That wide variety.

I can do wherever the Lord sends me, I'm equipped. Okay, so wow, that's really helpful for me because it seems like there's a lot more variety here than what I thought. That's very common. Yeah, absolutely. That's, yeah, that's really something. So you already mentioned some of the pieces, but if you want to add any more of like, why did you choose this career? And then the piece that I was really thinking about is like, feels like this would be a pretty hard job sometimes, right?

There's surely there's easier things to do. Yeah. Yeah, so if you want to speak into that. It is. It's messy. And we're walking into messy situations. But didn't Jesus do that when he walked into this earth? He walked into a messy, sin-ruined situation. So, you know, that kind of helps me to take that context when I go into a house that might be culturally quite different from what I'm accustomed to. That, you know, hey, Jesus visited a sin-sick world and lived there for 33 years and bore all of that.

For an hour, hour and a half, I can sit here, you know, with various situations. So, but a lot of it is the component of, is the Lord putting me here? Or have I put myself here? That's important. It's an important piece. I'm not just here because I want to go and help these people. It's the Lord sending me there. It feels like motive or the intention behind it is a really important piece that I keep hearing coming out with this, right? Yeah, I think it is.

And it is for me as a Christian, it's very much an outpouring of my faith. For other social workers, it might be just that thing in them, that altruistic, I want to do good. You know, I want to make an impact on this injustice or that injustice. You know, for me, my motivation is, what would Jesus do? Well, get into that a bit more. Go a little deeper with that. How does your faith inform the work that you're doing?

Which, and I'm sure there's many areas of intersection, but again, I think there is kind of a stigma around the social worker. Like you said, the person with the, you know, stern and the, you know, the clipboard and things. So there's all these stigmas. And so when I heard, oh, you're a social worker, oh, now that is interesting. You know, I want to drill into that a bit because how does, yeah, what you believe, how does that inform what you do on a daily basis? Yeah, it does have an impact.

Because of the outward testimony, you know, I obviously look different than the people in the inner city or the people that I serve. And so I get some real, real blunt questions. You know, I work with kiddos right now, or I work with adults that have intellectual disabilities, and their questions are real blunt. What's in your head? You know, okay, you know, we've got to go here right now, you know.

So, you know, I kind of have some answers, and I just say, oh, there's a Bible verse I really like that makes me want to wear it. That's enough for them. If mom wants to ask me later, that's her thing. So you're working with fairly young people, you said again? At this time. Okay. At this time, most of my kiddos are like age 4 to 12. Oh, okay. Most of my experience is with adults with intellectual disabilities. So then I've got a greater range. And I still do that like on a ministry level with those folks.

So that kind of lays my foundation. Like, okay, I go with the Bible. That's my measuring stick. That's where I go. And then if they want to speak into that, fine. If they want to ignore that, fine. Then we go on to the next thing. Something that really impacts how my faith informs my social work practice could probably be summed up in Matthew 5:6 and 7. We have something called the social work standards and ethics that we have to, certain competencies that we have to go by.

They're all wrapped up in Matthew 5:6 and 7. Conduct your life in a way of integrity, in a way of love, in a way of looking at yourself first and pouring out to others. There you have it. You're doing social work. So let's pivot slightly and say, do you have challenges of balancing what you believe, your convictions, with the responsibilities of your job? Like, do those ever misalign and you have to kind of wrestle through that? Yeah, and that would be what we call in the social work field, ethical dilemmas, okay?

Oh, yeah. But it happens to everybody. It doesn't just happen to a conservative Anabaptist out there. It also will happen to maybe somebody who's part of the LGBTQ community that needs to serve somebody who has got Trump signs all over their yard, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that is a real. If you're a social worker, you're going to have to deal with that. And the answer is the same as the answers we see in the Bible and in the Sermon on the Mount.

Look in at yourself, know what you are, know where you are before you be pouring out on other people. So that's how we're taught. You need to be aware if you have racial blind spots in either direction, whether you're a white person who has racial things there, or whether you're a social worker who is African American, who feels really ripped off and has had it with the system, well, she can't be getting in the face of the white principal she's working with, you know, about this. So we have to temper that.

That's biblical, okay? This is all the consider the beam in your own eye, you know? So a lot of the concepts very much tie into my faith. And then the outpouring very much service. I mean, that's just plain a gospel fact. Have there been times when there was a real tension there that, if you're able to give like, say, a specific example that, okay, wow, here's one of those ethical dilemmas, and you had to walk through that and try to find the, I'm not even sure what you would say, the middle ground or something.

I almost don't like that word. It feels like there's, that's not quite the right thing I'm going for, but I think you get what I'm trying to say. Common ground is what I go for. Yeah, there you go. If I am sitting with somebody that is from the LGBTQ community, some might not all, but some might come at me as like, you're against me. You think I'm a sinner. And it's like, technically, ain't we all? You know, I can relate to that person, and part of it is because I've had an education.

It might give me a little bit more of the liberal viewpoint on some of that stuff. But it's like, yeah, but if somebody is in adultery or drunkard or whatever, I mean, it's all the same. It doesn't matter whether it's the, if you're waving a rainbow flag or whether you're going to the bar or whether you're beating up your wife, it's all the same. Sin is sin is sin. I want to go with what's common between you and me. And let's focus on that. What do you need from me? I need you to understand me.

I understand you're a human. We're good. Let's go. Okay, so that's, would that be one of the fundamental principles that you end up using then, this concept of common ground? Yeah, yeah. You know, somebody, say I would be a school counselor and I have a teenager coming in and she's like, I want an abortion and I need you to help me get an abortion. I can't, you know, I can't do that, you know. So I can refer her to somebody. Okay, well, I know of a place that shows you all your options. Check that place out. Okay.

So that gets a little more down into like a real tangible situation, right? Oh yeah. That could get a mess. We're quizzed on that stuff. So yeah. Well, I wasn't sure if there are certain limitations on what you're allowed to do. Like, well, I'm sure there are. There's parameters. But what you just described there, oh, okay. I can see that. That makes sense. You know? Yeah. If a same-sex couple comes to me and says, I need marriage counseling, you know, I can assess what their issues are in general.

Then I can say, hey, you know, Sally over there, she really understands your community and your context. I think she's a better choice for you. That does make a lot of sense because, wow, I can still imagine tension being a possible thing. Well, actually, probably quite a lot in a lot of different ways. Oh yeah. Right. Yeah. But then again, perhaps I'm looking at this a bit wrong when in reality, we all face this to one extent or another.

Anytime you interact with society, you know, obviously you experience it in one way as a social worker, but maybe all of us do. We interviewed, I'm just thinking off the top of my head, I interviewed my dad actually about his business stories and things like that and how standing up for, you know, what was ethical, what was right.

And I was like, sometimes that really cost, you know, and it was trying to find, again, you know, kind of that common ground, like, well, I can't really do that because that's not right, you know. And sometimes the stories don't always end amazing. You know, sometimes there's a real cost to standing up for something, right? Yes. But, and so maybe some of what you're facing in these scenarios that we're talking through is actually something all of us face in one way or another. Is that, yeah, you think? Yeah, yeah.

And just our view of humankind. How do we minister and how do we relate to people? Now, like I said, I'm in an urban setting in my church and our focus is serving that community, almost that neighborhood. In a city, you know, your neighborhood is like about the block around you, you know. And of course, everything's upward. So there's, you know, three, four stories of families. But that's your little community. And you come across all kinds. But we need to just do that on a community basis.

And then it just gets bigger. Okay. So then we look at the whole city and how our church will then hopefully impact the city, which will hopefully impact society, which hopefully will impact eternity. You know, so we're kind of starting with the neighborhood and making a spiral around. And that's one of the beauties of being in the city is that we are coming across folks that are fresh out of jail and homeless. And I mean, that's who we serve. That's our concentration for our congregation.

That's where the Lord has called our congregation is with the homeless and those who don't have the services that they need. So my social work has been really working hand in hand with my church's vision. I think that's another part, and maybe speaking to that as well, is how what your work is doing, how that interfaces with, say, the different ministries that a church may do in this environment, say.

Well, our church, the building itself was given to us by a congregation that had money and age, but did not have the membership to sustain what they had gotten going. It's a huge building, old-fashioned stained glass windows, the church bell, the whole nine yards. They gave us the building, plus, plus, plus. But one of the conditions was that we continue their homeless meal, is what they called it. We call it a community meal. So you don't have to be homeless to be there. It's just anybody.

And so we serve, I think at this point, it has been pre-COVID, we were nearly 100. Now it's probably up to about 40 folks that come in and we feed them, but we don't, we sit down and eat with them. They don't go through a line with a tray. You know, we sit down, our families sit down. They get to experience us and we get to experience them. And that's our vision of impacting the community. Wow. And we've had people then come to church.

I think almost all of our community people that have attended our church came first to the community meal to check these people out, you know? Hey, I get it. You know, I totally get it. Absolutely. So, you know, that is kind of our way of serving. So we're coming up against people who just got out of jail or have significant mental health diagnoses and can't maintain an apartment and they're homeless and living under the bridge or don't want to because they believe the whole world's corrupt. Who knows?

You know, all kinds of scenarios. We see all kinds of stuff. And so my social work practice has been able to inform the other people in the church. We have had people under various mental conditions or sobriety conditions that want to come to a church service. And they might be disruptive. How do we handle this? You know, they're just kind of like, Elizabeth. Yeah. Now all the guys in my church have the crisis intervention number on their phone. Now they know the drill. Somebody's on a hand.

You know, this is the number I call. Now we've had it happen where they've had to come in and escort the person out. We now have different plans in place for people that really, all they want is our bathroom. They're homeless. They want to clean up. They want to use our bathroom. They have to sleep through church so that they can use our bathroom. Yeah. How do you handle that? How do you handle your children seeing that? How much do you want your children interacting with them?

You don't want them to be pulling away from it, but is that person safe? You know, all that stuff comes up. And so I'm really grateful for my social work training that I can, you know, kind of stand in that gap a little bit, if that makes any sense. So it's been a real blessing. The Lord has just blessed it from all kinds of angles and made it clear to me that's the path that he wants me to serve him in. Yeah. Okay.

So I can imagine that you have a number of stories and experiences and things, you know, from this type of work. Is there one story in particular, perhaps, that you'd like to share with us that kind of captures what you're doing and why you do it? There's actually two. Hopefully I won't. Sure. The one story that has touched me the most is from our own groups. A group of church people came together to say to each other, we have a brother in our congregation who is a quadriplegic.

He's 60 years old and his parents are getting old. What are we going to do when they cannot manage his care anymore? What they ended up doing was coming up with a multi-church board because we are in a larger area. And they came up with a multi-church board and built a house, well, added onto a house and put up a group home for conservative Anabaptists with disabilities that cannot be taken care of at home, but a nursing home isn't appropriate. They built this home that is awesome. And I was very privileged.

And again, it was a total God thing that he landed me there to manage that home. First, the Lord took me through some training at a place, a very large ministry. So I learned how to run a group home and really went through some stuff learning that. And then it's like, aha, that's why you had me go through that, Lord. And so I had the privilege of managing that group home for seven years, watching the church interact with our residents. We had three residents interacting as a church body.

I mean, you know, as conservative Anabaptists, we do that really well. And they did. Yeah. Oh, they did. So that it was just the church was working well. And it just, wow, I loved it. I loved it. And I'm still very involved with the house, but my full-time job is working as the behavior consultant. I go over to the group home work weekends or just hang out with my dear ones. But I lived there. I lived in an apartment above the house for seven years and managed the home.

Yeah, that seems like such a snapshot of the body of Christ coming together to care for those in need. Like, wow. Yeah. That's amazing. It was. It was a God thing, you know. So it was just, it just blessed my heart. And because that was basically like a church mission, we weren't licensed and we only had three. If you have four or more residents, you need to be a licensed facility. So now as a social worker and as a licensed social worker, I could have a licensed facility. Oh.

Which could be, I mean, it was much nicer to not have to deal with all the paperwork, regulations, and licensure. But I knew the rules. I could keep the standard. That house, you know, would have passed an inspection. I knew what the regulations were. I could keep that. It was all, you know, absolutely, you know, legal and on the up and up. But if other groups, other states, I would know now how to do that and help other groups do that.

And I do work with Anabaptist Disabilities Network and some different places who have interest in this sort of a church outreach. So that's probably my favorite story. My other one is what I see in my congregation. I just, when I see the men, for lack of a better term, I mean, the women do it too, but you know, men lead out in relating to these folks that are from the community and dealing with these situations just from what they know in the Bible and just what the Holy Spirit is doing in their hearts.

And the answers and responses that they are giving to these people are the same things that we're learning. That's a thus and thus model. Oh, that's this such a technique. Oh, that was, you know. But this is just coming out of Christ in them. And it's like, wow. You know, they didn't have to be taught to do that, you know, because they're opening to learning, you know. I mean, yeah, none of them probably knew what crisis intervention was before we started our church. You know, they're learning.

But yeah, it's just really touching to see the church work. We hear a lot of complaints about the church, this, the church, that, you know. But I think it does us well to concentrate on when the church is working well. I think our ministers and our leaders deserve that. Yeah, I was just going to say there are so many examples of this, you know, where you do see, you look around and you're like, oh, whoa, that church did something really incredible there.

Really served its community and like made a difference in the local environment. And people look at that and like, wow, that's amazing, you know. And that feels like we're on such solid historical footing. Like, you know, the church has always done that. You can trace that thread, you know, all back, back all the way to Jesus and the apostles. And that's a beautiful legacy, you know. And anyways, so that story you told about the home that you were involved in, that's pretty spectacular, actually.

And maybe there's someone listening to this being like, hmm, like, hey, we should, yeah, we should think about doing something like that. Like, how can we care for people in these types of situations? Yeah, and it can be switched into any situation. You know, here in our area and in other areas, there are kind of settings for people struggling with crises in their life or mental health issues or family issues or, you know, things like that.

Or if the church feels led to have a homeless shelter, how would they start doing that? If our churches had more social workers, we can help with that, you know. So that was kind of something that inspired me. I feel like the church needs social workers and I think social work needs the church. Oh, yeah. And I think that is a pretty important piece that this isn't something that's happening in isolation, right?

Like this is interfacing close or should be, I guess you're saying, interfacing very closely with the local churches. Yeah. As we bring this episode to a close, what's a piece of advice or something you'd like to leave the listeners? Like I said, I feel that the church needs more social workers and I feel like as general society declines and becomes more complicated, we plain people aren't going to enjoy the wide margins that we have from the government.

You know, right now they leave us school our own or have births at home or whatever. They kind of, you know, we get an awful lot of privilege. Actually, I think we're probably, as a Mennonite woman, I think I'm probably about the most privileged, you know, segment of society that there is. There's like people open doors and hand me their babies and walk away, you know. It's just like, you know. That's awesome. But, you know, I can see how that could decline very rapidly.

And, you know, so now I'm getting a little intellectual here, but I just feel like as a church, we need to be able to handle that. And I, so I think my part of being a social worker could help that.

And all those who are out there who are paramedics or doctors or mamas raising their babies, I mean, we all are doing, you know, like we can all contribute to that if we're wise, you know, and think about the church and how we as a church can impact, you know, like I was saying before about, you know, community, go wider, you know, society, go wider, eternity, you know. Just keep opening up that lens and letting your impact or letting Christ, Christ in you, impact. This has been fascinating.

I hope this episode has encouraged people to have a better understanding of this type of work and also encouraged people to say, oh, you know, let's think creatively. Like how could our church, you know, get involved in society around us? You know, like you said, start a homeless shelter or, you know, help this person in this particular situation, whatever that might be. There's lots and lots of options. Yeah, we do community well. Yeah. You know, like you said, historically, I mean, that's what we do well.

So let's give Christ while we're doing that. Let's make sure people are taking Christ with them, not shoe fly pie, you know, and barn raising. So those are great things. Those are valid things, but let's give them Christ. Yeah. That's some powerful pieces to leave us with. Well, Elizabeth, thanks for taking the time to come on and share with us today. Thank you. Really appreciate this. Thanks for listening to this episode with Elizabeth.

There's much more to her story that we weren't able to cover, but you can find that whole story of how she went from being Roman Catholic to the Amish and then on to the Mennonites in the episode linked down below. If you appreciate what we're doing here at Anabaptist Perspectives, consider joining our exclusive partner podcast, which is available to monthly supporters of any amount. You can sign up through our website, and we'll see you in the next episode.