For several years, Virginia Baptist mission teams have ministered on the Standing Rock Reservation, the fourth largest Native American reservation in the U.S, straddling the border of North and South Dakota. Michael Clingenpeel, pastor of River Road Church, Baptist, in Richmond, is with a mission team there this week and is sending daily impressions of the work.
FORT YATES, N.D. — No one has a corner on hopelessness. On almost every street and cul-de-sac in our fair land is at least one home whose occupants have run out of options.
That said, the people who live on the Standing Rock Reservation have more reason than most to be hopeless.
Donna Bower, a member at River Road Church, Baptist, hands out toothbrushes and toothpaste and demonstrates oral hygiene during a fair at Bullhead, S.D. (Photo by Michael Clingenpeel)
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The unemployment rate, for example, is 64 percent, according to the reservation's tourism director. In addition to poverty, there is a high incidence of alcoholism and other substance abuse, diabetes and domestic violence. One community has one of the highest rates of suicide in the nation. The reservation is in the midst of a federal crackdown that has surged law enforcement presence to three times previous levels.
Pastor Boots Marsh, who lives and works at Tipi Wakan (“sacred tent”) in Cannon Ball, N.D., understands better than anyone here how this feels. He spent 10 years of his life spiraling down and the next 10 in the process of restoration:
“All of our background and all the things we went through seem to fit this place,” he said to me as we sat at a table in Tipi Wakan on Thursday morning.
For the next six hours I rode with Pastor Boots as he journeyed around Standing Rock, shaking hands with people outside the post office at Cannon Ball, eating lunch at the gym in McLaughlin with a team from Warsaw (Va.) Baptist Church, thanking a team of college students who were placing last brush strokes on one of four houses they were painting in the South Dakota community of Little Eagle.
I peppered him with questions between stops, and he rendered thoughtful answers. At one point, in the middle of a discussion of the problems facing the 10,000 Native Americans who live at Standing Rock, and the difficulty of measuring success in ministry, Pastor Boots mentioned “the hopelessness of those who help.”
A man limps up to the door of Tipi Wakan. Inside, the medical team cleans and bandages a raging sore on his big toe. They warn the man, a diabetic alcoholic who rarely sees a sober day, that failure to take proper care of the wound will lead to an infection, and eventual amputation of his foot. He nods in recognition, but they know he will ignore their advice. The hopelessness of those who help.
A child, age 9, says to a Virginia Baptist volunteer at McLaughlin that she has tried to commit suicide. There are no mental health resources for this community of 750 people where a suicide took place the previous week in a home just behind the building where the volunteers were working. The hopelessness of those who help.
Pastor Boots’ cell phone rings on the ride back toward Cannon Ball. Elizabeth Boone, one of Virginia Baptists’ Venturers, is calling to say a fight broke out between a woman and her daughter at the community center. The police have arrived and broken it up. The woman is one who has professed Christ at Tipi Wakan under Pastor Boots’ ministry. He laments that word of the fight will spread through Cannon Ball, and her witness will be compromised. The hopelessness of those who help.
Helping is for patient, tolerant, imperfect, glass-half-full people. It looks for hope where the going is slow, where success is difficult to measure and where discouragement comes easily.
The antidote for the hopelessness of those who help is faith, which, as the writer of Hebrews put it, “is the conviction of things not seen.”
Faith is needed for those who help at Standing Rock, and also for you who help in Richmond, Roanoke, Alexandria, Virginia Beach.