From Church to Social Work: Learning What It Means to Love My Neighbor

by Kelly Ropson
Client Care Specialist

Like many staff at World Relief Wisconsin, I grew up in a church which taught me to “Love My Neighbor.” We sang songs about it, discussed expressing kindness towards people and helping those in need. While it was highly impactful to me as a child, looking back I wonder if we unpacked that value enough over time as it carries significant weight for those who consider themselves Christians.

Fast forward to the winter 2020. I was parenting four children (one with a serious medical condition).We were homebound, it was dark outside what felt like most of the time, and I’d already attended some Covid-related funerals. To say it wasn’t an easy time is an understatement (as all of us who lived through it can attest to!). 

Learning To Know My Neighbor

During that long winter, our church in Green Bay started an online class called “How can we Love Our Neighbor if we don’t Know Our Neighbor?” I immediately signed up and fell in love with the class. Every time we met there was a speaker from a different area of our community. They came from schools, housing, prisons, the police force, racial resource centers, and spoke about poverty (and its relationship to other societal challenges), racial disparities, community needs assessments, challenges inside the school systems, and so on.

While sitting in my car (the quietest place during Covid) and attending class online, I felt a renewed sense of purpose and calling. I also realized a few important things. One, I really didn’t know my neighbors and I didn’t know how my own community functioned and survived. Two, many of our speakers were social workers!

Long story short, I applied for the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Master of Social Work (MSW) program as a direct result of taking our church’s class. In four part-time school years, I worked towards finishing this degree with the intention of using it to Love My Neighbor and work towards loving my community the way Jesus would. 

Where Faith and Social Work Meet

During the MSW program, I was reminded many times how closely social work and Loving Your Neighbor align. Four of the six social work values especially jump out at me; Dignity and Worth of the Person, Service, Importance of Human Relationships, and Social Justice.

As I work with immigrants at World Relief, I hold these values quite closely. Every person I meet with deserves to be treated with dignity and was created in the Image of God (a very similar idea to Dignity and Worth of the Person). Many of our families come to Wisconsin with trauma, have experienced sterile and unloving systems, and have to navigate life in a community that doesn’t understand them. In my work with clients, I let them know that they matter, their experience matters, and they are worth taking seriously before I do anything else — with tangible results.  

Dignity for Every Neighbor

Ultimately, both as a Christian and as a human being, I was forced to wrestle with some difficult questions by pursuing the MSW. Who IS my neighbor and how do I love them? I was able to capture that struggle with the last requirement I needed for the program: a capstone project.

After both experiences at World Relief and studies at UWGB, I decided to write my project on the “Scapegoating of Undocumented Immigrants and Its Widening Net.” In it, I explored how falsely blaming one group of people (undocumented immigrants) for current problems will grow and encompass other groups of people. This is something we are witnessing with the cancellation of Foodshare and Medicaid for those with refugee status as well as the arrest and detainment of documented refugees and citizens.

An important piece of the project includes a beautiful painting of undocumented farm workers. It’s a reminder to me that all people have human dignity and worth and that all people are my “neighbor,” even the ones society scapegoats or teaches me to think less of. And, importantly, how do I love them? I treat them with dignity and God’s grace, and then work on their behalf to make things right.