If Every Church in America Supported its Needy Widows at $100/Month

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My recent post, “It’s Time for America’s Churches to Take Their Financial Responsibilities to Widows and Others Seriously,”¹ has received overwhelming support. It’s been downloaded from my site over 20,000 times and shared by over 4,000 people.

Now I want to extend the thought in that post. What would it be like if every church in America supported its needy widows with a modest monthly supplemental pension of $100/month?

According to the Social Security Administration, about 7.8 millions widows aged 65 or older received retirement benefits in 2015.²

Among widowed individuals receiving retirement benefits in that same year, 12 percent were living in poverty.³

According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the official poverty level for one person aged 65 or older is $11,756.⁴

This means that there are roughly 936,000 widows in the United States living on $11,756 or less in annual income, many of whom are members of America’s churches.

So what would the impact be if every church in America provided a monthly supplemental pension of $100/month to these needy widows?

The estimate for the number of churches in America I often see floating around is 300,000. Let’s say as a guesstimate that each church has two widows living at or below the official poverty level, a level that I think everyone would agree is extremely low. That would mean that for just $200/month per church, every church in America would be providing a 10% increase in annual income for 600,000 widows, or almost two thirds of those who are officially living in poverty!

$100 a month in additional income may not seem like much to us. But if you’re a widow and living on less than $1,000 a month, $100 a month is huge.

Maybe it’s time for us Christians to show America what obedience to the Word of God really looks like.

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

Learn how to meet every pressing need in your church here.

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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom

and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.

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1. You can read the post here.
2. “Fact Sheet, Social Security, Widowed Individuals Receiving Social Security Retirement Benefits,” Social Security Administration PDF.
3. Ibid.
4. U. S. Census Bureau, note how extremely low this is, less than $6/hour for a full time worker.