Witness to End Poverty (WEP):  Good News to the Poor was launched in the spring (2008) by about a dozen clergy and laity in the Minnesota Annual Conference, as a Wesleyan model of voluntary participation in the relief-and-abolition of poverty in Minnesota. Most of the organizers have served in core-urban areas.  They started the Witness to End Poverty: Good News to the Poor as a response of conscience and faith to the roughly one million people in Minnesota who live in poverty, or on low-incomes (200% or less of the federal poverty level of about $21,000/year for a family of four). About half of these persons lack health insurance, and 25 per cent of the children in Minnesota are being raised in such financially stressed households.

We follow the example of the founder of United Methodism, John Wesley, who in his own era of financial troubles for ordinary families, both proclaimed Gospel-love, and embodied it for his neighbors, by a number of innovative steps such as cooperative-employment and no-interest loans.  He also helped to initiate the first Methodist Society intentionally committed to care for low-income persons in a large urban setting, London.  “…With the great numbers of poor in the large urban societies, the outreach to the poor who were not of the (Methodist) society became more difficult to keep focused.  So Wesley instituted a new sort of society, the Stranger’s Society…. instituted wholly for the relief, not of our Methodist societies but for (non-Methodist –ed.) poor, sick, friendless strangers” (Theodore W. Jennings, Good News to the Poor)

Any person of faith and conscience will ask what can be done, as matters of mercy and justice, to ease the anxieties of, and increase the educational, training and employment opportunities for, neighbors in such situations.