The Rev. Michael Bordelon has been the rector of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, in Lafayette, since 2019. He’s developed a reputation for being open, friendly, and for leading his church’s efforts to assist people within the community.

Bordelon says St. Barnabas’ outreach efforts aren’t anything new or special. Instead, the church is simply doing what Jesus preached.

Why does St. Barnabas maintain its focus on helping the less fortunate?

It’s how we see our faith. As Christians, when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, what we’re saying is we’re trying to make this earth look and feel just like Heaven. Jesus laid it out: Care for one another. Look after the poor. If they’re weeping, weep with them. If they’re hungry, serve them.

We like to make it more complicated than it has to be. We say things like, “Oh, we can’t help because they haven’t checked off this category, or filled out this application.”

But those are man-made things, right? Jesus said to serve and to love and to reach out your hand and help.

St. Barnabas makes a particular point of being diverse and inclusive, reaching out to people with a variety of different backgrounds. 

There are a lot of people who have experienced church trauma and spiritual trauma, people who have been told that, “Well, Jesus doesn’t love you because you’re LGBTQ,” or whatnot.

On one hand it would have been helpful if Jesus came out and said that, but he didn’t. There are different ways you can interpret and read it: You can say, “Wait a second. Does scripture actually say that?” Let’s dive into those places and see what’s really being said.

It’s easy for us to make criteria saying people don’t belong. Humans have been doing that since the beginning. But when Jesus came in he flipped the script — and this message of diversity and inclusiveness, that’s how we interpret Jesus. In every single (Bible) story, he’s going out of his way to make sure someone has a place.

You say your church has even proved popular, on occasion, with people who don’t believe in God …

We recently had a family visit who were atheists. They said “I don’t believe in God, and I don’t know much about Jesus, but (St. Barnabas is) a group I want to be a part of. It’s a place where everyone is welcome.”

And I’m thinking, that’s exactly what we’re trying to be. All of it is because Jesus said so. That’s the sort of mentality. People who don’t even believe in Jesus recognize there’s something special here, there’s a special community here, and that’s what people want to come in and be a part of.

I don’t think were doing anything radically different. Instead, we’re doing things the same way that Christ did. Of course I’m biased in that regard, but we’re not trying to do some cool new thing with new twists. This is exactly the way Jesus described it.

Specifically, how to you decide who to help? 

In Lafayette there are a lot of different resources and charities. That’s great, and we try to help out and donate when we can, we don’t want to duplicate services. But on the other side, there are also a lot of people who fall through the cracks, and that’s when we really mobilize. We’ll say, OK, how can we help plug these holes?

A common theme that’s brought up is feeding the needy. 

Our whole thing is that Jesus says to feed people. There are probably a lot of reasons why maybe we shouldn’t feed people: Are we really helping, or are we enabling? Are we really doing any good? They’re valid questions. But at the end of the day, people are hungry and that’s why we feed them.

We do it because Jesus said so. For us, that’s the only reason.