Christians and the Politics of Poverty

     The government should be responsible for alleviating poverty in our country.

     The government should not be responsible for alleviating poverty in our country.

As a Christian,* you can support either of those positions without violating your faith in God.  As a Christian, however, you cannot stop there.  Regardless of your political persuasion, a follower of Jesus is compelled to engage personally and sacrificially in the plight of those living in poverty.

Both of the statements often serve as an excuse to avoid following the clear teaching of Jesus.  We are taught to love our neighbor, and to help those who are hurting in any way.  This is not an action that we can ignore, nor is it an action that we can delegate to others by virtue of our vote.

Regardless of our politics, we must follow the example of Jesus, the leading of the Holy Spirit, and the teaching of Scripture, to get personally involved.  To fail to do so would undoubtedly violate our faith in God.

*If you are not a Christian, then you can safely ignore these words.

Just Do SOMETHING!?!

I heard an interview on the radio recently.

The woman was a scriptwriter or a playwright (not sure which, maybe both) who had recently written a story about life in impoverished American ghettoes.  She talked some about the genesis of her new work, and she talked some about the characters and the story itself.  She talked even more about the realities of life in America's impoverished inner cities.

I was, of course, interested.  She was talking about where I live, and what I care about.  We live in a neighborhood where most kids grow up seeing violence, addiction, and illegal activity as normal parts of everyday life.  Our neighborhood is improving, but you can still find needles on the ground in front of the school, you can still see the prostitutes walking the main thoroughfare, there are still young men standing at the corners making more money in an afternoon than a roofing job pays in a week, and you can still hear gunshots in the night.

Then she began to talk about why she wrote it and what she hoped it might accomplish.

"I hope it will motivate people to do something, give some money, change how you vote, just DO SOMETHING."

I was a little frustrated.  In her defense, she is a playwright; an artist, not an activist, or an advocate, or even a scholar, but I would have hoped for a more educated response than this.  Throwing money at our problems, and giving power to professional blowhards (regardless of their political stripes), will never serve to accomplish anything helpful.  In point of fact, one of the largest contributing factors to the perpetuation of American poverty is precisely our unreflective need to just do something.

Helping the less fortunate by giving money and voting for certain politicians is actually an abdication of our personal responsibility to engage in helping our fellow man.  Not to mention it's counter productive.  Don't get me wrong, throwing money and votes around works well if our goal is to make ourselves feel better, it just doesn't change anything for those in need.  Indeed free money is often the reason why better solutions fail.

What is needed is personal engagement.  Instead of throwing money at the latest cause, while simultaneously climbing up the social ladder, try climbing down the ladder instead.

Incarnational Ministry

A ministry of presence is a requirement for serving alongside the poor. We must come near to those we desire to serve. We must touch them, and they us. It is not until their problems become our problems that we will ever truly be able to minister. Not in the sense that we care about them so much that their problems burden us emotionally, but rather in the sense that the problems we face in our lives are the same ones they face in theirs. When we suffer the violence of living with corrupt or absent police officers, when our property values drop because of corrupt banking practices, when our schools are failing and our jobs are gone, then we will be trusted to minister.

Jericho Road in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone Health Clinic

Spirituality of Poverty

The fundamental task in laboring in poor communities is spiritual.  This doesn't mean it isn't also practical, but it is a measured practicality that is attempting to uncover the curse of 1) alienation from God, 2) coercive and abusive relationships with each other, 3) hostility, ignorance, and apathy towards creation, and 4) an identity of shame.  These practical acts are spiritual in so far as they uncover the truth of the curse, and simultaneously uncover and introduce the authority and action of Jesus to break the curse,  heal these places of wounding, and tie bonds of love around us and Him, us and each other, us and the world.

The Second Adam is taking on the power of sin and death, defeating it, and re-forming us into His glorious image: favor and freedom with God, table fellowship with our enemies, stewardship of the creation, and walking in our authority and glory as the revealed children of God.

We partner with Him in breaking the power of the curse, healing the wounds, and building the bonds of love.

Charity and relief work are often needed as a precursor to this work, and in deed often constitute this very task.  But they can often also serve to inhibit this spiritual task.

Transforming Poor Communities

Reflections on the relational nature of poverty and on relationships as the necessary ingredient for transformation:

http://povertyunlocked.com/tag/bryant-myers/

Its only about 5-6 minutes of audio.

Three Kinds of Poverty

Poverty is usually thought of as 'not having stuff.'  But this is a fundamentally materialistic and consumeristic way of defining the term, and falls far short of understanding the plight of the poor, or the various ways in which poverty can be manifested.  For this reason, I am exploring these ways of describing poverty, although this is tenuously affirmed, and I would appreciate feedback on the ideas...

Instead of thinking of poverty as a lack of stuff, lets try thinking about it as a lack of access to systems of power.  This actually helps us to make sense of the different forms of poverty that we see in the world around us.  After all, most of us recognize that poverty is very real in our country, and yet, it is very different from poverty in other countries...

Deprivation
This can be defined as individuals or groups who lack access to systems of economic power.
These are people who are not having their most basic needs met.  They are without food, shelter, clean water, or health care.  This is what we think of as the 'global poor,' or the 'third-world poor.'

Opression
This can be defined as individuals or groups who lack access to systems of social power.
These are people who are abundantly fed, warm, and entertained, but have no control (real or perceived) over their own destiny, or that of their community or the world at large.  This is the 'urban poor' and the 'rural poor' of America.  People who have little access to education, to health care and healthy food, or to networks of economic, social, and political power.

Alienation
This can be defined as individuals or groups who lack access to systems of meaning.
These peoples needs are met, they have power to control individual destiny, but there is no larger sense of what is to be pursued.  These are people we are not likely to consider poor, yet, they have a clear lack.  For them material wealth and power are ends in themselves, instead of means to something more meaningful...

In all three of these categories, the resultant poverty can be the result of an actual lack of access, or a perceived lack of access.  Both are equally problematic.  If a family starves because there is a famine, and literally no food exists within range of their table, that is neither more nor less a problem than an individual who suffers from mental illness and literally starves with food in their pantry.

Paper Pt XIV: A Successful Church

The Cross and Ecclesiastical Success

It should be clear to any individual reading the canonical gospels that our formulation of a ‘successful ministry’ was foreign to Jesus. Perhaps we had better restate that; it was not foreign to Jesus in that He was unaware of the concept, but rather in that He explicitly and repeatedly rejected such a concept of success. Jesus deliberately rejected fame and the approval of the crowds,38 He hid from people who wanted to be with Him,39 said and did things that made people leave,40 and used a metaphor of torture and death for discipleship.41

12) Carrying the Cross – Our Master has made it clear, by personal example, and plain teaching, we must embrace suffering, and die to self. This stands in direct contradiction to the stated aim of most Church programming. A friend attributed the following anecdote to pastor Rob Bell (Mars Hill Bible Church, Grandville, MI): He was asked by a visitor, “what programs do you have here to meet the needs of me and my family?” If only more pastors would give this response, “we only have one program here, ‘Come and Die!’ “

13) Identification with the Broken – If the Cross is the center of the Church then we should share the same passions as the man who hung from that Cross. We should find, welling up within us, an attraction to those places where we might encounter hunger, danger, injustice, addiction, oppression, or poverty. This is the shame of the Western Church, we have retreated from the brokenness of the world, and then congratulated ourselves on how well our programs work without those broken people. We must reverse the trend of Christians emigrating to homogenized suburban communities pursuing idols of safety and security.

14) Necessary Failure – If the Cross is our Victory, then we must reexamine our language of ‘success.’ For Jesus, success, was abandonment and failure. We must think through our use of language; we say, “healthy things grow,” but Jesus said, “unless a seed dies, it will produce nothing.”42 Our yearning for success has more in common with the gospel of prosperity, than the gospel of the Kingdom. We must create contexts where failure is a part of our culture, where our failure and that of others is a normal occurrence, and where polished presentation is not the sign of God’s presence.43

Of course none of this is a repudiation of God’s good creation. Embracing the Cross is not an end in itself; but rather the only road to Resurrection and New Creation. Rebellious humanity needs to be crucified with Christ, not because we are human, but because we are rebels.

God has glorified Jesus and has promised to glorify us in Him. His very promises of justice are an affirmation of creation. We must prevent, however, an attempt at justice that does not involve the Cross, for that would not be justice. Resurrection is on the other side of the Cross. We must embrace the lessons taught by suffering, we must submit our egos to death, indeed, the motive behind our lust for success is simple pride.

The Homeless

I was at an all night prayer meeting just recently and I remember that we were praying for the city or something and I remember this picture that God gave me of the homeless people of our city.
There is a spot on Cypress where there is the I-5 off ramp and it comes to a stop right there at cypress. Well typically there is a homeless person or two there and they usually carry a sign that says, "Anything will do, even a smile." Or something along those lines. Well in my vision I saw that person and they were holding a sign like normal and only this time it said, "I don't want your money I just want you to come to know Jesus." I also so saw a sign that says, "I don't want your money I just want your time." The the thing that I felt that God was saying was that the homeless that have "fallen through the cracks of society" are going to rise up. I almost felt this urgency because the guy didn't even seem to care about money or his lack of it, he didn't seem to care about food. It was like the verse that says, "Seek first the Kingdom of God and all the rest will be given to you." All this man cared about was the lost souls that drove past him every day. Maybe we should go out there to that street corner and hold a sign like that. I think it might have a lot of fruit. I don't know if this vision means anything to anyone else but I thought that I might share it.