"Poor" Excuse...

I mentally and spiritually battle within myself about how best to help the poor. We live in a society that has tried many a wonderful and many a devastating things. Some with good results. Some with marginal results. Many with bad after-shocks that trapped people into a variety of classes of poor. A serious discussion needs to happen, starting with people who are truly compassionate, and ending with the politicians.

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Empowerment. A strong word that indicates a partnership. Not with a social program, although it may be driven or funded through such agents, but a person-to-person relationship that speaks truth, challenges, encourages and takes ownership of the upward mobility of another. I was challenged and yet know that the problem is bigger than simply I. It is wider and deeper than even those who are stuck within it can imagine. It does have cultural truths that must be parlayed without fear of retribution. And, it does have grey zones.

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The following monologue is by Doug Pagitt (pastor of Solomon's Porch and prolific author):

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"In our Minneapolis community, I’m really caught up in the complexities of the difference between people who don’t yet have the money that they need and those who are truly poor, meaning they could never get the money that they need. The Hispanic families that we work work with are just poor for a while. They are not going to be poor forever. They have a strong work ethic, and they’ll learn how to work the system. There are other people in our neighborhood, oftentimes poor white families or African-American families stuck in more systemic problems, and there doesn’t seem to be any solution. Now that’s a different conversation from what happens in Guatemala and Jamaica and other places.

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"So it gets really complicated when I see the term “the poor.” It also complicates it for me because I know that most of our "theology of the poor" in North American evangelicalism comes out of work that the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) has done. If you’re not familiar with that group, it's been very active. Its central concept is to relocate, to redistribute and to reconcile. Those are its three major emphases about how you make a difference in the world.

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"It’s my opinion that the CCDA was developed rightly and properly during a time when global economics was in a period of scarcity, meaning there wasn’t enough. You could've said to someone, “Eat what’s on your plate. There are people starving in China,” and rightly so. It’s also my opinion that we don’t live in a world of economic scarcity anymore; we live in a world of surplus. Our problem is not that we have too little food or too few economic resources; the problem is the poor distribution system that’s funneling food through complicated global mechanisms and multi-national corporations. All of which is to say, we live in an industrialized, global economy that’s no longer made up of simple agricultural societies.

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Christianity has played out the great majority of its history and a great majority of its theology in agrarian societies that don’t exist in this world anymore. We have to be engaged with the question, What does it mean to be a people who are involved in systems of poverty in our world that go beyond any personal involvement that we have?

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"The world has changed in some profound ways that make it a real issue for me to live as a good neighbor. So in my life, I’ve had to reduce all of this down to a question: How do I live as a good neighbor and never remain satisfied with that being enough? I’d love to have a conversation about what it means to truly live as a good neighbor in the world that we all live in — especially to those people who literally live next door to us."

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And with that I say "let's get to work,"