28 March, 2024

Friendship & Poverty

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by | 15 December, 2014 | 0 comments

12_Lawson_Lotus_JNBy Stephen Lawson

From a certain perspective, my neighborhood looks like a disaster area. Many buildings are vacant and appear to have been bombed out. There are collapsed roofs and precariously leaning walls on many houses. Whole blocks seem to be completely lifeless and abandoned. Nearly every corner has a church, or a school, or a store that is boarded up and closed for good. The streets are littered with broken glass, used tires, and trash. “Urban blight” is what city planners call this””neighborhoods that look like war zones. A better term for it might simply be “visible poverty.”

Poverty. The word falls on the page with a thud. It has a weight to it that seems to judge our successful ministries and ordered lives. Though we know poverty is present in our communities and is caused by a complex variety of factors, we treat it as though it were a natural disaster in some distant place that demands emergency care. 

So our churches support food pantries and collect donations for homeless shelters and have semiannual days of service in neglected parts of our communities. These things aren”t bad by any means, but they tend to treat poverty as though it were a devastating tornado, turning distant strangers into victims in need of canned goods and blankets, instead of a complex condition affecting our own neighbors in need of friendship and hospitality.

When a natural disaster strikes, Christians are often the first to respond. I was in Bible college when Hurricane Katrina hit, and I remember many students giving up their spring break and piling into 15-passenger vans laden with supplies to volunteer in New Orleans. I”ve seen small churches give generously to fill shipping containers with supplies to send to the areas affected by the horrific Asian tsunami in 2004 and the unimaginable earthquake in Haiti in 2010. When Christians see the catastrophic damage of these communities, we feel compelled by our commitment to the gospel to respond in love and service. But it is different when it happens in our own backyard.

Visiting my parents in Joplin, Missouri, late in the summer of 2011 was a surreal experience. A massive EF-5 tornado ripped through the city that May, leveling everything in its path. Not surprisingly, I saw my Christian friends once more on the front lines of responding to the great need of those caught in disaster. 

But they responded a different way. They did not have to schedule a weeklong trip and load up supplies and travel many miles. They did not need to fill a shipping container with canned goods to send to the other side of the world. Instead, they opened their homes and welcomed those who had lost everything to stay with them for months.

 

Love Concrete and Particular

It is one thing to pile into a car and travel to a distant place to do ministry; it is quite another when your own neighborhood becomes the site of disaster relief ministry. The connections of friendship, history, and shared space make the love we are called to feel for all people concrete and particular. 

The people of Joplin who were in need were not unfamiliar faces enduring hardship in faraway places, but were friends and neighbors who send their children to the same schools we do. 

The nearness of our neighbors changes the way we view their hardship and often makes us willing to sacrifice much more to serve them. Offering to let a young family bereft of their house live under your roof for several months is much more difficult than writing a check or bringing canned goods to church.

When I look at my neighborhood, I don”t see a disaster area. I see the streets where children I know race their bikes and eat Popsicles on porches; I see the sidewalks our neighbor volunteered to shovel during this past winter”s snow. I see the flowers planted in public spaces by a few neighborhood men with a pickup truck and a free Saturday. I see the street swept and cleared of garbage every week by Yolanda, a sweet lady in her 70s who loves this neighborhood. I look at my street and think of laughter and conversations during summer cookouts, when we set up picnic tables in the road and fired up the grill for a shared meal. This isn”t a disaster area; this is home.

There is a difference between abstractly supporting some program to help people and living in the midst of those people. Christian philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote of the difference between existing for people and existing with people. Politicians and pundits spin their wheels trying to convince us they and their programs are for the poor and broken of the world. 

As Christians, we are not called to do the same. We are not called to create more programs for the poor or to collect more canned goods for the poor. We are called to know and love the poor. We are called to follow Jesus, who was not simply for us, dispensing care and platitudes from far away, but who came among us, living and dying in our midst.

If the church wants to be involved in helping those in poverty, the first step is not to organize a canned goods drive or plan a mission trip. The first step is being among the poor and getting to know them as the beloved children of God they are.

 

Following the Example of Christ

In the same way that God moved into our neighborhood in Jesus Christ (John 1:14), we are called to move into the neighborhood and live among those to whom we”ve been sent: the poor, the oppressed, the prisoners, and the blind (Luke 4:18). For some this might mean selling their suburban house and moving into an economically under-resourced part of the city. For others, it might mean reaching out and befriending just one person from the trailer park down the road, or the low-income housing across the city. 

Such friendships are necessary if Christ is to be the model for our ministry, for God did not dispense salvation to us through an impersonal cardboard box or a tract. Instead, God came to us personally in Jesus Christ, who invites us into a friendship with God and God”s people.

We need to talk about poverty on a first-name basis. When we in the church speak about the problem of poverty, we shouldn”t first think of political slogans or impersonal statistics. Instead, we should think of people we actually know, whose faces and stories are in our minds. 

When I think of poverty, I don”t think about tragic images in television commercials trying to raise money for needs in distant places. I think of Deborah, a hilarious and gentle soul who can cook a heavenly sweet potato pie but struggles to find consistent work. No one seems eager to hire a single mother in her 30s who lacks a high school diploma, doesn”t have access to transportation, and can”t afford child care. I think of Marcus, who comes by a couple times a week looking for odd jobs, always with a smile on his face and always ready to talk about the goings-on of north St. Louis.

There are important questions about the societal causes and solutions to poverty which must be dealt with seriously, but we in the church should not let this big-picture approach be something we hide behind as we send impersonal help to distant places. Rather, we must (to borrow from the title of Ash Barker”s excellent book) make poverty personal. We need to be willing to give not simply monetarily, but relationally. 

As disciples, we all are called to follow in the footsteps of Jesus””though he was rich, he became poor for our sake so that we might be brought into true friendship with God and God”s people.

Stephen Lawson is a PhD student studying historical theology at Saint Louis University. He is a member of the Lotus House, an intentional Christian community in north St. Louis. (Click here to read a related story about Lotus House.) He worships at North City Church of Christ. He has changed some of the names used in this article. 

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