“Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20)

The theme of this month’s synchroblog is poverty. Poverty isn’t just about being cash-poor, it is about political, economic, and cultural deprivation. It is about being at the bottom of the heap, and not being able to pull yourself up by the bootstraps because you have no boots to begin with.

When people talk about the “deserving poor”, they are typically referring to middle and working class people who have found themselves in difficult circumstances: They may not have any money. . .they may not even have a home, but they do have the cultural values, and the privileges thereof, of the middle and working classes. When Jesus spoke about the poor, he was likely talking about those who were living poverty: Like their modern counterparts, the impoverished of his day were caught in a generational cycle that few, if any, would ever emerge from. What is even worse, the impoverished of his day, again like their modern counterparts, probably contributed to their own situation as a result of the culture of poverty, and as a result, they too were probably defined as “the undeserving poor” by those who were in a position to help them.

The funny thing, though, is that neither Jesus nor the prophets ever made the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor. Dorothy Day, who I suspect saw her ministry as being one of hospitality rather than social work or “charity”, didn’t make this distinction either. Instead she obeyed the commands of Christ and his prophets to care for the poor, whether they were deserving or not, grateful or not.

In fact, Jesus doesn’t seem to much care about whether the poor deserve whatever the non-poor can give to them. Instead, he not only tells us that we are supposed to care for the poor, but that, by the way, the kingdom of God belongs to them.

Now ain’t that a kick in the head?

This is a hard thing for me to swallow, incidentally. I work hard, as do a lot of my friends and family members. None of us are rich, none of us have a lot, and some of us are particularly vulnerable: A bad accident or even a minor financial crisis could threaten our housing situation or our ability to even buy food. We are (generally) responsible people who do our best to obey the law and to be productive, and Jesus has the nerve to tell us that the kingdom of God belongs to those “other” people who (really) don’t deserve it in the first place!

Why them? Why the poor? Why not the working classes? Why not those who “deserve” it?

I don’t like to presume to speak for God, but I have a few ideas:

Those who live in poverty, like all of us, have their blind spots: There are options that they do not see, prejudices that they hold, ways in which they misunderstand the world around them. But unlike the working/middle/upper classes, they have no illusions about safety nets: They are aware of their vulnerability to evil and know that the systems in which the non-poor have so much faith simply cannot be relied upon. They live day-to-day, hour-by-hour: Planning ahead is at best a pipe dream, at worst, as set-up for crushing disappointment.

When God incarnated as Christ, he left a “sure thing” for uncertainty: By putting himself at the mercy of fallen and corrupted systems, he found himself being tortured and executed at the age of thirty-three. No system protected him, no system could save him. His resurrection took place outside of established systems (including basic human biology), and his kingdom isn’t of this world anyway. The poor, those high-risk cynics who perpetually “fall through the cracks” of systems that weren’t designed to help them anyway, are closer to Jesus’s incarnated condition than the privileged will ever be.

And that is why they are heirs to his kingdom.

And that is why we are to serve them.

And that is why when we do unto them, we do unto Jesus.

Visit the other synchrobloggers at the links below:

Sonja Andrews: Fully Known and Fully Loved
Phil Wyman at Phil Wyman’s Square No More
Adam Gonnerman: Echoes of Judas
Cobus van Wyngaard: Luke: The Gospel for the Rich
Lainie Petersen at Headspace
Steve Hayes: Holy Poverty
Jonathan Brink: Spiritual Poverty
Dan Stone at The Tense Before
Jeremiah: Blessed are the poor… churches…
Alan Knox: Boasting in Humiliation
Miss Eagle: Poverty and the Hospitable Heart
Jimmie: Feeding the Poor

I should note that my post was made in response to Shades of Gray and a Washington Post article, both of which offered critical perspectives on short-term mission trips to third-world countries. I was agreeing with their criticisms, but I perhaps should have better clarified my own position.

There is a place for short-term mission work, but I think that these opportunities should be a response to the actual needs of communities, not a business in and of themselves. I am concerned that there is a “marketing-to-the-missionaries” aspect to these programs: Yes, some services/labor may be given to a community, but if the primary emphasis is put on the experience of the mission team (rather than meeting the needs of a community), this is a problem. I don’t question that many people who participate in these programs find them humbling and a real opportunity for growth, but if they aren’t meeting the needs of those who they are supposed to serve, they are being cheated out of fulfilling their desire to truly be of service.

Secondly, these trips may not be a cost effective way of getting work accomplished, and, in some cases, they may be responsible for driving down wages of local workers. Obviously this is not always going to be the case: In a disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake, people are desperately needed to rebuild infrastructure and stabilize the area. Well-organized short-term mission teams and individual volunteers are absolutely crucial to these efforts. In addition, there are many churches, aid agencies, and social service programs that have well-organized short-term mission and volunteer programs that do serve critical, and well-defined, community needs.

Thirdly, many aid agencies working in underprivileged communities (both domestically and overseas) desperately need both cash and specialist labor. If a community has few medical professionals or engineers, it makes sense to sponsor a medical or engineering team to that area. If there is a shortage of housing in that community, it makes sense to send cash to an agency and let them hire local workers to do the building. Just because a community is poor does not mean that it completely lacks human resources: It may well be that sending cash is far better stewardship than sending a team of unskilled workers.

The lack of cultural sensitivity displayed in some of these programs is problematic. Granted, problems of cultural sensitivity and disruption are inevitable, but I think that efforts ought to be made to minimize them.

In our desire to “do good” we should remember that we don’t get to define what “doing good” is. Neither do churches, parachurch ministries, or even aid agencies. Instead, we need to take the time to listen to those whom we seek to serve so that they can tell us what they need.

We might be surprised.

Or we might not.

But the point is that we need to listen.

(Please note: An addendum/clarification to this post is available here.)

About ten years ago, my mom was a youth group leader at her church. The church was located in a very affluent community, and the kids in the group were very privileged indeed. The youth leaders decided that the kids needed to learn about the “less fortunate” and asked them if they would like to cook and serve a meal at an inner-city soup kitchen.

The kids were less than delighted at the prospect.

Finally, after a fair amount of cajoling, nagging (and probably tears on my mother’s part), the group decided to play along. They were serving a meal at the soup kitchen when a fight broke out between two of the diners. Things escalated when one of the combatants ran into the kitchen to find a knife. (The youth group girls huddled in a corner, crying hysterically, while all this commotion was taking place.)

After the day’s disastrous events, my mom asked my understandably-traumatized sister (who was in the youth group, and is now a very socially-conscious and kind-hearted adult) if she had learned anything that day. My sister nodded and said:

“I learned that I don’t like poor people.”

This story came to mind when I read a recent post by Pastor Pat Spelling over at Shades of Gray. She posted on well-intended “short term missions”, including a provocative article from the Washington Post entitled “Churches Retool Mission Trips“. The points that both Pastor Spelling and the Post article are good ones:

1. Short-term mission trips are often poorly conceived and executed by those organizing the trips. Youth groups are sent to “help” a community with no real understanding of that community’s needs or culture: In some cases the “help” offered is simply redundant (such as multiple groups painting and repainting a church over the course of the summer), but in other cases it is actually harmful to the community (i.e. putting local laborers out of work).

2. These trips are not cost effective: Participants are usually required to “raise funds” from church members, family and to cover their expenses, which can easy run from $1000-$3000. Thus a ten person youth group (plus chaperones) could easily spend $12 ,000-$30,000 to build a house or a hospital that, in the economy of many third-world countries, might only cost $2000-$10,000 if local labor was employed.

3. Most disturbing of all, however, is the attitude among many that even if such trips aren’t particularly cost-effective (or even necessary to those being “served”) they are justified because, after all, middle -class teenagers need to “learn” about their privilege and about the “less fortunate”. (Apparently the “less fortunate” are to endure these assaults upon their communities and local economies so that privileged youths can get an education. In other words, the poor get to be used as object lessons so that the privileged can engage in a course of self-improvement.)

Um, I don’t think so.

When it comes to serious, systemic poverty (and not just in the third world), “short-term” anything is pointless. Poverty, true poverty, is extremely complex, and people don’t “get it” just by going out and building a house or serving a meal at a homeless shelter. At best, kids on these trips are going to come back with “an appreciation of what they have” (but no real understanding of why they have it or how they got it or why other folks don’t have it), at worst, with attitudes like my sister’s after her visit to the soup kitchen.

If young people truly want to address poverty and its ills, they need to understand that going on an expensive working vacation is not the answer. Ironically, they would do best to take advantage of their privilege and the benefits that it affords them: They could use their social networks to raise cash, not for mission trips, but to send directly to long-standing aid agencies in third world countries. They could go to university to become doctors and nurses and engineers and agriculturalists and then visit a third world country to teach, train, solve problems, and generally do the sorts of specialist work that is actually needed. They could also work to transform social and foreign policy in their own countries or house and befriend students from third-world countries who are trying to bring new knowledge and skills back home.

But none of the above strategies sound as good as “My Johnny just went on a mission trip to help those poor people in South America!”. I just wonder what the “less fortunate” being “missioned” have to say to their friends after each group leaves for home.

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