What Are Our Obligations to the Poor? Part 13
July 7, 2010
Dear Friends,
We started with some questions. Let’s see if we can’t answer them now.
1. Is helping the poor a) a commandment, b) a nice, but optional thing to do or c) not necessary?
This is a misleading question. We have an obligation to help everyone. Everyone, including ourselves, has some poverty if we do not limit poverty to material poverty. We are to represent Jesus Christ to mankind. We are to exhibit love, morality, kindness, faithfulness, truth and mercy to a world that is seriously lacking in all of these qualities. We are to help where we can.
At the same time, helping the material poor is so interwoven into discipleship in the Bible that it is inextricable. Yes, we do need to help the poor. It is a command. It is “pure religion.” It is what Jesus did.
If we have a negative knee-jerk reaction to helping the poor, it is probably for one of three reasons. 1. Perhaps we wrongly associate helping the poor with all too often misguided or inefficient worldly poverty alleviation programs. 2. It is also possible that we simply assume that people in poverty are there because of some sort of moral failing or laziness. This may true, but with our new definition for poverty, we see that if that is the case, we simply need to help in a different way. 3. We may wrongly assess that the role of the believer is not to help people materially, but spiritually. We may think that the obligation is only to the household of faith (a flawed understanding of Galatians 6:10). We fail to see that Jesus attended to the physical and the spiritual needs of mankind and we are to mimic him in that service.
The bottom-line is that we are individuals need to assist the poor and needy. We also should do so as a group. We should make every attempt to help in a Biblical manner. If we don’t help the poor in a Biblical manner, we may end up doing more harm than good.
2. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the religious leaders (the priest and the Levite) walked on by the man in need. When we, as believers in Jesus, see things like the earthquake in Haiti or the victims of the tsunami, and do nothing, are we equally guilty of “walking on by” or is that only for local situations? What is the right thing to do when you see the man at the intersection holding the sign that says “Will work for food?”
There are three issues in this question. 1. Religion isn’t really “pure religion” if it ignores the poor. 2. Sometimes the right answer is not to give money but to help in other ways. 3. There are three kinds of help – relief, rehabilitation and development. How we help is determined by the need. We’ve already addressed #1, so we’ll move on to #2.
Sometimes the right thing to do is not to give the money. We have to have a holistic approach to poverty alleviation. How do we really know we are helping if we give money to the guy holding the sign “Will work for food?”
Our church has a policy that works like this. We are in a downtown area and are blessed with a member who is an expert in homelessness (he works with the indigent as his profession). When someone shows up asking for money, we give them $10 in McDonald’s coupons and this brother’s business card. We tell them that we won’t give them anything else until they have met with this brother. He is in a position to evaluate them holistically. If they are drug addicts or are alcoholics, he can refer them to a program. If they have other needs, he can refer them back to the ecclesia or to the appropriate organization. In this way, we don’t add to the problem, but take a step back and say “how do we help these people come closer to God.”
This same brother suggests that we should not give money to the people begging on the streets. He suggests that for the vast majority of them, we really aren’t helping them. He also suggested that many of these types of beggars aren’t really homeless, but simply do this to make money. If you really want to help them, stop what you are doing and take them out for a meal. Get to know them a little and see what the real needs are. I would urge caution in doing this. You will find that the three major reasons for homelessness are substance abuse, mental illness and inability to get a job because of a prior felony conviction. You probably want to ease into this by educating yourself on poverty in your area and joining an organized group that helps the poor before venturing into your own solo efforts and getting yourself into trouble.
The last thing we need to do is to be able to quickly assess the difference relief, rehabilitation and development which are outlined in the book When Helping Hurts. They suggest that relief is the urgent provision of emergency aid to reduce suffering resulting from a natural and/or man-made crisis. Relief is by its very nature, immediate and temporary. It is prolonged only when self-reliance is impossible. The basic dynamic is provider and receiver. Sometimes the situation is so critical (like the earthquake in Haiti) that we don’t have time to evaluate all of the options, get “buy-in” from the locals. If someone is drowning, you don’t say “stop thrashing and tell me a little about yourself.” You treat critical situations in a manner in keeping with their criticality.
Rehabilitation, on the other hand, is the restoration of people and their communities to their pre-crisis state and minimization of future vulnerabilities. We are looking to move from doing for and looking for opportunities for doing with. We have to avoid paternalism in this stage and so involve the local population.
The final stage we move to development which is the process of on-going change that is moving people closer to being in right relationship with God, with themselves, with others and with nature. Development isn’t done to people or for people but with people. The key dynamic is promoting an empowering process. This will typically be done around or result in some product or projects.
So let’s take a practical example. You find a homeless family with small children on the street on a bitterly cold night. In a relief effort, you help them find shelter that night. This could be in many forms. It might be renting a hotel room for them, taking them to a shelter or taking them into your own home. The next day, you move into rehabilitation mode. You meet with them to find out more about them. How did they become homeless? What is the cause of their material poverty and how do you help them fix it? It is a case of just needing a job? Is it a case of simply needing to find affordable housing? Once you work with them to find a solution to this immediate need, you move into development mode. Working with them, how do they get into better relationships with God, with self, with other and with creation so as to move forward positively in life? Do they need to learn a job skill? Do they have an understanding of the Gospel message? Do they have reasonable people skills?
The beauty of this process is that if you avoid developing a paternalistic approach, you will find that they will be helping you as much as you are helping them. A touching story of this kind of relationship is chronicled in the book Same Kind of Different as Me. I would strongly recommend this book to demonstrate this principle.
Have a great week,
Comments»
No comments yet.