Monday, May 19, 2008
The Poverty Problem
I haven’t posted much recently because in addition to various life stressors, I’ve decided I need to solve the problem of poverty. Yeah, I know - pretty arrogant, isn’t it?
Since I’m in charge of Outreach and Missions, when people walk in to the church office and ask for financial assistance or groceries, they usually get referred to me. Thus I am confronted on a regular basis with the panhandler dilemma - to help or to refuse?
People tend to think this is a pretty simple issue. Most American Christians fall into two camps. You either a) ignore or refuse the request, since “they’ll probably spend it on drugs anyway,” or b) you help them somehow because it’s what Jesus says to do. Now, I’m inclined to answer b, but the corollary is that the person making the request will tell their friends, and pretty soon you have a line stretching from your office out the door and down the street. This makes it tempting to lean toward answer a, because nobody like making work for themselves.
Now, one possible solution is c) refer the person making the request to another partner organization who has social workers, a screening process, and some kind of bureaucracy in place to do what you do not have time to do. I call this solution “paying other people to be Christian for you.” It’s not my favorite answer either. I have tried to rationalize it this way: when people come to the church office asking for money, we mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that they have come to “the church.” The church is out there in the world. The office is the office. It would be a bit like going into the corporate headquarters of Publix and trying to buy a head of lettuce. It’s a pretty good rationalization, actually, and sometimes it convinces me.
The problem with all these responses, of course, is that they all perpetuate poverty. In all cases, I become the great benevolent church savior, who bestows my favor or withholds it based on whatever social philosophy I’m using. I am a participant in the system which keeps people in poverty. And rather than seeing the person who has come making the request as a human being, I see them as a set of problems to be fixed.
And then there’s the meta-meta problem, which is that this is simply the way poverty is: we keep trying to dump the issue on someone else, pay the poor to get out of our faces, or ignore them. The fact that someone comes into our office occasionally (and perhaps even gets belligerent) is a reminder that poverty does not go away. It should be frustrating.
I also can’t help but notice that although Jesus said, “give to whoever asks,” he also had a habit of making himself scarce when people were looking for him.
So I’ve done a ton of research over the past several weeks. One of the best resources I’ve found is Walking with the Poor by Bryant Myers. I’ve also talked with many social workers and professionals at our partner organizations. One of my favorite pieces of advice was from a woman who handles direct assistance for her organization: “don’t do walk-ins, honey, you’ll wear yourself out.”
My temporary solution is to be proactive - take the budgeted amount we have for financial and food assistance and go out and find the people who need help. It doesn’t stop people from walking in with requests, but it does give me the sense that we are doing something that’s somewhat more theologically appropriate. I realize that my subjective sense of “doing something” is not the best criteria to use, but honestly I don’t have much else to work with at this point. I am thankful that this crisis has pushed me into a place where I can no longer be satisfied or silent about the Church’s response to poverty.
I’ve also reached a place where I understand in a deeper way that there are no procedural or strategic answers to this systemic problem. It cannot be solved with more money or a better policy as long as the social systems which maintain poverty are still in place. The fact is that there are people who profit from poverty, and they will continue to resist attempts to change the system.
