Matt's recent AgapePress column
posted by Matt Friedeman @ 10:20 AM
9 comments
Friday, September 30, 2005
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- Your name is "Mo!"
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- Matt's recent AgapePress column
- Haley on Jeb
- This rocked my boat today - "Blessed are those tha...
- John Wesley on Katrina?
- And now, a word from Democratic Underground
- "Hey, boy, you not from around here, are ya?"
'Not called!' did you say? 'Not heard the call,' I think you should say. Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father's house and bid their brothers and sisters, and servants and masters not to come there. And then look Christ in the face, whose mercy you have professed to obey, and tell him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish his mercy to the world. (William Booth)
9 Comments:
Mr. Friedeman,
I was facinated by your article entitled, "Caring for
Jesus, Caring for the Poor". I live and work in Africa
with a Christian relief and development organization.
I think you are right on and particularly liked your
statement about the need to establish personal
relationships with the poor, find out what they need,
hold them accountable and help them take
responsability and apply spiritual answers to the
heart of the matter. I have found the their is both
"poverty" and "poverty mentality". Poverty can
generate a poverty mentality but there are poor
without poverty mentality. The combination of both is devastating.
Thanks for your article.
Timothy Albright
CAMA Services
Regional Consultant for Africa
I read the full article, and I'm afraid you failed to mention several crucial facts:
1) It was a Democratic president who "ended welfare as we know it."
2) It was a Democratic president who initiated charitable choice and a Republican president who failed to fund the faith-based initiative to the degree promised.
3) Many people are living lives of sexual fidelity in marriage or chastity in singleness, working full time, and still in poverty.
4) Reviving "welfare as we know it" is not in the Democratic platform. Finding solutions to the health care crisis is, and good thing because many people work for employers that don't provide health insurance.
I wish both parties were doing more to address poverty, but to say that present Democratic proposals are to restore the welfare state is dishonest.
I wonder why I don't hear many Christian Republicans challenging their party's rejection of cost-of-living adjustments to the minimum wage and proposals to make health care affordable to people who don't have the excess income for private accounts, and so on.
As a Christian Democrat, I most certainly contend for the lives of unborn children. Where are the Christian Republicans who are contending for the lives of postborn children with asthma who are hurt by pollution and are dying for want of medical coverage?
Put another way, how many of this president's policies are distinctly pro-postborn-life, and what are evangelicals saying about it?
Christian Republicans who really want to understand how pro-postborn-life the present administration is should follow the posthurricane money trail.
Meg
Marsha, here's where the discussion of poverty doesn't get anywhere.
If addressing poverty is all about extending charity--and thus determining who will use the charity for good and who will use it for ill, then assessment of the recipient's worthiness is indeed central to the conversation.
But again, most poor people are working. If someone is working full-time and living frugally and is still poor, the problem is not simply that we need more charity and that we need churches to determine whether this full-time-working person is worthy to wait for hours at a church food pantry. The problem is that the person is not receiving a subsistence-level wage.
Why, then, is the question always about the poor person's worthiness to receive aid? The question instead should be whether employers ought to pay their employees a living wage.
So then we must go back to scripture and rethink accountability. Are employers accountable to their employees? How so, and to what degree?
Our knowledge of human depravity should tell us not only that some poor people misuse the resources made available to them, but also that some people of means will fail to pay their workers adequately so they can keep more for themselves.
Before even discussing government vs. church response, Christians should be going to scripture to learn what it says about employers who deny workers their due. And if this study does not shift our discussion of poverty away from a single-minded focus on the worthiness of poor people to receive charity, then we need to ask whether we are allowing Mammon to be our god.
Meg
Marsha, I'm not sure what you mean by saying that my position isn't firm.
I'm saying we should go to scripture and learn what it says about poverty and its causes.
That's a pretty cut-and-dried recommendation, seems to me.
Here I have not made any recommendations about what should be done after that study is completed. But I did speculate that if we study scripture on this, it will move us away from reducing poverty-response decisions to a matter of worthiness-determination.
Let me give you a challenge. Get a Strong's concordance and open it to "poor." Set aside an afternoon and read--better yet, type out--every verse that contains that word, along with the surrounding context. Take in every scripture prayerfully, with an open heart and mind.
Then write back about your impressions.
Meg
Marsha, here's what I don't get, then.
Why does your discussion keep turning back to people on welfare?
Of course there are people who refuse to work and won't help themselves. But that is not the only cause of poverty.
What does scripture say about other causes?
Is there such a thing as economic injustice? What is it? What does the Bible tell us our orientation to it should be?
Meg
Yes, they are related.
So when it comes to how we respond to poverty, what does that mean?
If our response is just to try to fix poor people, then we're missing the point entirely.
There are plenty of poor people who are faithful in marriage or celibate in singleness, who are working harder than I've ever even imagined working, who live with extreme frugality, and who still struggle to meet basic bills.
If we know this is true, what does the Bible have to say about it, and how does the Bible inform our response?
Meg
Oh, regarding the American standard of living--it is indeed too high. But what I'm talking about is not whether people can enjoy a new car and a big home. I'm talking about whether people who work full-time and live faithfully and frugally can preserve their very lives, with a heated home in winter, enough healthy food to ward off preventable illness, reasonable enough work hours to attend to children's needs and get necessary sleep, and the wherewithall to see a doctor when necessary and to fill life-saving prescriptions. Basic stuff.
Meg
Marsha, I think part of the problem is that people treat government vs. church response to poverty as an either/or proposition.
When my friend went through a period of serious illness, underemployment, and homelessness, the government subsidized her day care fees, paid for her medical care, and provided her with food stamps. Church families were housing her, they divvied up the care of her children among themselves until she found the good day care arrangement, and so on.
When she was dangerously ill, Medicaid paid her hospital bills, and church people took in her children and cared for her after she was released from the hospital.
The government's involvement didn't keep the church from acting, and the church never would have been able to foot all her medical bills and so on.
This is especially an issue in churches in poor communities. There is a whole lot of mutual care that goes on within poor churches. There was a period of time when we were one of the only families we knew that didn't include children grafted into the family by way of adoption, foster care, or guardianship. But to collectively meet the medical bills of every member of the church who didn't work in an insurance-providing job--there simply wasn't the wherewithall.
If the church isn't doing its job because the government contributes, then it's the church's problem to solve. My disabled family members shouldn't have to pay the price of the church's insufficient action by having government benefits cut!
Meg
Government mismanagement aside (public as well as private entities can have that problem), my friend's life was saved because she was able to get medical treatment as a Medicaid recipient.
Are you saying that maybe she should have died so the church would notice that they need to help?
What about people who are disabled? Should someone with congestive heart failure lose a government housing subsidy so the church will notice that shelter is necessary for survival?
If the church doesn't adequately notice need now, there's no guarantee that it will notice it then either. Who should have to give their lives or lose their homes for this experiment?
There is plenty of need to inspire the church's concern and action. We shouldn't create more to get its attention.
Meg
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