Blessed are the poor

Blessed are the Poor

Engaging “the Poor” in Us and in Others

A seminar by Fletcher Tink, Ph.D.

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Index Poorly Defined The Word: Care-full and Cared For Definitions Cartoon: Prosperity Gospel Drop-outs

Biblical References to the Poor Perspectives on Poverty Glossary from Bread for the World Poems from the Underside Excerpts from Theirs is the Kingdom Group Response #1

The Poor—Always With Us? The Word: Waste and Want Quotations about Poverty Thinking Honestly about the Poor and Ourselves Hunger cartoon Misguided Motives Social Problems “Pooring” It On The Word: Rags and Ropes “Compassion and the Clothes Closet” Evil in Three Dimensions Cartoon: McDonalds False Loves Thinking Honestly About the Poor and Ourselves Shame vs. Guilt “Street People: a Case in Diseased Eyes” “Love in Three Ventricles” Thinking Honestly About the Poor and Ourselves Hymn: The Servant Song “Potpoori” The Word: Jams and Jars Excerpts from Theirs is the Kingdom Three Ways of Looking at People Hunger Next Door Cartoon: Elijah Group Response #2

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Poor Praying The Word: Care-full and Cared for Prayers of the Poor My Prayer for the Poor “Ragman” Hymn: Let Your Heart Be Broken Action The Word: Rights and Rules “From Census Taking to Name Affirming” “The Poor and the People Called Methodists” Nazarene Manual Statements on Compassionate Ministries “Why Servanthood is Bad” “Insights from Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty” Hymn: “Take My Life” Bibliography on the Poor

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“Poorly Defined”:

Who are the “Poor”--Them or Us?

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The Word: Care-full and Cared For “’You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. “You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are---no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought. “You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat. “You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for. “You’re blessed when you get your inside world---your mind and heart---put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. “You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family. “You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom. “Not only that---count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when this happens---give a cheer, even!---for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.”

Matthew 5:3-12, from The Message.

Discussion Questions 1. When and how have you been cared for in a time of personal

crisis? 2. When you were going through a crisis, how did you respond? (stiff

upper lip? Panic? Depression? Anger? Manipulation? Prayer? Calling on friends to help you?...)

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3. Have you ever found hope in the midst of crisis by focusing on serving others rather than on your own need? Was this good? Was this bad?

4. Where have you found that in your caring you have found yourself cared for?

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DEFINITIONS I. When You Think “Poor,” Which One of These Words Grabs You? Put the Top Five in rank Order, from First to Fifth Abandoned Broke Confused Cursed Deficient Denied Depressed Deprived Destitute Disfavored Dispossessed Dying Hopeless Humble Impoverished Indigent Needy Penniless Pitiable Powerless Rundown Sick Underprivileged Unloved Unfortunate Victims Weak Others: _________________________________________________ II. When You Think “Poverty,” Which One of These Words Grabs You Put the Top Five in rank Order, from First to Fifth Addiction Aloneness Dearth Deficiency Destitution Disadvantage Forgotten

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Injustice Isolated Neediness Paucity Privation Resourceless Scarcity Shortage Others: ____________________________________________________ III. When the Bible thinks of the “Poor” and “Poverty,” the Hebrew and Greek words use the following cognates: Afflicted Become Low Beggarly Dispossessed Humble Impoverished Lacking Lean Needy Oppressed Trembling Weak IV. Is there a different emphasis or orientation to our modern words for the “Poor”? If so, why?

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In one presentation of this material, the following preferences were given in this rank order: Section I: Underprivileged, Impoverished, Needy, Destitute, Powerless Section II: Deficiency, Destitution, Neediness, Disadvantaged, Resourceless Section III: (not available) How do your answers compare?

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What does the cartoon say about the Gospel of Prosperity?

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Biblical References to the “Poor” (Mentioned in the NIV, 178 times)

Strategies to Aid the Poor

1. “but during the seventh year let the land lie unplowed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what they leave. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove.” (Ex. 23:11)

2. “Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien.” (Lev. 19:10)

3. “When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the Lord your God.” (Lev. 23:22)

4. “If one your countrymen becomes poor and is unable to support himself among you, help him as you would an alien or a temporary resident, so he can continue to live among you.” (Lev. 25:35)

Treat the Poor Justly

1. “If one of your countrymen becomes poor among you and sells himself to you, do not make him work as a slave.” (Lev. 25:39)

2. “If anyone making the vow is too poor to pay the specified amount, he is to present the person to the priest, who will set the value for him according to what the man making the vow can afford.” (Lev. 27:8)

3. “Do not take advantage of a hired man who is poor and needy, whether he I a brother Israelite or an alien living in one of your towns.” (Deut. 24:14)

4. “Pay him his wages each day before sunset, because he is poor and is counting on it. Otherwise he may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin.” (Deut. 24:15)

5. “So the poor have hope, and injustice shuts its mouth.” (Job 5:16) 6. “who show no partiality to princes and does not favor the rich over the

poor, for they are all the work of his hands?” (Job 34:19) 7. “Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of

the poor and oppressed.” (Ps 82:3) 8. “The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no

such concern.” (Prov. 29:7) 9. “Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.”

(Prov. 31:20) 10. “Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In

your hearts do not think evil of each other.” (Zech. 7:10)

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Treat the Poor Generously

1. “If there is a poor man among your brothers in any of the towns of the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward your poor brother.” (Deut 15:7)

2. “He who is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will reward him for what he has done.” (Prov. 19:17)

3. “Do not exploit the poor because they are poor and do not crush the needy in court.” (Prov. 22:22)

4. “Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter---when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” (Is. 58:7)

5. “But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.” (Luke 14:13)

What are God’s Intentions for the Poor?

1. “However, there should be no poor among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you.” (Deut. 15:4)

2. “I will bless her with adequate provisions; her poor will I satisfy with food. (Ps 132:15)

3. “I know that the Lord secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy.” (Ps 140:12)

The Realistic Perspective about the Poor?

1. “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded towards your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.” (Deut 15:1)

2. “A poor man’s field may produce abundant food, but injustice sweeps it away.” (Prov. 13:23)

3. “The poor are shunned even by their neighbors, but the rich have many friends.” (Prov. 14:20)

4. “Wealth brings many friends, but a poor man’s friend deserts him.” (Prov. 19:4)

5. “A poor man is shunned by all his relatives---how much more do his friends avoid him! Though he pursue them with pleading, they are nowhere to be found.” (Prov 19:17)

6. “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” (Matt. 26:11)

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God Advocates for the Poor

1. “He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap; he seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor.”

2. “The poor will eat and be satisfied; they who seek the Lord will praise him---may your hearts live forever.” (Ps. 22:26)

3. “My whole being will exclaim, ‘Who is like you, O Lord? You rescue the poor from those too strong for them, the poor and needy from those who rob them.” (Ps. 35:10)

4. “Your people settled in it, and from your bounty, O God, you provided for the poor.” (Ps 68:10)

5. “He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.” (Ps 113:7)

6. “The poorest of the poor will find pasture, and the needy will lie down in safety. But your root I will destroy by famine; it will slay your survivors.” (Is. 14:30)

7. “The poor and needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst. But I the Lord will answer them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.”

8. “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.” (Is. 61:1)

Examples of Care for the Poor

1. “as the time when the Jews got relief from their enemies, and as the month when their sorrow was turned into joy and their mourning into a day of celebration. He wrote them to observe the days as days of feasting and joy and giving presents of food to one another and gifts to the poor.” (Esther 9:22)

2. “because I rescued the poor who cried for help, and the fatherless who had none to assist.” (Job 29:12)

3. “Have I not wept for those in trouble? Has not my soul grieved for the poor?” (Job 30:25)

4. “If I have denied the desires of the poor or let the eyes of the widow grow weary.” (Job 31:16)

5. “She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy.” (Prov. 31:20)

6. “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.” (Matt. 11:5)

7. “The servant came back and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and ordered his servant, ‘Go out

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quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.” (Luke 14:21)

8. “In Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha (which, when translated, is Dorcas), who was always doing good and helping the poor.” (Acts 9:36)

Redistribution of Resources for the Poor

1. “His children must make amends to the poor; his own hands must give back his wealth.” (Job 20:10)

2. “Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (Matt. 19:21)

3. “Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.” (Luke 12:23)

4. “Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?” (James 2:5)

The Bad Treatment of the Poor

1. “You evildoers frustrate the plans of the poor, but the Lord is their refuge.” (Ps 14:6)

2. “The wicked draw the sword and bend the bow to bring down the poor and needy, to slay those whose ways are upright.”

3. “A poor man pleads for mercy, but a rich man answers harshly.” (Prov. 18:23)

4. “The people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the alien, denying them justice.” (Ez. 22:29)

5. “For I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins. You oppress the righteous and take bribes and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts.” (Amos 5:12)

6. “Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also come in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, ‘Here’s a good seat for you,’ but say to the poor man, ‘You stand there’ or ‘Sit on the floor by my feet,” (James 2:2-3)

Some Negatives Causes of Poverty

1. “Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth.” 2. “Do not love sleep or you will grow poor; stay awake and you will have

food to spare.” (Prov. 20:13)

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3. “He who loves pleasure will become poor; whoever loves wine and oil will never be rich. (Prov. 21:17)

4. “for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags.” (Prov. 23:21)

Judgment on Those that Exploit or are Insensitive to the Poor

1. “He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.” (Prov 14:31)

2. “He who mocks the poor shows contempt for their Maker; whoever gloats over disaster will not go unpunished.”(Prov 17:5)

3. “If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered.” (Prov. 21:13)

4. “He who oppresses the poor to increase his wealth and he who gives gifts to the rich---both come to poverty.” (Prob. 22:16)

5. “The Lord enters into judgment against the elders and leaders of his people: ‘It is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses.” (Is. 3:14)

6. “What do you mean by rushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor? Declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty.” (Is. 3:15)

7. “to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.” (Is 10:2)

8. “and have grown fat and sleek. Their evil deeds have no limit; they do not plead the case of the fatherless to win it, they do not defend the rights of the poor.” (Jer. 5:28)

9. “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” (Ez. 16:49)

10. “If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.” (I Cor. 13:3)

11. “But you have insulted the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? (James 2:6)

Blessings on Those Who Care for the Poor

1. “A generous man will himself be blessed, for he shares his food with the poor.” (Prov. 22:9)

2. “He who gives to the poor will lack nothing, but he who closes his eyes to them receives many curses.” (Prov. 28:27)

3. “and said, Cornelius, God has heard your prayer and remembered your gifts for the poor and to present offerings.” (Acts 10:31)

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Perspectives on Poverty Please match the perspective with one of the following statements that, to you, sounds most like the role played:

1. Cynic’s Perspective: 2. Desperate Man’s Perspective 3. Dr. Phineas F. Bresee’s Perspective 4. Denominational Perspective 5. Child’s Perspective 6. Administrator’s Perspective 7. Desperate Mother’s Perspective 8. Biblical Perspective 9. Government Perspective 10. Thankful Mother’s Perspective

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Fill in the blanks with the corresponding speaker from the list above. A. _____ “I was born there I was raised there I was loved there Then one day, I left there for elsewhere “I found purpose elsewhere I found meaning elsewhere I loved elsewhere Then one day, I left elsewhere for overthere “I showed compassion overthere I knew sorrow overthere I hated overthere The one day I left overthere for nowhere B. _____ “Because of the increased client load, it will be necessary for our resource development team to submit additional grants and elicit corporate gifts in order to service the mission of our organization.” C. _____ “My daddy doesn’t have a good job and so we don’t have enough money to buy school supplies and I get embarrassed in school ‘cause of it.

D. _____ “There’s no way that the government can dole out enough money to feed all of the deadbeats that are out there. I work for a living and the government doesn’t have the right to take my money and hand it over to those who make lousy choices in life.”

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E. _____ “I just enrolled in a work-at-home program stuffing envelopes. It is so depressing. . . We have less food [since welfare reform], though I look for bargains and sales and try to stretch my money. I end up yelling and fighting with the children, maybe because they aren’t getting enough to eat. I don’t know. I borrow, but now I owe everyone so I can’t borrow anymore.”

F. _____ “For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, ‘Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!’ and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup---where does that get you? Isn’t it obvious that God-talk without God-act is outrageous nonsense?

G. _____ “The ‘Temporary Assistance for Needy Families’ (TANF) program has helped very much to alleviate the welfare dependence burden on our nation, as evidenced by the number of people on welfare before the reform of 1996, and the drastically lower amount after 1996. This steady decline shows that this program and the welfare reform acts of 1996 has served to greatly assist the needy in our nation, as well as relieve some of the economic and sociological obligation that the rest of the American society has had for the past few decades”

H. _____ “We do not view compassionate acts as instruments for offering salvation. We endeavor to meet the needs of people simple because of the need. That’s the Jesus way, and as Wesleyans, we believe we are called to live like Jesus among the poor, disadvantaged, and suffering peoples around us.” I. _____ “The first miracle after the baptism of the Holy Ghost was wrought upon a beggar. It means that the first service of a Holy Ghost-baptized church is to the poor; that its ministry is to those who are lowest down; that its gifts are for those who need them the most. As the Spirit was upon Jesus to preach the gospel to the poor, so His Spirit is upon His servants for the same purpose.”

J. _____ “Just when I thought that all was lost

I heard about this place. I was hungry, tired and scared Until behind the counter I saw this smileing (sic) face. That one smile assured me that it was going to be OK And that I wasn’t alone For I wasn’t the only one that didn’t have a home Over the weeks of me walking through those big glass doors I know that I’ve found security, I need nothing more. Although there are hundreds of faces the staff see a day, When I approach the desk They call me by name and help me right away. No matter my problem big or small They seem to work through them all I thank the Lord for keeping me safe Thank all of you at the Horizon House place!

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Answers: A. 2 B. 6 C. 5 D. 1 E. 7 F. 8 G. 9 H. 4 I. 3 J. 10

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Poems from the Underside Battered Angel

While sleeping one night, I had a dream.

It left a tale to tell. I dreamed I saw an angel

And he wasn’t looking well.

His body was bruised and battered, Wings ripped and torn tired, .

I saw that he could barely walk, So tired weary and worn.

I walked over to him and said,

“Angel, how can this be?” As he looked back at me and tried to smile,

These words were said to me. . .

“I’m your guardian angel, Quite a job as you can see.

You’ve lived a very hard life. With that you must agree.

You’ve broken laws and hearts. What you see, you’ve done to me.

“These bruises are from shielding you.

Each day I do my best still The drugs you’ve used so recklessly,

I’ve often paid the bill.

“My wings you see, are ripped and torn; A noble badge I bear.

So many times they’ve shielded you, Though you were unaware.

“Yes, every mark has its story

Of pain and danger I’ve destroyed. You’ve made me wish more than once

That I was unemployed.

“If you would only embrace life, And choose to do good on your own. It would end the pain and suffering

That goes with being your chaperone.

“I will always be there to watch over you Until my strength finally fail.

As for when that will be? All I can say is I’m getting old and frail.”

When I awoke, I thought about my dream,

How much he seemed to care. Then I looked around my prison cell

And my heart sank in despair.

As I sat there and wondered “Why should I even try?”

The air rushed by from beating wings And I heard an angel cry!

By Robert Mounts, 2005

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The Only's

If only I had more time. If only I had more food.

If only I had more money If only I had more room.

If only I had more than one

Oh, only I had more. If only it wasn’t my only one,

I could give it that is sure.

God had only One. But there He didn’t stop

For the Love He had for us, “It’s my Only, wasn’t His thought.

If in your hand

You held just one little seed, Would you plant it

So others you could feed?

Only one is enough with God, With only One He did so much.

Don’t be afraid to give your Only. With it, many He will touch.


Beyond Myself

What have we missed

As we walk head down? So focused on our problems Facing the day with a frown.

What have we missed

As we fail to look? And refusing to hear the cry

Of those, the battle has overtook.

What are my problems Compared to some?

Had not I been full of gloom, I could shine like the sun.

At a place in my life

When I chanced to look up, It was easy to see beyond myself

And be partaker of the Lord’s Cup.

Truly, we need to understand That we are to be a Light,

Always remembering each time we pray That it’s for the lost we do fight.

Don’t misunderstand this poem, For problems will surely come;

But learn to place them at the Master’s feet So you can carry others to that same Throne.


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Excerpts from Theirs is the Kingdom: Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America by Robert D. Lupton

"The Truly Worthy Poor" People with a heart to serve others want to know that their gifts are invested wisely. AT least I do. I don’t want my alms squandered by the irresponsible and the ungrateful. And since I’m often in a position to determine who will or will not receive assistance, I’ve attempted to establish criteria to judge the worthiness of potential recipients. A truly worthy poor woman: Is a widow more than sixty-five years old living alone in substandard housing; does not have a family or relatives to care for her. Has no savings and cannot work; has an income inadequate for basic needs. Is a woman of prayer and faith, never asks anyone for anything but only accepts with gratitude what people bring her; is not cranky. A truly worthy poor young man: Is out of school, unemployed but not living off his mother. Diligently applies for jobs every day; accepts gratefully any kind of work for any kind of pay. Does not smoke, drink, or use drugs; attends church regularly. Will not manipulate for gain either for himself or his family; is dependable and morally pure. Does not act “cool” or “hip” like his peers on the street. Has pride in himself and is confident; may sleep in alleys but is always clean and shaved. A truly worthy poor young woman: Lives in public housing (only temporarily). Has illegitimate children conceived prior to Christian conversion; is now celibate. Tithes her welfare check and food stamps; is a high school dropout but manages well with limited resources. Places a high value on education and nutrition for her children. Walks everywhere (grocery store, church, school, welfare office) with her children to save bus fare and keeps her sparsely furnished home spotless. Occasionally runs out of food by the end of the month, but will not beg for “handouts.” Will not accept more than twenty-five dollars per month in help from friends even if her children are hungry because this violates welfare rules. A truly worthy poor family: Is devout, close-knit. Has a responsible father working long hours at minimum wage wherever he can find work. Has a mother who makes the kids obey, washes clothes by hand, and will not buy any junk food. Lives in overcrowded housing; will not accept welfare or food stamps even when neither parent can find work. Always pays the bills on time; has no automobile. Has kids that do not whine or tell lies. I want to serve truly worthy poor people. The problem is they are hard to find. Someone on our staff thought he remembered seeing one back in ’76 but can’t remember for sure. Someone else reminded me that maybe to be truly poor means to be prideless, impatient, manipulative, desperate, grasping at every straw, and clutching the immediate with little energy left for future plans. But truly worthy? Are any of us truly worthy?

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Group Response #1 Personal Testimonial of Kindness Extended to You in a Time of

Personal Economic or Emotional Crisis

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“The Poor...Always with Us?”:

Causes and Consequences

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The Word: Waste and Want When Jesus was at Bethany, a guest of Simon the Leper, a woman came up to him as he was eating dinner and anointed him with a bottle of very expensive perfume. When the disciples saw what was happening, they were furious. “That’s criminal! This could have been sold for a lot and the money handed out to the poor.” When Jesus realized what was going on, he intervened. “Why are you giving this woman a hard time? She has just done something wonderfully significant for me. You will have the poor with you every day for the rest of your lives, but not me. When she poured this perfume on my body, what she really did was anoint me for burial. You can be sure that wherever in the whole world the message is preached, what she has just done is going to be remembered and admired.” That is when one of the Twelve, the one named Judas Iscariot, went to the cabal of high priests and said, “What will you give me if I hand him over to you?” They settled on thirty silver pieces. He began looking for just the right moment to hand him over.”

Matthew 26: 3-16, The Message

Discussion Questions1. When you see the poor, what personal feelings rise to the surface?

Helplessness? Action? Avoidance? Anger? Frustration? Other? 2. Do you believe that Jesus’ answer was insensitive? Selfish? Matter-

of-fact? Saying something important such as…? 3. Why do we have the poor always with us? 4. If the poor are always with us, is it right for the church to

intentionally or inadvertently exclude the poor? 5. Why, in this story, is perfume more important than money?

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Quotations about Poverty Read through and evaluate quickly your reaction to these statements. Score each of these statements on the basis of 1-5, according to this scale: 1 Strongly agree

2 Agree somewhat 3 No reaction or I don’t understand the point 4 Disagree somewhat 5 Strongly disagree

********************************************************* 1. “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.” Charles Darwin My evaluation: ____ 2. “We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.” William James My evaluation: ____ 3. “You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.” P.J. O’Rourke My evaluation: ____ 4. “The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied . . . but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing. John Berger. My evaluation: ____ 5. “Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit.” Eli Khamarov My evaluation: ____ 6. “The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.” William James My evaluation: ____

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7. “It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.” Bill Vaughn My evaluation: ____ 8. “Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving.” O. Henry My evaluation: ____ 9. “A rich man in nothing but a poor man with money.” W.C. Fields My evaluation: ____ 10. “The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.” Willem de Kooning My evaluation: ____ 11. “Hunger makes a thief of any man.” Pearl S. Buck My evaluation: ____ 12. “To a man with an empty stomach, food is God.” Gandhi My evaluation: ____ 13. “Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.” Sydney Smith My evaluation: ____ 14. “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” Mahatma Gandhi My evaluation: ____ 15. “However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not sun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.” Henry David Thoreau My evaluation: ____ 16. “For every talent that poverty has stimulated, it had blighted a hundred.” John Gardner My evaluation: ____

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Thinking Honestly About the Poor and Ourselves

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Hopelessness in an Unequal Society “Both Maridel and Parker were overweight, to the point of being unhealthy. They decided it was the time to do something drastic. Responding to an ad for a Fat-Away program, they drove to a rural area in their state, where they were taken to separate areas of the woods. For six weeks, they would be locked into these ‘compounds,’ as they were called. In each compound, according to the ad, were the perfect ingredients needed to lose weight. Their goal was to each lose forty pounds. What they did not know is that the less-than ethical Fat-Away organization was really a research laboratory studying the effects of various diets, exercise programs and weight-loss expectations on people’s weight change. Without a word to Maridel and Parker, they placed Maridel in a compound designed to help her lose weight, but they placed Parker in a compound designed for Parker to gain weight. “In Maridel’s compound were running trails, a swimming pool, state-of-the-art exercise equipment, a basketball court, and a sauna. In her cabin were magazines on proper nutrition, instructional videos on how to lose weight, an abundance of natural, healthy, low-far, low-calorie foods, and no sweets. Each day she was greeted early by fit and trim people who asked Maridel to go on a run with them, talked about how much they loved being thin, and encouraged her that she too can be thin---wonderful conditions for losing weight. “In Parker’s compound was only a tiny cabin. No exercise equipment was available whatsoever, but there were plenty of videos and movies that showed high-calorie foods looking sumptuous, more high-calorie goodies than even a sumo wrestler could desire, and just a few fruits and vegetables. The only other people Parker saw were also obese, and though they talked about losing weight, they seemed not to really care about their weight---not good conditions for losing weight.

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“The program called for each participant to weigh in at the start, and then every two weeks thereafter. At the end of two weeks, with neither aware of what was inside the other’s compound, Maridel and Parker were taken to the weighing room. They each took their turn on the scale. Maridel stepped on the scale first. She had lost nineteen pounds! Parker’s turn produced far less excitement. He actually gained two pounds. “Maridel, who assumed that both she and Parker had the same type of compound, was irritated with Parker. ‘We paid good money to be here, Parker. How can you waste it? You have to exercise, you have to eat right!’ Parker tried to make his case, but it only made Maridel more irritated. Maridel told Parker he needed to try harder. Parker, though he was depressed about his weight gain and the difficulty in exercising adequately and eating right, resolved to do so. “But try as he may, Parker kept eating too many bad foods. And he exercised very little. He became depressed, and his depression only made him eat more and exercise less. After another two weeks, back he and Maridel went to the scales. Maridel, with wonderful weight-loss opportunities and taking full advantage of them, lost another fifteen pounds. Parker however actually gained more weight than he had the first two weeks. Maridel could not believe what Parker was doing to himself. ‘Don’t you know why we are here? Parker, this place is designed for us to lose weight. If you can’t do it here, where can you?’ “’I don’t think this is all that great a place to lose weight,’ Parker sniped. ‘The food here is fatty, and exercising is next to impossible.’ Maridel was taken aback. Finally she replied, ‘It wouldn’t matter if that were true, Parker. When we get home, the food can be fatty and exercise difficult, but you must learn to eat and exercise right, regardless.’ Parker, increasingly frustrated by Maridel’s comments, retorted. ‘No way is it as easy as you’re making it seem. I think that Fat-Away is treating me unfairly. I’m not even sure I want to lose weight.’ “With that Maridel was dumbfounded. If Parker was not even going to try, if he was going to blame others, perhaps he deserved to be obese. But she also thought that if only Parker could have a vision of what he could look like, he would take advantage of Fat-Away and lose weight. She encouraged

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Parker to imagine being thin, toned, and healthy. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Parker? If only you would try.’ ”Back they went for another two weeks. At the final weigh-in, with the predictable result of Parker not having lose weight, Maridel simple resigned herself to the idea that Parker wanted to be overweight. Why Parker would want this, she was not sure, but of one thing she was sure---until Parker decided he wanted to lose weight, he would not.” Taken from Divided by Faith, by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith. pp. 110-112

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mhancock

Text Box

This is a child's view of hunger. What does this cartoon mean to you?

Misguided Motives

1. A “Romanticism” about the poor and their needs “It’s gonna be cool, helpin’ them out!” 2. A “Messianic Complex”, to “save” the needy “Just wait till I fix the problem!” 3. An “Exaggerated View” about the needy “They are so pitiful!” 4. A “Poor Self-Esteem” Perspective that is enhanced by working with the poor “I feel so much more important around them!” 5. A “Utilitarian” perspective, that uses the poor for personal advantage “It’ll look good on my resume 6. A “Guilt” Complex about the needy “Man, I have so much that I’ve got to share!” 7. A “Duty-bound” obligation to the needy “Guess I’ve got to do it. It’s the Christian thing!” 8. The “Titillation” of excitement among the poor “Yeah! This is where the real action is.” 9. A “Masochistic” attraction towards the poor “I like to hang around people hurting worse than me.” 10. The “Attention-getting” device “Hey, everybody’s going to think I’m another Mother Teresa. . . Who knows maybe I’ll win a Nobel Prize some day!

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Chapter 7 Poverty

Summary by Russ Long May 29, 2005

Key Conceptsblaming the victim culture of poverty feminization of poverty income meritocracy new poor old poor poor-poor (severely poor)

poverty poverty line social classes social stratification underclass wealth wealthfare welfare

I. Poverty in the U.S.

Basics of Social Stratification

Social Stratification

Stratification is the hierarchical arrangement of large social groups on the basis of their control over basic resources (Kendall, 1998:24).

Social Class

A class system is a system of social inequality based on the ownership and control of resources and on the type of work people do. A primary characteristic of the class system is social mobility. In other words an individual can move up, or down, the class structure (Kendall, 1998:24).

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Presumably, social movement is based on merit. One, therefore, earns their position in society.

Meritocracy

Meritocracy is a system of social inequality in which social standing corresponds to personal ability or effort.

Underclass

The underclass refers to poor people who live in areas with high concentrations of poverty and few opportunities to improve their lives.

Wealth

Wealth is the value of all economic assets, including income, personal property, and income-producing property (Kendall, 1998:24).

Income

Income is the economic gain derived from wages, salaries, income transfers (governmental aid such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children), or ownership of property (Kendall, 1998:27).

Assets

Wolff (in Skolnick and Currie, 1997:99) describes assets as consisting of all forms of "financial wealth such as bank accounts, stocks, bonds, life insurance savings, mutual fund shares and unincorporated business; consumer durables like cares and major appliances; and the value of pension rights." Wolff (1997:99) continues to say that from these sources, one should subtract liabilities such as "consumer debt, mortgage balances, and other outstanding debt." The upper classes control a much greater percentage of valuable assets than income. Robertson (1989:180) points out that in 1973 the bottom fifth of Americans controlled only 0.2% of all assets while the top fifth control 76% of all assets. Further, the assets controlled by the poor tend to depreciate (household items) over time while those of the rich tend to appreciate (real estate and stocks).

A. What is Poverty and How Is It Measured?

Eitzen (2000:178) describes poverty as a standard of living below the minimum needed for the maintenance of an adequate diet. health, and shelter.

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B. The Extent of Poverty

1. The Poverty Rate

The poverty rate is an absolute measure of poverty. It is the proportion of the population whose income falls below the government's official poverty line.

Poverty Rates, 2000

U.S. Texas Austin Metro

Corpus Christi Metro

San Antonio Metro

Total Population 12.38 15.37 11.07 18.16 15.08

The United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) defines metropolitan areas (MAs) according to published standards that are applied to Census Bureau data. The general concept of an MA is that of a core area containing a large population nucleus, together with adjacent communities having a high degree of economic and social integration with that core. See: http://www.census.gov/population/www/estimates/aboutmetro.html

Tables compiled by Russ Long

2. Determining the "Official" Poverty Line

The official poverty line is based on a minimum family market basket – a low-cost food budget that contains a minimum level of nutrition for a family – multiplied by 3 to allow for nonfood costs (Eitzen, 2000:178).

3. Problems With The Official Definition of Poverty

There are some serious problems with the "official poverty rate."

a. Poverty is Unique depending on Social and Physical Environment

Any number of social and geographic factors are going to mean that poverty in one region is not the same as poverty in another region (rural vs. urban poverty for example).

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http://www.census.gov/population/www/estimates/aboutmetro.html

b. The Cost of Food Declined

The definition of official poverty may have made more sense in 1965 when it was created than it does in 2001. The cost of food, as a proportion of the family budget, has declined.

c. Fails to Keep Up with Inflation

see Eitzen (2003:181)

Extreme Poverty

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is the poorest census tract in the United States with a poverty rate of 73%

Source: Newsweek, July 19, 1999, p 34.

4. Alternatives to the Official Poverty Rate

a. Relative Measures (Fifty percent of the Median)

Fifty percent of the median income is a relative measure of poverty. Kendall (1998:33) describes relative poverty as a condition that exists when people may be able to afford basic necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter but cannot maintain an average standard of living for members of their society or group.

b. Subjective Measures (Ask the individual)

C. Who are the Poor? (Race & Ethnicity, Gender, Class, Age)

Poverty and Income Data

Historic Poverty Trends in the U.S.: Poverty Rates & Poverty Population -- 1959 to 1999

Historic Poverty Trends in the U.S.: Race, Ethnicity, & Female Householder -- 1959 to 1999

Historic Poverty Trends in the U.S.: Age -- 1959 to 1999

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http://www.delmar.edu/socsci/rlong/data/Inequality/HistoricPovertyTrends.htm

http://www.delmar.edu/socsci/rlong/data/Inequality/HistoricPovertyTrends.htm

http://www.delmar.edu/socsci/rlong/data/Inequality/HistoricPovertyGroups.htm

http://www.delmar.edu/socsci/rlong/data/Inequality/HistoricPovertyGroups.htm

http://www.delmar.edu/socsci/rlong/data/Inequality/HistoricPovertyAge.htm

Are the Rich Getting Richer? Percent Change in Household Income by Quintile: 1995 & 1996

Median Family Income by Race and Ethnicity: 1999

Per Capita Income by Race and Ethnicity: 1999

1. Feminization of Poverty

Feminization of poverty refers to the trend whereby women are disproportionately represented among individuals living in poverty (Kendall, 1998:34-35). (also see Eitzen, 2000:181)

he Old-Poor, The New Poor, and The Poor-Poor (Severely Poor)

a. The Old Poor

. n

was work that the unskilled and uneducated could do to earning a living.

b. The New Poor

than the poor in previous generations. The is little need for hard physical labor.

c. The Poor-Poor (The Severely Poor)

lf the poverty line. Eitzen argues that 39% of the poor fall into this category.

2. T

Eitzen (2003:188) contends that the old poor (of previous generations) are different than today's poor because the old poor had hopes of escaping povertyEven if the old-poor did not escape poverty, they had hopes that their childrewould escape poverty. There

Eitzen (2003:188) argues that the new-poor are much more trapped by poverty

Eitzen (2003:189) refers to people who have incomes below ha

Child Poverty

Eitzen (2003:184) notes that children living in poverty come from female-headed families, they are rural, and they are mostly white.

Progress in Reducing Child Poverty

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http://www.delmar.edu/socsci/rlong/data/Inequality/RichGettingRicher.htm

Eitzen (2000:183) points out that one in five children are poor in the United States. He further notes that child-poverty can be reduced because it has happened in other industrial countries. He shows that America’s wealthy children do better than wealthy kids in other countries but the kids of poor people in America have less to live on than kids in any other industrial country except for Ireland and Israel. Other countries reduce child poverty through government programs. The offer broader child tax credit than does the U.S. They have guaranteed child care, health care, and child support when fathers won’t pay.

II. Myths About Poverty

A. Refusal To Work

(Eitzen, 2003:190)

B. Welfare Dependency

(Eitzen, 2003:190-191)

1. Welfare

Welfare is government monies or services provided to the poor.

2. Wealthfare

t amount of government aid goes to the nonpoorWealthfare describes a situation in the U.S. where the greates

(Eitzen, 2000:188-189).

a. Funding for Social Service:

n public education for children and Social Security and Medicare for the elderly.

There are two hidden welfare systems that benefit the wealthy as well.

a. Tax Expenditures and Tax Loopholes:

ur

Most government expenditures for human resource programs go to the nonpoor. This includes moneys spent o

Many wealthy individuals and corporations often pay lower taxes or no taxes at all. For example, the government allows homeowners to deduct from their taxes estate taxes and interest on mortgages. The money saved via tax breaks is fo

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times larger than all funding for low income housing. Only about a quartAmericans i

er of n the top income bracket receive these tax breaks (Eitzen,

2000:188).

b. Corporate Assistance:

idies and credit assistance to corporations, banks, agribusiness, defense, etc.

C. The Poor Get Special Advantages

r ke milk. They also have a harder time getting insurance

and obtaining loans.

1. High-cost Commodities

ated in

neighborhood. This gives the neighborhood stores a near-monopoly advantage.

2. Inflated Interest Rates

, finance company loans, and quick payday loans from check cashing services.

3. Regressive Taxes

than do the wealthy. Sales taxes are, therefore, regressive (Eitzen, 2000:190).

The second form of hidden welfare to the wealthy comes in the form of direct subs

No, the poor do not get special advantages. In fact, the poor pay more than the nonpoor for many services. Eitzen (2003:193) notes that the poor pay more foday to day products li

The inner-city poor have to pay more for food and commodities. The large "club-stores," which are often associated with discount shopping, are often locthe suburbs. The poor must buy from stores located in their immediate

The poor are not generally offered the kinds of financial services which are provided to people in the middle class. This includes bank loans. The financialservices which the poor have access to charge extremely high interest rates. These services include rent-to-own companies, loans from pawnbrokers

When the poor pay taxes on items they purchase, they pay a much greater amount of their resources on those items

III. Deficiency Theory #1: Innate Inferiority: Social Darwinism

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Disclaimer

I normally would not include a disclaimer in a sociological inquiry, but in this case one is in order. The reader should be fully aware that as I present the material on deficiency theories I do not subscribe to any of their tenets. It is my contention that poverty is an economic issue rooted in the structure of society. Solutions to poverty are political. Biology plays a very minor role in determining who is poor. I present material on deficiency theories, not because I think they are valid explanations of poverty, but rather as a forum from which to critique deficiency theories.

Self-fulfilling Prophecy and I.Q.

Henslin (481:1999) contends that a self-fulfilling prophecy refers to a false assumption of what is going on that happens to come true simply because it was predicted.

Eitzen (2000:196) argues that IQ testing promotes a self-fulfilling prophecy. He contends that knowledge of IQ scores can determine how people respond to one-another.

For example:

A teacher learns that a pupil has a low IQ score. This knowledge prompts the teacher to assume the student is a slow learner and lowers his/her expectations of the student. The lowered expectations lead to less access to knowledge and ultimately to even lower IQ scores on future tests.

A. The Role of Biology

Biology obviously plays a role in deciding who we are (see Charon, 1987:70-78). Biology is responsible for our helplessness at birth, it's responsible for providius with a brain that can accommodate complex conceptual tasks (e.g., langand math). Biology is responsible for physical differences between men andwomen. Biological explanations, in part, account for men being physically

ng uage

stronger than women and women living longer than men. Women are less ines that women mature faster than men. susceptible to disease. Biology determ

B. The Rise of Sociobiology

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Does biology influence the kind of social relationships that people have with one another? Many contend that it does. Edward Wilson has called for the "systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior in all kinds of organisms including man." Sociobiologists contend that biological apprare valid attempts to explain human behavior because ultimately

oaches all social life is

traceable to our biological heritage and not social interaction. Biology is,

del

therefore, seen as the ultimate determinant of human behavior.

C. Biological Models As Social Models: The Homeostatic Mo

The Homeostatic model is a sociological model whose origins are found in biology. Remember that the use of biological models (or any other particular model for that matter) has significant influence on how we perceive social relationships. Note that within a biological system, dramatic change can causthe death of the organism. For Biology this is a literal description of a livingsystem. When biological models are applied to social systems, societies are seen as like a human organism.

e

It is assumed that all parts of the system function to support the greater organism. All parts are perceived as necessadespite unequal arrangements. One tends to forget, however, that biologicdescriptions of society are

ry -- al

merely metaphors. Often they do not accurately describe human systems. Further more, biological models assume that if something exists, then it must contribute to the preservation of the larger system (i.e., it must be necessary). Biological models provide justification for the existing status quo (whatever the status quo may be).

D. Social Darwinism of the 19th and Early 20th Century

The discoveries of Charles Darwin had a profound impact on other branches of scientific inquiry. Charles Darwin, of course, is famous for his Theory of Evolution. In the world of biology the species most fit survived while those less fit eventually became extinct. Many social scientists, most notably Herbert Spencer, attempted to apply the logic of Charles Darwin to the social world. The essence of the social Darwinist perspective is that races or cultures, who occupied a "superior position" in the social world, deserved that position because they were the most socially fit (Eitzen and Baca-Zinn, 1994:170). According to Spencer "the poor are poor because they are unfit." Spencer argued that "poverty is nature's way of 'excreting ... unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members' of society in order to make room for the fit" (Eitzen and Baca-Zinn, 1994:170).

oy

E. A Modern Example of Social Darwinism: IQ Tests

Murray and Herrnstein (1994) along with Arthur Jensen (1969, 1980) emplSocial Darwinist type explanations in their interpretation of IQ scores. IQ scoreof course, are viewed as a measure of intelligence and

s, at it is assumed th

intellectual ability is inherited. Murray and Herrnstein imply that low IQ scores associated with people of color are the result of a deficient gene pool.

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Intellectual ability, according to Murray and Herrnstein, is inherited. Since, according to sociobiologists, social position is based on merit, those who occupy high ranking positions in society are biologically "fit." On the other hand, those individuals who occupy low ranking positions are least fit socially.

Some portion of IQ is inherited. On the other hand, some intellectual ability is gained through social interaction (e.g., through parental interaction or the school system). To assume that IQ is all biological is simple wrong. Furthermore, the impact such beliefs (i.e., that social position is based on genetics) can have catastrophic effect on the self-concept of poor people who are already stigmatized by poverty.

F. IQ and the Environment

Is IQ largely a function of biology? Does IQ measure intelligence? Much research on IQ exists that documents that variations in IQ scores are due to genetic factors less than half the time. The rest of the variation in intelligence is the result of social context. The following five items are social factors that influence IQ scores:

1. Prenatal Care: The impact of parental neglect in the development of the fetus is well documented. Parents who abuse substances while conceiving and carrying unborn children may produce offspring with lower IQs. Similarly poor diet and inadequate health care can lead to lower IQ.

2. Differences in Socialization: The type of interaction that children have with others can influence intellectual development. One might expect that parents who read to their children will produce children with higher IQ scores as compared to parents who do not read to their children.

3. Disadvantages Associated with Poverty: Poverty has negative impact on intellectual development on a variety of avenues. The poor in the United States have long been frustrated with "separate and unequal schools." Poor classroom conditions can negatively affect IQ scores. Poor nutrition and health can continue to have negative influence intellectual development.

4. Importance of IQ Scores to the Person Taking the Test: If passing a standardized test is unimportant, the individual probably will not put his or her full effort into performing satisfactorily on such a test. In fact, poor children might perform poorly on tests of all kinds out of fear of being ridiculed by his or her class mates if they perform well.

5. Cultural Bias of the IQ Test. IQ tests are typically written by middle-class people. They test knowledge of middle-class values. Many argue that performance on IQ tests measures, not innate intelligence and ability, but rather knowledge of middle-class conditions.

G. The Hidden Agenda Behind the Bell Curve

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From the time of Thomas Malthus there have been those opponents of social welfare who contend that welfare is simple a means of using the wealth of the advantaged to perpetuate and increased the population of the disadvantaged.

Social welfare is condemned because, it is argued, social welfare is the source of poverty rather than the solution. Many argue that assistance to the poor encourages a state of dependence. Social Darwinism advocates withholding aid from the poor. Social welfare programs would interfere with nature's way of getting rid of the weak.

Following through on this logic, in order to eliminate poverty, the poor have to be encouraged to rectify their own situation. Malthus argued that the poor should feel "the great pain of poverty" before they would take steps to limit their birth rates. Murray and Herrnstein (1994) 200 years later use the same logic to lash out against social welfare spending. They argue that poverty, welfare dependency, illegitimacy, and crime are all correlated with low IQ and that the correlation is due to genetics.

At the least one might argue that what is, in fact, occurring is an effort to substitute IQ scores for moral worth. IQ scores provide an easy explanation for complex social interactions that lead to poverty. Some even contend that IQ scores are an ideological tool. IQ can help maintain the social position of people who do well on IQ tests. It can foster a particular social view (a middle-class view) of what constitutes intelligence.

H. A critique of Biological Models

Granted, biology plays a large part in who we are, but no matter what the biological differences may be, what becomes important is how we socially respond to those differences. An over-reliance on biological explanations for social behavior may cause observers to overlook the importance of the social definition superimposed on biologically determined characteristics.

Of major importance here are the potentially catastrophic consequences that a reliance on biology models might have on psychological issues such as self-esteem. Poor people are already stigmatized. An over-reliance on the biological model might drive many already disadvantaged into believing that attempting to achieve success is useless.

Other material should be considered in the IQ debate. Note the "Flynn Effect" which was first noticed in 1930 that shows that all groups show a steady rise in IQ scores from 1930 regardless of social class or race. The Flynn Effect demonstrates that IQ does improve -- even for the poor. Contrast this with William Shockley's (1966) call for the sterilization of people with low IQs.

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IV. Deficiency Theory #2 Cultural Inferiority: The Culture of Poverty

Oscar Lewis, author of La Vita (1965), coined the term "Culture of Poverty" (also see Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited, 1974). The essence of Culture of Poverty theory holds that poor people share deviant cultural characteristics. The poor have lifestyles that differ from the rest of society and that these characteristics perpetuate their life of poverty. According to the Culture of Poverty thesis (in Eitzen and Baca-Zinn, 1994:173) "the poor are qualitatively different in values and that these cultural differences explain continued poverty."

Eitzen and Baca-Zinn (1994:173) maintain that there is a strong implication embedded in the Culture of Poverty that defects in the lifestyle of the poor [cultural deprivation] perpetuate poverty. Such defects are passed from one generation to the next. Under these circumstances it is extremely difficult for people, once trapped by the Culture of Poverty, to escape poverty.

Characteristics that typify the Culture of Poverty exist across a variety of racial and ethnic groups. While these characteristics (see below) are certainly present in poverty populations, Culture of Poverty Theory leaves the impression that they typify all poor people. THAT IS A FALLACY!

The following characteristics typify the culture of poverty. Some may be accurate in some settings. Some may have had explanatory powers a few decades ago, but today are no longer accurate. Some are contradictory. They all tend to present negative connotations. All are highly stereotypical.

Characteristics of the Culture of Poverty

1. Parents are more permissive in raising their children. They are less verbal with their children. Family-heads display a strong disposition toward authoritarianism.

2. Children raised in poverty also have drastically different orientations in life when compared to middle-class children. There is an absence of childhood. Children experience an early initiation to sex.

3. Families often form based upon free unions or consensual marriage. This partially explains the trend toward female-headed homes.

4. The poor are more fatalistic. One might expect that a poor person would believe the following idea: "What will be will be and I can't change it."

5. The poor are less apt to defer gratification. Banfield argues that the essence of the poor subculture is its present-time orientation.

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He asserts that the poor do not know how to defer gratification (see Eitzen and Baca-Zinn, 1994:173).

6. The poor are less interested in formal education.

Source: Eitzen and Baca-Zinn, 1994, and Farley, 1988

The Culture of Poverty theory argues that the characteristics presented above enable the poor to adapt to poverty. For example, the lack of childhood happens because sometimes poor children have to begin working at an early age. Moreover, poor children have to "hustle" to survive. There is no time to be young. To act young is a sign of weakness. The absences of privacy and competition for limited goods are self-explanatory characteristics of poverty. Perhaps the strong disposition toward authoritarianism is necessary because of the hard choices that poverty provides.

A. The Moynihan Report

The Culture of Poverty is a functionalist approach to poverty. It assumes a "right" or "correct" culture and a deviant culture. The poor are poor and are likely to remain poor because their culture deviates from the norm. The Moynihan Report (1965) is an example of a study that (perhaps inadvertently) borrows aspects of the Culture of Poverty to explain African-American poverty. Its goal was to explain continued poverty in the 1960s.

The Moynihan Study accurately pointed out that much of the poverty associated with the Black community was due to a history of slavery and economic oppression (unemployment). It also called attention to the necessity of altering one's lifestyle as a means to cope with poverty. Moynihan, however, ultimately came to concentrate on the characteristics of the Black family that required changing, rather than the system of oppression that needed changing.

B. A Critique of the Moynihan Report and the Culture of Poverty

1. It Blames the Victim

The most important criticism of the report is that it put the blame for poverty on the victim. Blaming the victim places the burden of change on the victim and removes it from society. From the Culture of Poverty perspective, poverty is viewed as the fault of the poor in that, their culture, not social injustice, causes and perpetuates poverty. The implied assumption is that until the poor changes their "culture," no amount of government intervention will solve the problem of poverty.

2. Negative Emphasis on Female-headed Families

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Another objection to the Culture of Poverty thesis revolves around the negative emphasis placed upon female-headed families. Female-headed families do not ensure a life of poverty. Children of single-parent family perform well in school. They do not have greater problems with mental health. Poverty, of course, affects both. Poverty, not single-parenting, generates social problems like illiteracy. Furthermore, single-parents are usually women and women are placed in economically disadvantaged positions due to the structure of the economy that pays women only 68 percent the salary that it pays men. THIS IS NOT CULTURAL. It's SYSTEMIC.

3. The Attack on Divorce

There appears, imbedded in culture of poverty theory, an attack on divorce. There is no evidence that divorce, itself, causes poverty. Sometimes divorce can lead to better social adjustment. Since 1957, as the number of divorces has risen, the percentage of people saying they are happy with their marriage has also risen from 67 percent to 80 percent (footnote missing!). People who focus on the problems associated with single-parent families also forget the positive impact of the extended family. The extended family supports single-parent families by providing grandparents, aunts, and even friends.

4. Most Black Families are Not Poor

Other problems with the Moynihan Report pertain to the implied image that the majority of Black families are typically from broken homes. The poverty rate for Blacks is about 30 percent. That means that 70 percent of Black families are above the poverty line. Furthermore, while focusing on the characteristics of the Black family, the Moynihan Report does not attack aspects of the social structure that put one group at a disadvantage when compared to another. With the Black family, the disadvantage flows from historically based discrimination (which included forced breakups of families while under slavery), high levels of unemployment, and welfare laws that encourage one parent families.

5. Poor People Do Not Have Radically Different Lifestyles

Finally, the culture of poverty contains the assumption that families living in poverty have radically different outlooks than middle-class families. Elliot Liebow in Street Corner Man (as referenced in Eitzen and Baca-Zinn, 1994:173) suggests that most poor people, in fact, attempt to live by society's values. Their struggle is frustrated by externally imposed failures. Most people who are poor would prefer to escape poverty via a good job. Good jobs that poor people are eligible for are rare. Liebow suggests that the characteristics associated with the culture of poverty are those that appear when individuals try to achieve goals defined by society, but who fail to achieve society's goals because society has not provided means to achieve those goals. These are the proverbial blocked opportunities.

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6. One-Way Adaptation?

Culture of Poverty proponents argue that the poor adapt to a lifestyle which allows them to deal with poverty. They tend to assume that one these lifestyles have been adopted, they become institutionalized with poor culture making it very difficult fort the poor to escape the culture of poverty. One might ask that if it is so easy to adopt to poverty lifestyles, that it might be just as easy to adopt to a middle class lifestyle once that lifestyle is provided.

V. Structural Theories

A. Institutional Discrimination

Eitzen (2000:200) contends that "the real explanation of why the poor are poor is that they made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents, in the wrong section of town, in the wrong industry, or in the wrong racial or ethnic group." The poor encounter structural conditions in society which, in part, are to blame for poverty. They experience Institutional discrimination. Institutional discrimination is embedded in the customary ways of doing things, prevailing attitudes and expectations, and accepted structural arrangements. Such arrangements work to the disadvantage of the poor. Examples follow:

1. Education

Most good jobs require a college education, but the poor cannot afford to send their children to college. Scholarships are available, but only to the best performing students. Poor students tend to not score high on assessments tests because of, among other things, lower expectations of teachers and administrators.

2. Health Care

The poor get sick more and stay sick longer than people in the middle class. This happens, in part, because they cannot afford preventive medicine, they have improper diets, and they don’t get proper medical care when they get sick.

B. The Political Economy of Society

Eitzen (2000:201) argues that a basic tenet of capitalism promotes poverty. That basic tenet is that who gets what is determined by private profit rather than collective need.

1. Employers are constrained to pay their employees at little as possible in wages and benefits.

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2. By maintaining a surplus of labor, wages are depressed.

3. Employers make investment decisions without regard for employees.

VI. The Elimination of Poverty

A. Assumption One

Poverty is a social problem and the source of other social problems, therefore, it must be eliminated.

See (Eitzen, 2003:205)

B. Assumption Two

Poverty can be eliminated in the United States.

See (Eitzen, 2003:205-206)

C. Assumption Three

Poverty is caused by the lack of resources, not deviant value system.


D. Assumption Four

Poverty is not simply a matter of deficient income; it results from other inequalities in society as well.


E. Assumption Five

Poverty cannot be eliminated by the efforts of the poor themselves


F. Assumption Six

Poverty cannot be eliminated by the private sector of the economy.

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3G. Assumption Seven

Poverty will not be eliminated by an expanding economy.


H. Assumption Eight

Poverty will not be eliminated by volunteer help from well-meaning individuals, groups, and organizations.

See (Eitzen, 2003:207-208)

I. Assumption Nine

Poverty will not be eliminated by the efforts of state and local governments.


J. Assumption Ten

Poverty is a national problem and must be attacked with massive nationwide programs financed largely and organized by the federal government.


Bibliography Banfield, Edward C.

1974 The Unheavenly City Revisited. Boston, Little, Brown

Charon, Joel

1987 The Meaning of Sociology: A Reader. Englewood, CA: Prentice hall.

Eitzen, D. Stanley and Maxine Baca-Zinn

1994 Social Problems. (6th Ed.) Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

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Farley, John E.

1988 Majority - Minority Relations. (2nd Ed.) Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

2000 Majority - Minority Relations. (4th Ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall

Jensen, Arthur R.

1969 "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" Harvard Educational Review, 39 (Winter):1-123.

1980 Bias in Mental Testing. New York: Free Press

Kendall, Diana

1998 Social Problems in a Diverse Society. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Lewis, Oscar

1965 La Vida. New York: Random House.

Liebow, Elliott

1967 Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Street Corner Men. Boston: Little Brown & Company.

Malthus, Thomas

1809 An essay on the principle of population, or, A view of its past and present effects on human happiness with an inquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal on mitigation of the evils which it occasions. Washington : Roger Chew Weightman,

Murray, Charles and Richard J. Herrnstein

1994 The Bell Curve : Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York : Free Press,

Shockley, William

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1966 Mechanics. Columbus, Ohio, C. E. Merrill Books

U.S. Bureau of the Census

1990 US Census Look-up, 1990, http://venus.census.gov/cdrom/lookup/

Wolff, Edward N.

1997 "Top Heavy." in Crisis in American Institutions. (10th Ed.) by Jerome H. Skolnick and Elliott Currie. New York: Longman.

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http://venus.census.gov/cdrom/lookup/

“Pooring It On”:Treating People as We Would

Want to be Treated

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The Word: Rags and Ropes One day , Shephatiah, Gedaliah, Jehucal, and Pashhur heard me tell the people of Judah that the Lord had said, “If you stay here in Jerusalem, you will die in battle or from disease or hunger, and the Babylonian army will capture the city anyway. But if you surrender to the Babylonians, they will let you live.” So the four of them went to the king and said, “You should put Jeremiah to death, because he is making the soldiers and everyone else lose hope. He isn’t trying to help our people; he’s trying to harm them.” Zedekiah replied, “Do what you want with him. I can’t stop you.” Then they took me back to the courtyard of the palace guards and let me down with ropes into the well that belonged to Malchiah, the king’s son. There was no water in the well, and I sank down in the mud. Ebedmelech from Ethiopia was an official at the palace, and he heard what they had done to me. So he went to speak with King Zedekiah, who was holding court at Benjamin Gate. Ebedmelech said, “Your Majesty, Jeremiah is a prophet, and those men were wrong to throw him into a well. And when Jerusalem runs out of food, Jeremiah will starve to death down there.” Zedekiah answered, “Take thirty of my soldiers and pull Jeremiah out before he dies.” Ebedmelech and the soldiers went to the palace and got some rags from the room under the treasury. He used ropes to lower them into the well. Then he said, “Put these rags under yours arms so the ropes won’t hurt you.” After I did, the men pulled me out. And from then on, I was kept in the courtyard of the palace guards.

Jeremiah 38:1-13, The Contemporary English Version Discussion Questions

1. Ebedmelech was of a minority race and an immigrant, serving in the palace. When have you been helped in a moment of crisis or desperation by someone regarded as lower status than yourself?

2. Like Ebedmelech, what risks have you personally taken to help someone in need?

3. Some people are the rags that offer comfort and protect one from bruising in the midst of rescue and change. Can you think of

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anybody who has been a comfort “rag” to you in the midst of crisis?

4. Some people are the ropes that yank people out of their situation. They create conditions for change. Can you think of somebody who jolted you into change that was necessary in your life?

5. In your own ministry to those in need, which of the two—rags and ropes—do you intend to be?

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Compassion and the Clothes Closet Taken from Theirs is the Kingdom

by Robert Lupton

While remodeling our church, I came across a yellowed sign taped to the wall of an old storage room. Before tearing it down, I gave it a casual glance: CLOTHES CLOSET. But then I realized it was more than just a sign. It was a history. The lined-out, crayoned-in revisions and explanations told a fascinating story of the evolution of a ministry. Between the lines one could read of the classic struggle between Christians in charge and people in need. I gently peeled the document for the wall to preserve it for further study: The sign: THERE WILL BE A MINIMUM CHARGE OF 10 CENTS FOR EACH USE OF THE CLOTHES CLOSET Reading between the lines: A first attempt to control greed. The sign: Up to 5 articles for 10 cents; Up to 10 articles for 20 cents; Up to 15 articles for 30 cents. Reading between the lines: The scratched out rules failed to limit grabbiness The sign: NO CREDIT Reading between the lines: No money---no admission. Nice and clean. Testing credit-worthiness is too time-consuming, subjective, risky. The sign: No one can use the Clothes Closet without charge (unless they get a signed note for the pastors) Reading between the lines: Revision of the no credit policy. An “appeals” procedure for those dissatisfied with stated rules. Legitimizes end-runs that are being made to the pastor. The sign: No one can take more than 5 articles without a signed note verifying your needs. Reading between the lines: Definition of credit revision. Unless the pastor spells it out in writing, the five-garment limit prevails. No second party verbal interpretations. The sign: The word “no one” shall be taken to mean either individuals or families. Reading between the lines: Further definition of credit revision. Another loophole closed. The pastor’s note could not be used as a free ticket by different members of the same family. The sign: NO SMOKING! Can you envision the challenges, the rule tightening, the manipulative ploys and countermoves that took place between good church folks and the people they were trying to help? I smile when I remember how brow-furrowed we became about enforcing our

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one-sided legislation. Like temple police, we guarded the resources of the kingdom as if they were our own. Somewhere in the process, the poor became our adversaries. Anyone who has been given the unfortunate task of dispensing free (or nearly free) commodities can tell similar stories. Something seems to go wrong when a person with valued resources attempts to distribute them to others in need. The transactions, no matter how compassionate, go sour in the gut of both giver and receiver. A subtle, unintentional message slips through: “You have nothing of worth that I desire in return.” The giver is protected by him or her one-up status. The recipient is exposed, vulnerable. It’s little wonder that negative attitudes surface. It becomes hard to be a cheerful giver and even harder to be a cheerful recipient. Ancient Hebrew wisdom describes four levels of charity. At the highest level, the giver provides a job for a person in need without that person knowing who provided it. At the next level, the giver provides work that the needy person knows the giver provided. The third level is an anonymous gift. At the lowest level of charity, which should be avoided whenever possible, the giver gives a gift to a poor person who has full knowledge of the donor’s identity. The deepest poverty is to have nothing of value to offer. Charity that fosters such poverty must be challenged. We know that work produces dignity while welfare depletes self-esteem. We know that reciprocity builds mutual respect while one-way giving brews contempt. Yet we continue to run clothes closets and free food pantries and give-away benevolence funds, and we wonder why the joy is missing. Perhaps it is our time and place in history to re-implement the wisdom of the ages, to fashion contemporary models of thoughtful compassion. Our donated clothes could start stores and job training. Our benevolence dollars could develop economies within the economy: daycare centers, janitorial help, fix-the-widow’s roof services, and other jobs that employ the jobless in esteem-building work. “Your work is your calling,” declared the reformer, Martin Luther. Does not the role of the church in our day include the enabling of the poor to find their calling?

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Evil in 3 dimensions Cosmological Evil—

The “Devil”

Systemic Evil—”The World”

Personal Evil—”The Flesh”

• Personal evil—The “Flesh”: Gal. 5:17; 6:8; Rom. 7:19 A. Targeted by Evangelicals/Fundamentalism B. Through strategies of personal pietism/legalism and individual conversion/private discipline and relief services

• Systemic evil—The World”: John 12:3; 1 Cor. 1:21; 6:2 A. Targeted by mainline denominations/liberation movements, etc. B. Through strategies of political activism/advocacy programs/contextual theology/incarnational identification

• Cosmological evil—The “Devil”: 1 John 3:8; Eph. 6:12 A. Targeted by Pentecostals/Charismatics B. Through strategies of intercessory prayer/fasting/exorcisms/Jericho marches, etc.

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What does this cartoon mean to you?

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False Loves Adapted from Em Griffin, The Christian Persuader

From the Power Point Presentations: “Motivations to Love” and also “CM for Jordan” (session 1)

Seven varieties of people “lovers”

• Nonlovers • Flirts • Seducers • Rapists • Smother Lovers • Legalistic Lovers • True Lovers

Nonlovers

• These “Christians” do not engage others; they remain aloof. • Their attitude is: “I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to

live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine.” • “Let people suffer in their context. I should not interfere. It is their business to

straighten out their own problems.” • The nonlover is, at best, calloused and uncaring. • The antidote to this is Romans 10:14, 15: “How then can they call on the one

they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”

Flirts

• These “Christians” do not love the needy person; they are in love with themselves.

• Their attitude is: “I will make as many conquests as I can and try to be as popular as I can through my services.”

• Often times they try to run up the statistics of people they have benefited to show popularity or leverage further attention. They are not interested much in long-term relationships with the people they help.

• The “flirt” is, at best, “immature.” • The antidote to this is the example of Paul who backed up his words with

ongoing, loving, and nurturing correspondence. Seducers

• These “Christians” respond to people for all the wrong reasons, such as power, success, money, popularity, influence.

• Their attitude is: “I’ll exhibit my influence, example, intelligence, sophistication, “star appeal” that attracts and panders to the baser desires of the needy.”

• It does not elevate and empower but rather manipulates for personal advantage.

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• The “seducer” is, at best, “immoral.” • The antidote to this is found in the words of Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:2: “Rather,

we have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to every person’s conscience in the sight of God.”

Rapists

• These “Christians” use acts of force to produce desired results while denying the needy free choice. The force used can be psychological as well as physical and often is built on excessive fear or guilt.

• Their attitude is: “We’ll do whatever is necessary to produce desired results or outcomes. The end justifies the means.”

• The “rapists” is, at best, “criminal.” • The antidote of this is found in the words of Paul in 2 Corinthians 7:2-4: “Make

room for us in your hearts. We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have exploited no one. I do not say this to condemn you; I have said before that you have such a place in our hearts that we would live or die with you. I have great confidence in you; I take great pride in you. I am greatly encouraged; in all our troubles my joy knows no bounds.”

Smother Lovers

• These “Christians” love their recipients to death. They genuinely care, but offer only a relationship built exclusively on one-way communication.

• They fail to see or receive the “exchange of gifts.” The “smother lover” does not allow for mutual growth or critique, or even room to breathe on the part of the person who is the object of love.

• Their attitude is: “I must meet every need to exhibit the love of God.” • The “smother lover” is, at best, “blinded” by their own projections of need. • The antidote of this is found in the passage given in James 3:1-2: “not many of

you should presume to be teachers, my brother, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. We all stumble in many ways.”

Legalistic Lovers

• These “Christians” go through the motions of love without any conviction or commitment.

• They offer, in the words of 1 Corinthians 13:1, a gesture of love that is nothing more than “sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.” They are concerned about the duty of service and tend to focus on spiritual results but fail to look at the total needs of the individual—food, peace, dignity, or accomplishment.

• Their attitude is: “I’ve discerned the problem and met the need. That should be sufficient!”

• The “Legalistic lover” is, at best, duty bound, without the motivation of the spirit of Christ.

• The antidote to this is found in James 2:15, 16: “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, ‘Go, I wish you well;

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keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?”

True Lovers

• These Christians care more about the welfare of the other persons than about their own ego needs. He or she respects the rights of the other person and gives people space and occasion to say, “no!” when it is offered.

• He or she does not humiliate the person, nor resent him or her when he or she defers.

• We are all called to be “True Lovers” of all people.

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Tilted Towards Failure

“You’re in the seventh inning, and one team is up twenty to nothing. Then we find out that the winning team has been cheating all along. And then they say, “Okay, okay, okay, we’re sorry. Let’s go back out and finish the game.” Illustration from John Perkins Referenced in Divided by Faith, by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith. p. 127

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Shame vs. Guilt By Fletcher L. Tink

A problem in the Church: Shame versus Guilt. Definitions:

• “Guilt” is my failure before God • “Shame” is what I feel as my failure before others • Unquestionably, the Church, through its message of salvation for all, is the

greatest “guilt-erasing” institution on earth. • However, could it be that the Church, at the same time, may be the greatest

“shame-inducing” institution? Culture of Poverty (COP)

1. Not equal to being poor 2. The poor have upward mobility 3. The poor have mainstream values 4. Those of the “Culture of Poverty” have different values 5. Those values are based on “survival” needs 6. Those in the COP realize that they cannot obtain success through normal means 7. Yet those in the COP have their own coherency of values 8. Indications of those in the COP:

cash transactions transience high unemployment distrust of institutions lack of community involvement fractured families absence of childhood early initiation into sex non-legal marriages family abandonment female-centered families present-time oriented fatalistic sense of inferiority strong feelings of marginality helplessness dependence

9. By age 6 or 7, children are acculturated into COP Some Positives to the culture of poverty:

1. Develop capacity for spontaneity, adventure and sensitivity 2. Enjoy the reality of the moment 3. Suffer less from repression 4. Find multiple outlets for hostility 5. Less frustrated, because of lowered expectations

What to do with Shame:

1. Don't overwhelm with kindness: “smother-love” 2. Don't use kindness to manipulate 3. Don't set up unrealistic expectations 4. Find neutral space and free time to build relationships

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5. Remember your own past 6. Enhance the positives 7. Allow for exchange of “gifts” 8. Experience “suffering” together 9. Don't be a “servant”, be a “friend” John 15:13-15

(John McKnight: “Why Servanthood is Bad!”) What was Jesus' connection to the Culture of Poverty?

• no steady job? • no regular housing? • no “family” commitments? • gave “no thought for the morrow”?

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Street People: A Case Study in Diseased Eyes By Fletcher L. Tink

I’ve got to be up-front about my religious pedigree: conservative theological tradition that highlights the person and the soul. I direct an urban institute that works out of a “First Church” chummy with a long row of others all located along the once sedate Wilshire corridor of Los Angeles. In my neighborhood can be found a potpourri of human types and cultural flow that adds up to sensory overload. With change have come the “street people,” a threat to some, an opportunity to others. They slip into my office or into worship services on a regular basis—a ragtag collection of individuals, but in increasing number entire families, tots toddling along behind. Some are hostile or demanding; others stammer their requests in shyness, embarrassed to find themselves in their regrettable fate. Many speak in heavy accents or through adopted interpreters, others in dialects, a few in tears. The litany of need is agonizingly varied—a bus ticket to Phoenix, food for the children, a bed for the night, a jacket for warmth, a signature for a document, someone who just wants to talk. Some rant in the clouded confusions of their own mind. I’ve heard these called insensitively in the vernacular, “space cadets.” Yet I must admit that many times I am quite unsure where reality ends and imagination begins. In my despairing moments, I remind myself of St. Augustine’s maxim, “Every meeting is a divine encounter.” In my town, perhaps 30,000 or more street people hang out as a phantom population, holed up in missions, alcoves, dark alleys, and beaches, sometimes damaged by the demonic effects of child abuse, drugs, and alcohol, or just a bad combination of low or high IQ, loss of job, divorce, heart attack, or bad fiscal decisions. They have dropped out of the bottom of the “security net.” Our students once worked with Andrew. He is a latter day Rip Van Winkle, perhaps sixty-ish, flowing white beard, a twinkle in his pixie blue eyes. He doesn’t drive, smoke, or even eat hamburger meat. When I would get him french fries, he would try to pay me with his little stack of pennies and nickels. Church friends tried to salvage him, set him up in a tiny apartment, where he could receive social security checks. He was found later sleeping on an oil slick in an underground parking garage. Later he set up shop in the alcove across the street from the church under a pile of rags and newspapers, accompanied by his two grocery carts of personal belongings. Each morning, he ritualistically swept off the sidewalk and the sewer gutters as a part of his civic duty.

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A friend of mine saw him and almost sneered, “If only he would accept Jesus Christ, he could get cleaned up and live more purposefully . . . like us.” I was impudent. “Maybe not; I think that he is a Christian.” “But he can’t be and live like that!” was the retort. Between you and me, I had trouble imagining Andrew, “cleaned up.” And I reflected on Jesus. He was an itinerate prophet, and such were not reputable in Israel as productive members of society. He had no place to lay his head, gave no thought to tomorrow, and seems to have lived off of the good will of his friends. Furthermore, on occasion, he brusquely detached himself from his family. And to the temple moneychangers, whom he very much upset, he must have appeared to be a rude intruder. Could it be that Jesus was a street person? Has Jesus sanctioned the middle class lifestyle as that which is most Christian? Or are we to follow him into his homelessness, into his “live for today” philosophy, where we just “hang loose?” Is the external material condition of anyone an adequate or appropriate measure for an honest expression of the gospel? Recently, George Caywood, director of the Union Rescue Mission of Los Angeles, shared with me a conversation he had with one of the former street persons now involved in their Christian growth program. The gentleman had observed that street people generally go through a sequence of questions as they are seduced into the street lifestyle. For a variety of reasons, a person finds him or herself on the streets for the first time and contemplates: “Do people survive like this?” The more that he observes, the more he becomes convinced that the streets are a viable option. As he gets more personally involved in the lifestyle, he then asks the question: “Can I survive like this?” The option becomes a habit as he reinforces the conviction of his own survivability. The final, and most disastrous question is “What must I do to survive like this?” Once the person has entered the nether world of this question, then the game of manipulation and the use of people as things is in full weed. The world no longer is made up of human beings but rather objects that only have meaning as they meet one’s physical necessities. Forget the upper layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs! Again and again, in my encounters with street persons, I seek to find out who they are and ask lots of probing questions. And frequently they erupt with anger “I didn’t come in here to be quizzed. I came here to get . . ..” I try to talk to them about Christ and the Christian community, but their habits of manipulation are such that they hear little of what I say. The sin, then, is less in the lifestyle than in the corruption of the eyes, eyes created in the image of God, intended to sparkle around the true personhood of others. Eyes that laugh when others laugh and weep when others weep. The tragedy is

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that those eyes damaged to stage three are eyes so marred that they cannot see beyond their own needs. In the spectator’s eyes, the world becomes masked and dehumanized, only useful as a delivery system of survival. John 9 describes the healing of a street person, a beggar born blind. The miracle that unfolds is one not just of physical eyesight but of restoring the capacity of the blind to see people as humans again: “Tell me so that I may believe in him.” (Verse 35). It is not good enough just to see. The real miracle is to see people as Jesus sees them; in other words, through Jesus’ eyes. Caywood’s informant gave me another important insight. The eyes of the most damaged street people are incapable of understanding and accepting the words and gestures of “I love you.” Their feelings are so numbed, their manipulative ways so honed, that genuine words of tenderness and care are dispassionately rejected or misunderstood in the grasp for material gain. Any relationship of this type is inherently deceptive and non-reciprocal. However, the eyes do watch. They watch the language of love directed towards other. In time, those eyes assess and heal by watching carefully how love is expressed to others. Love to a third party in similar circumstances is more instructive than “in your face” love. Perhaps, we can call this exhibition of love, “indirect” or “oblique” love. The verse, “Behold, how the brethren love one another” is not just a sentimental description of how the church relates to itself. Rather, it is a poignant example of a creative process to strip the scales from the damaged eyes of those who can only understand love obliquely expressed. Key to this strategy are the dynamics of a loving community of believers who offer hospitality to others in a way that exhibits indirect love. Many churches, insular as they are, are too detached from street people to exhibit the power of a loving community. Caywood shared with me this further insight. While ministering at the mission, he verbally handed out some bold “I love you’s.” One recipient, whom we will call Hugo, had never heard these words addressed to him before. They remained vacuous. However, as Hugo watched Caywood reinforce words with deeds to others, bit-by-bit the lessons of personhood and love took on positive content. After five years of living at the mission, Hugo announced abruptly that he was going home to care for his dying mother. Hugo’s story was not uncommon—child abuse, deprivation, never once hearing the words “I love you” from his mother. He felt a responsibility to care for her in her last agonizing months, but, even more, he dreamed of hearing her tell him just once, “I love you.” Sadly, she never did. But the power of the story is that, after never knowing what the words meant, a Christian community had so refashioned him that he could do so for the first time, hunger for parental love even unrequited. From the paralysis of

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desensitization and dehumanization, he became a person who could see people as people again. There is a final irony to this whole discussion. If street people can be diagnosed by the disease of their eyes, so, too, can Christians. The Christ that sees street people only as “lazy bums,” “dirty,” “should be banned from the neighborhood,” “a bunch of liars,” “riffraff,” “they’re out to get you every time,” “I’m sorry, we can’t help you at all”—these are the Christians who have depersonalized others to the point of being guilty of seeing people as things. And, like the Pharisees of John 9, they cynically sneer a modern version of “You were steeped sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” (Verse 34). Jesus answers us with a warning: “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind” (verse 39). For those of us who are trying to express God’s love to people devoid of a home, street people provoke in us the litmus test of the quality of our own eyes. We who proclaim to see are called to touch in healing ways the eyes of those who yet cannot.

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"Love in Three Ventricles"By Fletcher L. Tink

Stupid Joke Time: “A man with a receding hair line is a ‘thinker.’ A man balding on the pate of his head is a ‘lover.’ A man balding in both places simultaneously ‘thinks he is a lover.’” I’m at the stage that, while balding all over, I ask myself what does it mean for Christians to “love.” The word itself has been nibbled down by secular society by those who apply it casually to everything from a Zha Zha Gabor milky “I love you, dahling,” to “I luv cookies” (maybe we ought to create a new word “luv” for inferior definitions of “love”), to the ugly devouring of the word as crude sexual act. Sadly, even in Christianity, “love” has been diminished and deconstructed until even the world is suspicious by our use of it. It was Os Guinness in one of his early works who helped me reconstruct “love.” Admittedly, there is much material out there defining the Greek language’s rich variety of terms for love, including agape love, the spontaneous self-giving, disinterested love that emits from the nature of God himself. I understand somewhat what these terms mean. But it was Guinness who put character and content to “Godly love.” He says that there are three components to love. They are: true understanding, outrage, and identification. True Understanding “Jesus did not trust himself to them because he knew all men and needed no one to bear witness of man; for he himself knew what was in man” (John. 2:24-25). He (along with perhaps dogs and children) understood human nature—that is, in theological jargon, “anthropology”—and so could realistically deal with people on their own terms. Our modern humanistic world vacillates between two wrong anthropologies. According to one, we are indoctrinated that humans are basically good and that if something goes wrong, either the institutions around have corrupted the process or ignorance has set in because the institutions that should have informed or corrected have failed in their duty. This position Guinness calls “naiveté” and the world is intoxicated by this view. Ironically, it seems to me that the U.S. political parties have similarly been seduced. The one party fears the corrupting influence of institutions, especially the government. The other wishes to engage institutions and government to correct the “learning curve deficiency.” Yet both assume the inherent “good” nature of humans, to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, or to flower where fertilized. Sadly, a lot of idealists in the practice of life eventually slide into the second alternative, “cynicism,” where everybody is corrupt except, perhaps, “me”: distrust is rampant and anybody who has different thoughts or ways of acting is evil. How often I have seen the idealism of young teachers and social workers dissipate under the realities of the

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profession until the professional opts out “to make some real money” or joins the bureaucracy to avoid hands-on involvement. But Jesus’ alternative saw humans as they really were, made in the holy image of God, morally marred in Eden and carrying the legacy of their own corruption. But the image is not entirely transfixed by evil. It can be restored, purified, made new by the restorative powers of the cross and resurrection. The most evil of human beings can discover grace and become a saint. The most religious of people can ignore grace and slip into hell. This knowledge, known as the “realistic” perspective, gives hope where humanism burns out and gives caution where human adulation stretches too far. John Wesley is quoted as saying that a Christian has “poise” with all people. I think that one finds no surprises in human nature. Each person is distinct. Each person is neither worm nor God but find his or her wholeness to the degree that he or she accepts or fends off grace. Love therefore starts with a correct view of human nature. Outrage: Perhaps this is the most misunderstood and ignored part of Guinness’ trilogy. Christians are called to be angry. Yes, not angry for self-serving causes, but outraged at the same things that distress God himself—at the abuse and neglect of those less privileged than ourselves, at unjust and oppressive systems that set up calamity for millions of people before they ever get started in life. God has bestowed on us the emotion of anger, so that it could be used under appropriate disciplined circumstances. We are angry at Satan who took the beautiful world that God had made and subverted it into death, disease, and despair. We are angry at those who voluntarily choose to be agents of the same, those intent on exploiting the minds and hearts of gullible, impressionable children to divert them into the horrors of life. We are angry at war, at drug trafficking, at media influence, at corporate evil, at self-serving politicians, and at those who abuse power. Yet we know that they themselves are victims of the great deceiver, Satan, who has ensnared them under his spell. We are also angry at a listless gospel and a casual church that holds in its hand the pearl of great price with power and commission to liberate the world, but we have exchanged it for the trinkets of comfort, accommodation, and convenience. When Jesus stood before the tomb of Lazarus, he anguished not out of sentimentality, but out of anger that the world he had created had been so subverted that grief and death seemed to be its end result. When he whipped out the moneychangers in the temple, he was furious that the existing “church” had conveniently created marketing hoops through which penitent seekers necessarily had to jump to find salvation. We need a “divine love” that has a component of outrage to it to ensure that we follow through on our insights. Identification: God made the greatest cross-cultural leap of history to identify with humans. The spotlessness of heaven was exchanged for the grubbiness of earth. Love demanded an inside operation rather than an outside rescue. He puts on his garb of

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servant, takes on human nature, walks in our streets, shares our pain, and dies in our place. That is identification to the nth degree. It is identification that protects us from rash behavior. Moses, for instance, had good insight into the nature of the murdered Egyptian who killed the Israelite. His subsequent anger exploded in a gesture to right the wrong. But, his act was counter-productive, resulting in harsher treatment of the Israelites. It was not until he returned after a forty year “time-out” in the desert that he identified with the children of Israel rather than with Pharaoh’s court, securing the legitimacy to lead God’s people to freedom. As he suffered with them, his message took on vibrant credibility. This kind of love has character, has continuity, and has creativity. It is holistic. It captures our mind, impassions our heart, and instigates our feet into action and involvement. It is a love not only modeled by God himself—“love divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down”—it is a love imparted to us by the operations of the Holy Spirit into our very natures—”fix in us thy humble dwelling.” William Barclay, the Scottish Presbyterian Bible commentator, lamented that all the confessions and creeds, even while talking about the sovereignty, the omniscience, omnipotence of God, failed to identify as central the love of God. It was the Wesleys of the 18th century that recast the gospel, identifying the “central rotunda” of God’s being as “love.” Love is the essence of his nature out of which all the other attributes are halls of access that spike outward. Hence, as Wesleyans, we have optimal opportunity and obligation to discover God’s heart of love in its ventricular components—true understanding, outrage, and identification to a hurting world that desperately needs all three.

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Excerpt from Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. pp. 219 221 -

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Attitudes of Love “There was this guy in my life. . . , a guy I went to church with whom I honestly didn’t like. I thought he was sarcastic and lazy and manipulative, and he ate with his mouth open so that food almost fell from his chin when he talked. He began and ended every sentence with the word dude. “’Dude, did you see Springer yesterday?’ he would say. ‘They had this fat lady on there who was doing it with a midget. It was crazy, dude. I want to get me a midget, dude.’ “That’s the sort of thing he would talk about. It was very interesting to him. I don’t enjoy not liking people, but sometimes these things feel as though you are not in control of them. I never chose not to like the guy. It felt more like the dislike of him chose me. Regardless, I had to spend a good amount of time with him as we were working on a temporary project together. He began to get under my skin. I wanted him to change. I wanted him to read a book, memorize a poem, or explore morality, at least as an intellectual concept. I didn’t know how to communicate to him that he needed to change, so I displayed it on my face. I rolled my eyes. I gave him dirty looks. I would mouth the word loser when he wasn’t looking. I thought somehow he would sense my disapproval and change his life in order to gain my favor. In short, I withheld love. “. . . I knew what I was doing was wrong. It was selfish, and what’s more, it would never work. By withholding love from my friend, he became defensive, he didn’t like me, he thought I was judgmental, snobbish, proud, and mean. Rather than being drawn to me, wanting to change, he was repulsed. I was guilty of using love like money, withholding it to get somebody to be who I wanted them to be. I was making a mess of everything. And I was disobeying God. I became convicted about these things, so much so that I had some trouble getting sleep. It was clear that I was to love everybody,

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be delighted at everybody’s existence, and I had fallen miles short of God’s aim. The power of Christian spirituality has always rested in repentance, so that’s what I did. I repented. I told God I was sorry. I replaced economic metaphor, in my mind, with something different, a free gift metaphor or a magnet metaphor. That is, instead of withholding love to change somebody, I poured it on, lavishly. I hoped that love would work like a magnet, pulling people from the mire and toward healing. I knew this was the way God loved me. God had never withheld love to teach me a lesson. “Here is something very simple about relationships that [I discovered]. Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them. “If a person senses that you do not like them, that you do not approve of their existence, then your religion and your political ideas will all seem wrong to them. If they sense that you like them, then they are open to what you have to say. “After I repented, things were different, but the difference wasn’t with my friend, the difference was with me. I was happy. Before, I had all this negative tension flipping around in my gut, all this judgmentalism and pride and loathing of other people. I hated it, and now I was set free. I was free to love. I didn’t have to discipline anybody, I didn’t have to judge anybody, I could treat everybody as though they were my best friend, as though they were rock stars or famous poets, as though they were amazing, and to me they became amazing, especially my new friend. I loved him. After I decided to let go of judging him, I discovered he was very funny. I mean, really hilarious. I kept telling him how funny he was. And he was smart. Quite brilliant, really. I couldn’t believe that I had never seen it before. I felt as though I had lost an enemy and gained a brother. And then he began to change. It didn’t matter to me whether he did or not, but he did. He began to get a little more serious about God. He started praying and got regular about going to church. He was a great human being getting even better. I could feel God’s love for him. I loved the fact that it wasn’t my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God’s, that my part was just to communicate love and approval. “When I am talking to somebody there are always two conversations going on. The first is on the surface; it is about politics or music or whatever it is

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our mouths are saying. The other is beneath the surface, on the level of the heart, and my heart is either communicating that I like the person I am talking to or I don’t. God wants both conversations to be true. That is, we are supposed to speak truth in love. If both conversations are not true, God is not involved in the exchange, we are on our own, and on our own, we will lead people astray. The Bible says that if you talk to somebody with your mouth, and our heart does not love them, that you are like a person standing there smashing two cymbals together. You are only annoying everybody around you. I think that is very beautiful and true. “Now . . . when I go to meet somebody, I pray that God will help me feel His love for them. I ask God to make it so both conversations, the one from the mouth and the one from the heart, are true.”

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“Potpoori”:Stories from the underside

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The Word: Jams and Jars One day the widow of one of the Lord’s prophets said to Elisha, “You know that before my husband died, he was a follower of yours and a worshiper of the Lord. But he owed a man some money, and now that man is on his way to take my two sons as his slaves.” “Maybe there’s something I can do to help,” Elisha said. “What do you have in your house?” “Sir, I have nothing but a small bottle of olive oil.” Elisha told her, “Ask your neighbors for their empty jars. And after you’ve borrowed as many as you can, go home and shut the door behind you and your sons. Then begin filling the jars with oil and set each one aside as you fill it.” The woman left. Later, when she and her sons were back inside their house, the two sons brought her the jars, and she began filling them. At last, she said to one of her sons, “Bring me another jar.” “We don’t have any more,“ he answered, and the oil stopped flowing from the small bottle. After she told Elisha what had happened, he said, “Sell the oil and use part of the money to pay what you owe the man. You and your sons can live on what is left.”

II Kings 4:1-7, The Contemporary English Version Discussion Questions

1. Who was to blame for this woman’s crisis? 2. Why do people fall into crises and desperation in your culture?

Rank 5 reasons from the most important to the least important. 3. What do you think of Elisha’s responses? How do they compare

with your response to those who come to you with need? 4. Why did Elisha not solve the problem by offering oil immediately? 5. To whom are you ultimately indebted, and what effect does this

have in your life? How can you get out of this burden as informed by the story?

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Excerpts from Theirs is the Kingdom: Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America by Robert D. Lupton

Mother Teresa of Grant Park There is a saint who lives in our neighborhood. I call her the Mother Teresa of Grant Park. She has been an inner-city missionary for nearly thirty years. She has no program, no facility, and no staff. She lives in virtual poverty. Her house blends well with the poor who are her neighbors. There are box springs and mattresses on the porch and grass growing up around the old cars in her front yard. She goes about feeding and clothing the poor with donations from concerned people. She works all hours of the day and night. She is difficult to reach by phone, and she doesn’t give tax deductible receipts to her donors. To the consternation of her mission board, she seldom submits ministry reports (although for years she has faithfully saved all her receipts—in a large trash bag in her living room). The Mother Teresa of Grant Park appears to have a poorly ordered life. She doesn’t plan ahead much. She says she needs to stay free to respond to the impulse of God’s Spirit. And that she does. Through her, God works quiet miracles day after day. I, on the other hand, love order. I am of a people who love order. I was taught long ago to appreciate a neatly made bed and a well-trimmed yard. I am passing this value on to my children. We eat our meals together when everyone is seated and after the blessing is said. A calendar attached to our refrigerator door helps us organize our family activities. Order is a fundamental goal of our household. Order is also a fundamental tool of achievers. It enables us to control our time, our money, our efficiency. We can arrange our thoughts, build computers, and soar to the moon. If a task of humanity is to “subdue the earth,” then doubtless we achievers will provide the leadership. We are quite sure that God is a God of order. Our worship style and systematic theologies are clear reflections that. To the poor, order is a lesser value. Most pay little attention to being on time, budgeting money, or planning ahead. They may spend their last dollar on a Coke and a bag of chips to fill them up for three hours instead of buying rice or beans to last for three days. A mother may keep her children out of school to babysit so she can see the family’s caseworker—trading the future for the present. A family seems not to mind tall grass, old tires, and Coke cans in the yard. Mealtime is whenever people get home. They seem to react rather than to prepare. Often their faith in God appears simple, emotional, even illogical. God helps you when you’re in trouble and “whups” you when you’re bad. He’s good and does a lot of miracles. Perhaps it cannot be otherwise when survival dominates a people’s thinking. But something disquiets me when I reflect on these poor neighbors of mine and the Mother Teresa of Grant Park. Their “disorderly” lifestyles keep them from going anywhere, from achieving, from asserting control over their futures. Unless they change, they will never be upwardly mobile and self-sufficient. They will never be able to create successful organizations nor enjoy the finer things of life. They will remain dependent, simple, poor. Now here’s what bothers me. Why would Christ say, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20)? Could it be that our achievement values

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differ from the values of his kingdom? And his comments about the first being last and the last being first in that kingdom—what does that say to us well-ordered leader types? You see why it disturbs me, don’t you?

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Three Ways of Looking at People It has been said that we find ourselves “looking” at people at one of three levels. These are:

1. As Machines: Merely the extension of machines, little interaction or human contact. They are a cog in the assembly line. Example, tollroad collectors, drive through bank tellers, answering service receptionists (or in reverse, answering automated phone messages).

2. As Landscape: Merely the centerpiece of a landscape scene. It can be

the colorful “native” dressed in native gear set in position in front of volcano. Or it can be the dirty, ugly faces of the destitute set in the context of urban blight, used often to stir pity or attention for fund-raising purposes.

3. As Human Beings: Where each person is valued on their own terms,

listened to, and treated as a unique human being, and not as a programmatic client.

In your organization, on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the total commitment to one of these perspectives, how do you generally grade its interactions 1. with client; 2. with staff; 3. with potential funding personnel? Your Organization: ____ with client ____ with staff ____ with potential funding personnel In your own personal dealings with others within the organization, on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the total commitment to one of these perspectives, how do your generally grade your own interactions 1. with clients; 2. with staff; 3. with potential funding personnel (if applicable)? Yourself: ____ with client ____ with staff ____ with potential funding personnel

Why do we or the institution respond as it does? Does any of this need to change?

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Hunger Next Door Excerpted from

Grace at the Table: Ending Hunger in God’s World by David Beckman and Arthur Simon

I was in a food pantry with a young man and his son who had come needing help with some groceries. I like to chat with folks to set them at ease while I fix the food baskets---just general conversation to put us on the same level and break down some of the walls that divide us. But I was having a difficult time talking to this gentleman. He seemed especially uncomfortable, very stiff, keeping his hands tucked inside his coat pockets. Finally, he thrust out his balled-up fist. “Here is some money that I found on the floor outside the pantry,” he said as he handed over about $20 in rolled up bills. “Does it belong to you?” I assured him that it didn’t and told him that since he found it, he should just keep it. “No, I am certain that this belongs to you,” he insisted. I repeated that I was sure it didn’t and again urged him to keep the money for his family. “You don’t understand,” he said haltingly as his voice cracked a bit. Putting his arm around his son, he told me, “This is really hard for me. I have never had to ask for help before. I own my own rig and drive for a living. We usually do real good, but there just hasn’t been any work and I have to do something to feed my family. I want you to give this money to help someone else.” I was stunned. After all, the food we were giving him probably wouldn’t have cost us more than $35 wholesale. I was about to launch into my usual line, reassuring him that everybody needs help now and again. . . Then it hit me. He was using this incredibly difficult moment as an opportunity to teach his son, and here I was about to blow it. It made me stop for a minute and think about this man as an individual. Too often, I realized, I just moved though my day of helping others so quickly and so convinced that I had heard it all before. But no one is simply another “client.” Each of us is a child of God and each has a right to be here. So I thanked him. And I did use his gift later that day to help get food for another family. The real gift he gave me will always stay with me though. Rob Ercoline, Little Flower Catholic Church South Bend, Indiana

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What does this cartoon mean to you?

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Text Box

What I Have Learned from the Poor Group Discussion

“Poor Praying”:Interceding for the Poor

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The Word: Care-full and Cared For “’You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. “You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are---no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought. “You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat. “You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for. “You’re blessed when you get your inside world---your mind and heart---put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. “You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family. “You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom. “Not only that---count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when this happens---give a cheer, even!---for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.”

Matthew 5:3-12, from The Message.

Discussion Questions 1. When and how have you been cared for in a time of personal

crisis? 2. When you were going through a crisis, how did you respond? (stiff

upper lip? Panic? Depression? Anger? Manipulation? Prayer? Calling on friends to help you?...)

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3. Have you ever found hope in the midst of crisis by focusing on serving others rather than on your own need? Was this good? Was this bad?

4. Where have you found that in your caring you have found yourself cared for?

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Prayers of the Poor

Excerpts from http://www.universityofthepoor.org/schools/theology/prayers/March_2003_prayers.htm

God of Abraham God of Moses God of our Father and Mother's Hear our Humble Cry. We ask you to be a fence around us, to protect in every way, to protect us every day. As we travel the highways and byways of this land. As we go from state to state, city to city, protect us from the local leaders who will try to prevent us from being seen and heard. Those who will attempt to persecute as well as prosecute us. Protect us from careless and reckless drivers, protect us from those who willfully, intentionally set out to do us bodily harm. In your Holy name we pray. Amen - From Larry Ferrar, UNC Housekeepers Union, Durham, NC

Dear Heavenly Father, Please make us an instrument of your peace; Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy. As we pray together today, let us remember that things don't happen over night. Let us not forget the struggles we all are going thru in this movement for economic injustice. Even if frustration may set in. Let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shell reap if we do not lose heart (Gal.6:9) Amen - From Glenda Adams, Poor Voices United, Atlantic City, NJ

Lord, Today as we come together in pray. Let us remember that, “We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed but not in despair, persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed.” (Cor.4:8-9 – NKJV). Let us be encouraged and focus on the people of the poor and the denial of basic freedom. That all men were created equal. They were endowed by our creator with certain rights. And until we all have our economic human rights. We can not have real life, liberty and we can forget the pursuit of happiness. Remember our brothers and sisters on this day and pray for their safety. Thru this march to get our message thru. Amen - From Glenda Adams, Poor Voices United, Atlantic City, NJ

God of liberty, you led your people on a long march from slavery, and promised to bring them to a place of abundance. We are marching now, God; show us your abundance, and give us freedom from hunger, illness, terror and hopelessness. God of enough, you fed us manna in the wilderness and taught us that when we each take what we need, we all will be fed. We are listening now, God; teach us anew how to share. God of redemption, you confronted unrighteous leaders through people at the bottom of the ladder – like Amos, Esther, John the Baptist, Nathan the prophet and Jael. We are standing on the bottom, God; make our voices strong and fearless.

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http://www.universityofthepoor.org/schools/theology/prayers/March_2003_prayers.htm

God of reconciliation, you showed us how enemies can become brothers and sisters in the waters of your grace. We are willing, God; make peace among classes and let us be blessings for each other. God of all humankind, throughout all of human history, you have shown us that food, shelter, health and dignity are not too much to ask. You have spread before us your vision of a world without need, a world of peace and power. All that we seek, all that we ask, all that we desire comes from our common life in you, from our glimpse of your vision of a better world. Bless our work, as we bless your Name, and bring to fullness all that we know is possible. We ask, O God, calling you by a variety of names, but knowing that you are one God, one Source of all love and hope. Grant this, our God, and give peace to your world. Amen. - From Rev. Deborah DeMars Conrad, UrbanSpirit, Louisville, KY

God, Sovereign over all, you judge kings and presidents and make nations tremble. Pour out your Spirit of justice upon the leaders of our nation, that they may pursue policies that benefit all the people.

Too often Congress is the handmaiden of the powerful business interests or the instrument for furthering personal gain. Remind our leaders that you keep company with the poor and that when they oppress the poor, when they deny the basic economic human rights of the people, when they “eat the people as they eat bread,” that they are oppressing you. Great Advocate, help us make our urgent and just case for education, healthcare, jobs at a living wage, and housing to this nation so that no person is discarded by the public school system, stranded by the medical system, exploited by employers, or dies homeless on the streets.

Great and powerful God, as you have visited this nation with your abundance, so also visit it with your justice. Sovereign of the universe, hear our prayer and answer. Amen. - From the Rev. Noelle Damico, Catalyst, School of Theology, University of the Poor, www.universityofthepoor.org

You have created our hearts, dear God, to burn with anger and swell with grief when any one of our sisters or brothers is denied the life you intend. Help our minds to craft public policy that addresses the horrifying violations of human rights. But may our minds not be so entangled in complexity or numbed by the stark statistics that stand for so many human lives, that we become stymied and forget that the power for change is in our hands. May the stories we hear and the rights we know you intend for us, move us to action. Ignite our wills with your will that together we may ensure that all people have what they need to thrive. Amen. - From the Rev. Noelle Damico, Catalyst, School of Theology, University of the Poor, www.universityofthepoor.org

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http://www.universityofthepoor.org/

http://www.universityofthepoor.org/

Responsive Prayer One: For every child who is sick or dying because her family has been denied medical care All: God in your mercy, hear our prayer for health care.

One: For every child who calls the streets his home because no public housing is available All: God in your mercy, hear our prayer for housing.

One: For every child who is taught by the lack of text books and crumbling public schools that her mind and her dreams count for nothing All: God in your mercy hear our prayer for quality education.

One: For every child who this day is taking care of his younger siblings All: God in your mercy hear our prayer for affordable childcare. One: For every child who is scared because her dad and mom do not earn enough to pay the bills All: God in your mercy, hear our prayer for jobs at a living wage.

One: For every family who has been demeaned by workfare, denied by TANF, and made destitute by Hope VI All: God in your mercy hear our prayer for justice.

One: We know that you do not forget us God All: God in your mercy, hear our prayer and come quickly to save! Amen. - From the Rev. Noelle Damico, Catalyst, School of Theology, University of the Poor, www.universityofthepoor.org

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My Prayer for the Poor. Or My Prayer in Solidarity with the Poor.

Or My Prayer of Confession as it Relates to the Poor.

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Ragman by Walter Wangerin, Jr. Supplemental to Lesson #4

I saw a strange site. I stumbled upon a story most strange, like nothing in my life, my street sense, my sly tongue had ever prepared me for. “Hush, child. Hush now, and I will tell it to you.” Even before the dawn one Friday morning I noticed a young man, handsome and strong, walking the alleys of our City. He was pulling an old cart filled with clothes both bright and new, and he was calling in a clear tenor voice: “Rags!” Ah, the air was foul and the first light filthy to be crossed by such sweet music. “Rags! New rags for old! I take your tired rags! Rags!” “Now this is a wonder,” I thought to myself, for the man stood six-feet-four, and his arms were like tree limbs, hard and muscular, and his eyes flashed intelligence. “Could he find no better job than this, to be a ragman in the inner city? I followed him. My curiosity drove me. And I wasn’t disappointed. Soon the Ragman saw a woman sitting on her back porch. She was sobbing into a handkerchief, sighing, and shedding a thousand tears. Her knees and elbows made a sad X. Her shoulders shook. Her heart was breaking. The Ragman stopped his cart. Quietly, he walked to the woman, stepping round tin cans, dead toys, and Pampers. “Give me your rag,” he said gently. “And I’ll give you another.’ He slipped the handkerchief from her eyes. She looked up, and he laid across her palm a linen cloth so clean and new that it shined. She blinked from the gift to the giver. Then, as he began to pull his cart again, the Ragman did a strange thing: he put her stained handkerchief to his own face: and then he began to weep, to sob as grievously as she had done, his shoulders shaking. Yet she was left without a tear. “This is a wonder,” I breathed to myself, and I followed the sobbing Ragman like a child who cannot turn away from mystery. “Rags! Rags! New Rags for old!” In a little while, when the sky showed grey behind the rooftops and I could see the shredded curtains hanging out black windows, the Ragman came upon a girl whose head was wrapped in a bandage, whose eyes were empty. Blood soaked her bandage. A single line of blood ran down her cheek. Now the tall Ragman looked upon this child with pity, and he drew a lovely yellow bonnet from his cart. “Give me your rag,” he said, tracing his own line on her cheek, “and I’ll give you mine.” The child could only gaze at him while he loosened the bandage, removed it, and tied it to his own head. The bonnet he set on hers. And I gasped at what I saw: for with the bandage went the wound! Against his brow it ran a darker, more substantial blood – his own! “Rags! Rags! I take old rags!” cried the sobbing, bleeding, strong, intelligent Ragman.

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The sun hurt both the sky, now, and my eyes; the Ragman seemed more and more to hurry. “Are you going to work?” he asked a man who leaned against a telephone pole. The man shook his head. The Ragman pressed him: “Do you have a job?” “Are you crazy?” sneered the other. He pulled away from the pole, revealing the right sleeve of his jacket ---flat, the cuff stuffed into the pocket. He had no arm. “So,” said the Ragman. “Give me your jacket, and I’ll give you mine.” So much quiet authority in his voice! The one-armed man too off his jacket. So did the Ragman – and I trembled at what I saw: for the Ragman’s arm stayed in its sleeve, and when the other put it on, he had two good arms, thick as tree limbs; but the Ragman had only one. “Go to work,” he said. After that he found a drunk, lying unconscious beneath an army blanket, an old man, hunched, wizened, and sick. He took that blanket and wrapped it round himself, but for the drunk he left new clothes. And now I had to run to keep up with the Ragman. Though he was weeping uncontrollably, and bleeding freely at the forehead, pulling his cart with one arm, stumbling for drunkenness, falling again and again, exhausted, old, old, and sick, yet he went with terrible speed. On spider’s legs he skittered through the alleys of the City, this mile and the next, until he came to its limits, and then he rushed beyond. I wept to see the change in this man. I hurt to see his sorrow. And yet I needed to see where he was going in such haste, perhaps to know what drove him so. The little old Ragman – he came to a landfill. He came to the garbage pits. And I waited to help him in what he did but I hung back, hiding. He climbed a hill. With tormented labor, he cleared a little space on that hill. Then he sighed. He lay down. He pillowed his head on a handkerchief and a jacket. He covered his bones with an army blanket. And he died. Oh how I cried to witness that death! I slumped in a junked car and wailed and mourned as one who has no hope – because I had come to love the Ragman. Every other face had faded in the wonder of this man, and I cherished him; but he died. I sobbed myself to sleep. I did not know -- how could I know? -- that I slept through Friday night and Saturday and its night too. But then, on Sunday morning, I was wakened by a violence. Light – pure, hard, demanding light – slammed against my sour face, and I blinked, and I looked, and I saw the first wonder of all. There was the Ragman, holding the blanket most carefully, a scar on his forehead, but alive! And, besides that, healthy! There was no sign of sorrow or age, and all the rags that he had gathered shined for cleanliness. Well, then I lowered my head and, trembling for all that I had seen, I myself walked up to the Ragman. I told him my name with shame, for I was a sorry figure next to him. Then I took off all my clothes in that place, and I said to him with dear yearning in my voice: “Dress me.” He dressed me. My Lord, he put new rags on me, and I am a wonder beside him. The Ragman, the Ragman, the Christ!

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Action:Engaging a Poor World

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The Word: Rights and Rules My dear friends, don’t let public opinion influence how you live out our glorious, Christ-originated faith. If a man enters your church wearing an expensive suit, and a street person wearing rags comes in right after him, and you say to the man in the suit, “Sit here, sir; this is the best seat in the house!” and either ignore the street person or say, “Better sit here in the back row,” haven’t you segregated God’s children and proved that you are judges who can’t be trusted? Listen, dear friends. Isn’t it clear by now that God operates quite differently? He chose the world’s down-and-out as the kingdom’s first citizens, with full rights and privileges. This kingdom is promised to anyone who loves God. And here you are abusing these same citizens! Isn’t it the high and mighty who exploit you, who use the courts to rob you blind? Aren’t they the one who scorn the new name---“Christ”---used in your baptisms? You do well when you complete the Royal Rule of the Scriptures: “Love others as you love yourself.” But if you play up to these so-called important people, you go against the Rule and stand convicted by it. You can’t pick and choose in these things, specializing in keeping one or two things in God’s law and ignoring others. . . Talk and act like a person expecting to be judged by the Rule that sets us free. For if you refuse to act kindly, you can hardly expect to be treated kindly. Kind mercy wins over harsh judgment every time.

James 2:1-13, The Message

Discussion Questions 1. Is your kindness done regardless of the response? 2. Do you do compassionate deeds so that you can love yourself? 3. How do you express true love to others “unworthy” of it? 4. Do you find that it is easier to show kindness to “important” people

than to those that the world disparages? 5. Do you show love to earn God’s respect?

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From Census Taking to Name Affirming By Fletcher L. Tink

Not long ago, I was a census-taker for a month. I wanted to explore my community and get the inside scoop on government intrusion. I was pretty good at it. Made over $1,300. The short forms were easy—six questions that tallied numbers, ages and ethnic backgrounds, five minutes worth. But one out of six addresses, selected by random sampling, was cursed with the long form, sixty or so questions for the interviewee and thirty plus for each of the rest of the household. It was tedious, at times difficult and, for some people, offensive. Always, it consumed at least half an hour. But now we celebrate its results. The United States underestimated its populace by more than five million people and now has 281,000,000. (How could the IRS in its omniscience fail to assess these people?) Over the next few months, the racial and ethnic numbers will be broken out for us, along with a thousand other details in a dribble that attempts to give us a composite picture of who America is. Censuses are nothing new. David administered one and it got him into a heap of trouble. I Chronicles 21:1 warns: “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel.” Ironically, David was given his own three boxes to check off, and the result was a plague and 70,000 men dead, a staggering loss to his totals. I’ve long tried to figure out what is so perilous about a census. Everybody’s doing it. Even the church, your church, does it with gusto. I admit, census taking is necessary. There is even a Biblical book titled Numbers and God does number the hairs of our head. Necessary, yes. Death-dealing, maybe! Why was God so angry with David? Commentators speculate on two possible reasons: the militarizing of the populace and the imposition of outrageous taxes. Blame Solomon for the first, his “corvee”, that is, forced labor for the building of the temple or service in the military propelled Israel down that slippery slope from the high ground of God as protector to the grave of building one’s own kingdom or arming oneself for defense. Blame Rehoboam for the second. Once you number the people, then the numbers themselves lead governments astray into abuse, squeezing from their constituency financial gain. Sadly, David’s census led to enslavement on all the above accounts. But I believe the peril is deeper than this—the human tendency to scan numbers rather than faces. Our emotional well-being rises and falls on statistical input. If the curve is up, we are elated. If the curve turns south, we get depressed. If inferior growth to that of our competitor or colleague occurs, then we manipulate the numbers, or feel insufficient ourselves. Our bottom line is crunched into either profit or loss, rendering final judgment on personal value.

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But let’s peel back one layer deeper. Perhaps the peril is in the way we pose the questions. The census designer determines what is of supreme importance to know about a person. How much does he make? How many toilets are in her house? To what extent is she disabled? Perhaps the questionnaire says more about the values of those who compose the census than it does the people queried. By creating categories, people are diminished into manageable slots. In colloquial language, we are adept at doing this. People are “illegals,” “homeless”, “gays”, “blind”, “illegitimate”, “welfare mothers”, “soccer moms,” “feminizes” “macho-types”, and on and on. It allows us to pigeonhole each person and program our thinking into neat and negative stereotypes. Our need to create categories requires pre-judgment, and pre-judgment is mother to prejudice. Are not people more expansive, more complex, more human in God’s sight, than the labels we pin on them? And what about the people who don’t fit into our categorizations at all? Our need to create categories leaves vast numbers of people out. And when they don’t fit in, in essence, we “liquidate” them with the efficiency with which we liquidate bank accounts. My fear about my own church is that, in the euphoria of statistical growth, we set ourselves up for its shadowy side. Or we create categories designed to comfort us and, in so doing, annihilate the very people to whom God has called us to minister. Again, I reiterate that census taking is necessary. But beware its danger! If census taking is not the ultimate arbiter of value, then what is? The story of Gideon suggests an alternative. In Judges 6, the Midianites are securing the Israelites under siege. An angel of the Lord intervenes and is sent to Gideon to bestow on him the mantle of leadership. He protests vigorously that he is from the “wimpish” tribe of Manasseh and that he, in turn, is “Superwimp”. He confirms this by the gesture of “threshing wheat in the wine press”, an extraordinary act of cowardice and ineptitude, equivalent to hunting birds in the basement. The confused angel communicates the most outrageous message: “The Lord is with you, Mighty Warrior” perhaps thinking that he had landed at the wrong address. Pitiable Gideon protests loud and long at the name God has newly bestowed on him. He doesn’t recognize “Mighty Warrior” in himself, first offering his hapless resume, then insisting that God prove his calling by exceptional means. Only slowly, does his new designation possess him and his ministry. God has sloughed off all of his ugly stereotypes to reveal his true identity. Then, I began to realize that God has a habit of re-naming people as a rite of passage into new life. Sarai was re-named Sarah (“Princess”); Abram, Abraham (“Father of Many”); Saul, Paul (his cosmopolitan name); Simon, Peter, the “Rock”, and, most amazingly, Jacob, the “deceiver”, is given the name of God’s beloved people-nation, Israel, “he struggles with God”. Then I remember that John, the Elder, talks about a new name written down on the stone, yet to be revealed (Rev. 2:17). John Bunyan, 17th century

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writer, understood this well in his parabolic Pilgrim’s Progress, with his characters named Christian, Evangelist, Faithful, and Hope, all personifications of their names. As Christians, all bearers of the name of Jesus, we have three tasks. First, we need to discover our own names, graciously given to us by God and do so prayerfully, honestly, relentlessly. Second, we must strip away the hellish labels superimposed by societies that curse so many. Then we must so integrate our lives in theirs that we see each person as Jesus sees them, in their unique varieties and idiosyncrasies, each as a precious child of God for whom He died. Collectively, we help them discover God’s name, God’s identity and God’s mission for them. Let’s ratchet this thought up a dimension. Churches, too, have names. Some are geographic. Some are chronological, such as First Church; or theological, such as “Grace” or “Faith” Churches. Some are named after patrons or heroes. Yet it is the joint task of its members to uncover the real identity of the Church—be it “Community” or “Liberation” Church that contours its God-given role within the neighborhood. Over time and in prayer, God can reveal even that. The good news is that God has revealed to us not only His name, but ours also if we really want to know. That’s sure beats piling up the numbers!

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The Poor and the People Called Methodists Edited by Richard P. Heitzenrater

Nashville: Kingswood Books, Abingdon Press, 2002 Chapter One: The Poor and the People Called Methodists1

The general outlines of the early Methodists’ work with the poor is well known and often repeated. Methodists gathered clothes and food to send to the poor; opened free medical clinics to draw in the sick from the streets; and stood on street corners and begged for the poor. Closer examination reveals that these descriptions are not fully accurate, and the particulars of the Methodists’ efforts are even less familiar. The reasons for such a program of charitable activities are often ignored or misunderstood, and the context—the concept of poverty and the nature of the problem in eighteenth-century England—is largely unknown to most Methodists today. As a result, the picture of the poor and the people called Methodists, as typically portrayed, is largely incomplete, typically inaccurate, and therefore terribly inadequate. Shortly after I had begun working on this topic, my wife, Karen, raised a simple but profound question. “Who were the poor?” she asked. ‘Well,” I said, the poor were…Well, the poor…” The terminology that had seemed so obvious when I accepted the assignment, now seemed hopelessly amorphous: “Well, the poor were just that—the poor.” So, back to the drawing board we went to find out precisely who these people were. As it turned out, that question is at the very heart of the whole issue. And to my knowledge, virtually all of the Wesleyan scholarship on the topic had successfully avoided asking it. I searched again through the typical bibliography on the topic—Manfred Marquardt, Theodore W. Jennings, M. Douglas Meeks, John Walsh, and so forth. Nothing appeared on the definition of poverty. One conversation with John Walsh led me to look at the French and English social and economic historians who have recently examined the history of the concept of poverty. Their writings, encompassing a wide range of economic, demographic, social, and philosophical studies on poverty, represent an emerging field that has only recently begun to take shape. Defining Poverty Who were the poor? Surprisingly, no definition of poverty prevails—there is no true, scientific, objective concept of it.2 Poverty is a relative matter. Poverty is often considered deprivation, a condition marked by the lack of either the necessities of life or perhaps the comforts of life.3 In either case, definitions are in order. Often, the portion of the population at the bottom of the economic ladder is considered to be poor. Then the 1 This paper was given in conjunction with the opening of the exhibit, “The Poor and the People Called Methodists.” While introducing and complementing the material in the exhibit, this paper generally avoids duplication of the comments on the exhibit labels, which have been reproduced in Appendix III of this volume. 2 Wilfred Beckerman, “The Measurement of Poverty,” in Aspects of Poverty in Early Modern Europe I ,ed. Thomas Riis (Florence: Le Monnier, 1981), 48. 3 As Beckerman points out (“Measurement,” 53), if poverty is defined in terms of necessities, then whatever constitutes poverty in any particular time and place depends on what is conventionally regarded as a necessity in that context.

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question becomes, just how far up the ladder does the bottom go? Another complication is that many people are so-designated who do not consider themselves to be poor. At the same time, some who do consider themselves to be poor are not seen as such by others. To some degree, the whole question boils down to a matter of definitions. Spurred by periods of poor harvest and consequent general hardship, the English started to develop a national policy to deal with the poor in the sixteenth century. There was some malnutrition among the population but no problem of mass starvation even in the worst years of crop failure, as was often the case on the continent (such as in France). Only in England, however, did officials come up with a public program of “poor relief” at this time, which was financed by taxation. The system involved collective assistance for the infirm and impotent—the elderly, sick, widows, orphans, and disabled.4 The question was never whether to provide help, but rather who would provide it. The shift from occasional and indiscriminant almsgiving toward a public program of relief entailed a closer look at the definition of poverty. The questions were: Who deserved what type of public support, and who was responsible for providing it? The seventeenth century witnessed an increased public sensitivity to the concept of deprivation, which is, of course, a relative term. The English poor were never as bad off in absolute terms as those in some other countries. But the British developed a lively “intolerance of relative deprivation.” The concept of the deserving poor was expanded beyond the infirm and impotent to include people who were able to work but were unemployed or underemployed and therefore not able to provide sufficient (again, a relative term) support for themselves and/or their families—that is, they could not provide the necessities of life (again, a relative concept). This sentiment of concern was then codified in the Poor Laws. This series of laws, in place by 1601,5 defined a three-pronged national strategy to deal with the infirm and impotent who could not work were given cash support, and begging and casual almsgiving were banned.6 Putting the able-bodied to work meant providing not only materials and/or employment but also training for them, including children. This approach was generated by a national concern for the economy and a parliamentary effort to pass suitable laws, but the responsibility for implementation of the program was placed, not with the national, county, or town officials, but in the hands of parish officers—churchwardens, overseers of the poor, and justices of the peace. They were charged with the tasks of surveying the poor, collecting the taxes, relieving the impotent, setting the able-bodied to work, and training the children. Local control was at the heart of the system and accounted for some small success to the extent that taxes were actually generated and used locally. The system generally failed, however, because there was no uniform enforcement or implementation. Many areas followed the human inclination to do as little as possible that could still be considered acceptable.7

4 The aged (people over sixty), never less than 7 percent of the population, required communal support, as did the sick and disabled, a similar proportion. Paul Slack, The English Poor Laws, 1531-1782 (Cambridge: University Press, 1990), 5-6. 5 See 43 Eliz. C. 2, “An Act for the Relief of the Poor,” in William Theobald, A Practical Treatise on The Poor Laws…and an appendix, comprising a full collection of the statues, with notes (London: Sweet, 1836), 427-32. 6 Slack, Poor Laws, 9, 47. 7 Ibid., 12.

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The Elizabethan set of laws had been established for a rural, agricultural society. Poor became quantitatively defined as having housing (a tenement) worth £10 or less per year. Since housing was about one-third of the annual expense, that definition points to people with less than £30 per year in earnings. People in that category would therefore have included most laborers of the day: husbandmen, manufacturers (spinners, weavers, dyers, shearers), small craftsmen (tinsmiths, blacksmiths, carpenters, tailors), and manual workers of all kinds.8 One common understanding of poor in that context was “the laboring classes”—anyone who depended upon the wages of their labor for daily sustenance (i.e., those who had no investments, land, accumulated wealth, or independent income).9 That group would have included more than half of the population of England, which was thus at the mercy of environmental extremes and market fluctuations.10 One bad harvest could have been devastating. However, most people in this category apparently did not think of themselves as poor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.11 Dealing with the Problem The Poor Laws were passed by the rich to deal with the “problem” of the poor.12 The motivation for such a program was threefold: 1) Christian charity, 2) moral reform (against idleness, dirt, disease, indiscipline), and 3) a rising concern for public policy on social and economic matters. There seems to have been some religious sense of redemption for both the recipient and the donor.13 By the time Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations in 1776, he was able to give classic definition to the growing feeling that the health of the national economy depended on full employment of the population.14 This developing sense that poverty was a social and economic problem (with emphasis on problem) began to supersede any earlier religious motivations. AS the years wore on, more and more people called for more effectual methods of providing for the poor, both to sustain the aged and infirm and to make the idle and profligate more serviceable to the community. What started in Elizabethan England as an attempt to reform and remodel systems of charity was followed by a Jacobean tendency in the seventeenth century to see the problem in terms of the national economy—poor relief should be purposive and

8 Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor int eh Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1926), 1-2. 9 Bernard Mandeville, Fable of the Bees (1713), 294, cited by Gertrude Himmelfarb in The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 28. With no guarantee of subsistence, many of these people would be thrown into more desperate circumstances by any calamity. 10 Slack, Poor Laws, 4. Adam Smith saw the “laboring poor” as “the great body of the people.” See Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, 56. 11 “On the eve of the industrial revolution poverty was essentially what it had always been: a natural, unfortunate, often tragic fact of life, but not necessarily a demeaning or degrading fact.” Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, 41. 12 Thomas Riis makes the argument that the classification of the poor was created by the elite as part of their attempt to solve what they perceived as a social problem; the poor did not necessarily conceive of themselves as such. Poverty and Urban Development in Early Modern Europe: A General View,” I Riis, Aspects of Poverty, 16. 13 Slack, Poor Laws, 7, 47. See John Wesley’s letter to Miss March (26 Feb. 1776), Letters (Telford) 6:209: “The blessing which follows this labour of love [visiting the poor] will more than balance the cross.” 14 See the label for exhibit 3 in Appendix 3 of this book. Unless otherwise noted, all references to exhibits are for Appendix 3.

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discriminatory.15 By the eighteenth century, the whole system had become a social program of national welfare. The extent of poverty, as defined by the government, can be seen in some national surveys of population and economic status in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gregory King, in 1688, and Joseph Massie, in 1760 (following King’s scheme), provided estimates and incomes.16 Since there was essentially no inflation between the surveys, they correlate well with each other. And with the present availability of subsequent inflation statistics, conversion formulas, and equivalency charts, one can correlate and compare those statistics with contemporary figures.17 Both charts contain six main groups: 1) nobility and gentry, 2) clergy and professionals, 3) freeholders and farmers, 4) merchants and tradesmen, 5) manufacturers and artisans, and 6) laborers and husbandmen. Among the latter two groups, which included cottagers, fishermen, common soldiers, and so forth, most of the families in both surveys had an average income of not more than £30 per year, which would equate to approximately £2,800 ($4,480) today. In 1688, King estimated that 849,000 family units (more than half) decreased the wealth of the country by £622,000—that is, the cost of poor rates, which comprised half of the government budget of the day.18 A century later in 1776, when Massie did his survey, the cost of the rates had more than doubled to £1,523,163.19 The Poor Laws increasingly tried to put everyone to work who could work, attempted to train the children, and endeavored to relief the aged and infirm.20 A correlative activity was to outlaw and punish the vagrants—whipping the beggars, sending home the transients, Parish officers carried out all of these activities. Many of the able poor were simply underemployed.21 They were first called the “laboring poor” by Daniel Defoe in 1701, although the reality is much older, of course. Hard times often did not allow them to earn enough money to support their family.22 Many others were displaced, unemployed, sick, or otherwise unfortunately positioned because of times of dearth resulting from poor harvests, rising prices, death in the family, or other unpredictable causes. Rising unemployment resulted in lower wages, which increased the hardship of many families. Lack of work in the local situation represented a 15 Slack, Poor Laws, 41. 16 See the useful study by Peter Mathias, “The Social Structure in the Eighteenth Century: A Calculation by Joseph Massie,” in The Economic History Review 10 (2nd ser., No. 1, 1957): 30-45, especially the chart on 42-43. 17 For this essay, the work of John McCusker was very useful. See Appendix B, “Consumer Price Indexes, Great Britain, 1600-1991,” in How Much is that in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States” (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1992). Also see the “Conversion Table” in Frederic Morton Eden, The State of the Poor: or, An History of the Labouring Classes in England from the Conquest to the Present Period, 3 vols. (London: David, 1797), Vol. 3, Appendix I (p. viii). 18 Marshall, English Poor, 76. This figure did not include £100,000 in voluntary charitable contributions; Slack, Poor Laws, 44. 19 This figure did not include income of charitable trusts, which in 1788 amounted to £258,700. Slack, Poor Laws, 44. Inflation did not account for the difference. 20 Marshall, English Poor, 250. 21 Paul Slack points out that many of the poor were in fact employed but had insufficient earnings to support their families. “The Reactions of the Poor to Poverty in England, c. 1500-1750,” in Thomas Riis, ed., Aspects of Poverty in Early Modern Europe II (Odense: University Press, 1986), 21. 22 Slack, Poor Laws, 4.

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real problem, since the poor could not legally move out of the parish to seek employment elsewhere. Such a move made them illegal transients. Therefore, some localities established workhouses, cottage industries, and other means of supporting local employment of the poor through subsidies, which were paid for with the poor taxes. These provisions were intended to eliminate vagrancy and beggary. But many people asked whether the Poor Laws actually discouraged thrift and initiative among the able poor.23

Many times, those who were considered by others as “idle poor” were simply satisfied with their situation. Many of the so-called poor were not worried about their lack of contribution to the national economy. They would work just enough to have something to eat, drink, and a place to stay. There was little or no interest in savings or investments among most of the population.24 This sentiment was often used against them by employers who were forced to hire the poor at stipulated rates. The complaint was that these folk worked only as long as they felt they needed to for mere subsistence and were therefore not reliable employees—after three days labor in a week, they would go home and drink. And, they wouldn’t work for less than 2shillings (s.) 6 pence (d.) a day since they could get 1s. per day on the dole.25 Before 1760, the situation was further complicated by the fact that no clear-cut distinction existed between the agricultural and industrial sectors of the economy. Underemployed agricultural workers often did manufacturing work during slack times, but these workers commonly deserted the workshops for the fields during harvest season.26 Where poverty is the common condition of the population, as in large parts of England during that period, there is little realization or self-conception of being poor.27 The situation depended largely on local definition and control at the turn of the eighteenth century and can be characterized as “parochial laissez-faire.”28 Generally, those over the £30 per year line paid the poor tax; those under the line benefited from it. In many areas, there was a prevalent desire to keep the poor rates low. One of the continuing debates was whether the system should be based on a flat rate (equal pound rate) or a relative rate (based on ability to pay). In any case, the parish overseers of the poor generally earned about £20 to £30 per year, putting them just within the limits of the poverty level themselves.29 The system inflicted especially undue hardships on single women, widows with dependent children, and married laborers in rural areas. Disparity Between Theory and Practice Implementation of the Poor Laws was less than sufficient due to a number of causes ranging from incompetence to corruption.30 There were some good models.

23 Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police; London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: University Press, 1989), 29. See exhibit 1, 4a, and 4b. 24 The Bank of England was not founded until 1702. 25 Many people felt that “they indeed who prefer an Idle and vagabond Life of Beggary before honest labour, ought not to be encouraged in it by Relief, but abandoned to the Wretchedness which they chuse.” Andrew, Philanthropy, 19-20. 26 Mathias, “Social Structure,” 37-38. 27 Wim Blockmans, “Circumscribing the Concept of Poverty,” in Riis, Aspects of Poverty I, 43. 28 Marshall, English Poor, 9. 29 Ibid., 72-73. 30 Part one of the exhibit displays several aspects of the public policy and program toward the poor.

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Workhouses were the panacea after passage of the Poor Law of 1722, following the model established at Bristol.31 However, most were a failure in the end.32 A lack of clear purpose and careful administration resulted in many of the workhouses operating more like houses of correction. There were some noble attempts at “associated philanthropy”, which became more common further into the eighteenth century. Many hospitals, charity schools, and other organizations were set up on the basis of subscriptions from large numbers of donors, based on the example of joint-stock companies.33 In 1720, Westminster Hospital was the first organization to be established in this manner. Shortly thereafter, Samuel Wesley, Jr. initiated the solicitation of contributions that eventuated in the establishment of Hyde Park Hospital (i.e., St. George’s).34 Also, Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital was founded in 1739 as a haven for unwanted children; Magdalen Hospital was started in 1758 for “poor, young, thoughtless females”; and the list goes on. According to Joseph Massie, these projects appealed to charity, humanity, patriotism, and economy.35

In 1782, [Thomas] Gilbert’s Act eliminated many of the problems of single parish administration and the domination of the parish officers, helped create a better attitude toward the poor, and brought some improvement in the operation of workhouses.36 Generally, however, the overall results were no better than any previous reforms of the Poor Laws. This particular attempt, combined with other laws of the day, increasingly classified and criminalized the poor. People were still whipped for begging (going door to door in the parish) and jailed for debt. Vagrants (also called rogues) could be “put to service” for seven years or put in houses of correction. “Poverty” was defined by the elite, the wealthy, the officials, and the laws in terms of employment and wages as impacting the wealth and well-being of the nation. But poverty was experienced by the people in terms of hunger, exposure, and powerlessness, which impacted the health and well-being of the individual and family. Those who could be classified as poor in the eighteenth century still preferred self-help to the stigma of the dole, in spite of the increasingly prevalent notion of entitlements among some of them. Attitudes

31 Marshall, English Poor, 128. Wesley says that in Ireland a workhouse was called the “House of Industry.” Journal (17 May 1787), Works, 24:27. But in some cases, he observed English examples that seemed to function as a combination jail/workhouse; see Journal (24 June 1783), Works, 23:278. See also exhibits 6 and 7. 32 The 1798 figures for the workhouses in and around London reveal some pathetic facts. The total number of children born and/or received in the workhouses for the year is 8,185, of whom 906 were deemed “illegitimate” and 514 named as “casualties.” The number of young children who died under the care of nurses in the workhouses or parish houses is very high—287 of the 389 who were being housed in the environs of London. Of the 1,787 children under six years of age “sent to the country to be nursed,” 110 died during that year, while 366 were “apprenticed out or put out to service.” See exhibit 6. 33 Slack, Poor Laws, 42; see exhibits 8 and 9. 34 Richard P. Heitzenrater, Mirror and Memory: Reflections on Early Methodism (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1989), 166; see also Adam Clarke, Memoirs of the Wesley Family (London: n.p., 1823), 386. 35 Slack, Poor Laws, 43. 36 See 22 Geo.III, c.83, in Theobald, Practical Treatise, appendix, “The Statues Concerning the Maintenance and Civil Regulation of the Poor,” 497, which allowed parishes to combine efforts in maintaining workhouses.

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By the eighteenth century, the persistent attempts of the government to provide assistance to those in the lower economic levels of society had created an us-and-them mindset—those who paid the poor tax and those who benefited from it. The social managers of the scheme considered the poor a national economic and social problem to be solved by national legislation that would force increased productivity and thereby enhance national wealth. The poor participants in the scheme, however, began to think of the program of assistance in terms of entitlements, a level of relief that society owed them. The poor, therefore, came to consider public assistance a right, while the wealthy considered it a burden.37

The Poor Rates were high: at least 1 percent of the national income by 1750, which was relieving 8 percent of the population. After 1760, the payments began to shift from the impotent to the able, signaling a change in approach from “relief” or “subsidy” to “maintenance.”38 The jobs program never worked well since the poor were often reluctant to go off the dole for less than 2s. 6d. a day (about £30 per year), and the rich did not want to give jobs to “them”—they would rather have given to charity than employed the poor. Interestingly, there were fewer poor in difficult economic times—general periods of hardship meant that it was harder to find food to eat, so there was more willingness to work.39 The corn trade was no longer regulated, meaning, in part, that there were no more subsidized prices for the poor in years of scarcity (which more or less forced many of them to work). Increasingly, there was less regulation in employment, since most people felt it was easier to provide maintenance than to provide work or give encouragement and training to the poor.40 By the mid-eighteenth century, humanitarian pressures had resulted in additional slackening of Poor Law enforcement, which had already lost any effective national oversight by the end of the seventeenth century anyway. To make the whole problem worse, the poor rates, as we have seen, had jumped from £660,000 to over £1.5 million in a mere seventy years. Problems in the Public Scheme The system described in the previous section contains several inherent problems. The first was the problem of definition: What is poverty? Who are the poor? Is poverty a condition that threatens survival? Or, is there some relative level of adequate maintenance that should be provided for everybody? Is there a minimal level of nutrition that everyone should rely on? If so, what is the standard by which it can be determined in qualitative as well as quantitative terms? Should poverty be defined in terms of minimum wage? If so, what is to say that such a wage would be used adequately or efficiently by all? In addition, there were evident and persistent problems in the management of the system. First, there was the problem of finding suitable work for the unemployed or underemployed. Second, there was the expense of subsidizing it. Third, there was a fear of hurting the industrious by finding work for the idle. Fourth, there was the hardship that 37 Marshall, English Poor, 250. 38 Slack, Poor Laws, 46 39 Himmelfarb (Idea of Poverty, 51) points out that Adam Smith agreed with David Hume that “in years of scarcity when wages were low, ‘the poor labour more, and really live better, than in years of great plenty, when they indulge themselves in idleness and riot.’” This could have led to the view that the poor must be kept poor or they will never be industrious. 40 Marshall, English Poor, 32, 250.

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minimal wages would bring to unemployed laborers with large families. And fifth, there was the danger of developing a whole class of people who might lose a sense of self-sufficiency and begin to rely on others for subsistence. The Poor Laws represent a legal system that was designed to solve a social and economic problem. IN short, the program resulted in the conceptualization, classification, criminalization, and perpetuation of poverty. Wesley and the Methodists Into this setting came John Wesley and the Methodists. Several impressions about Methodism in eighteenth-century Britain are prevalent today:

• Early Methodists were primarily manual laborers and often destitute. • Later Methodists became respectable and rich. • Methodists had a mission to the poor of society. • Methodists stood on the street corner and begged for the poor.

None of these statements is entirely accurate, as we shall see. Some other impressions can be gleaned from Methodist writings:

• Methodists were all poor (Wesley himself says that). • Methodists distanced themselves from upper classes. • Wesley himself lived on the edges of poverty.

Again, none of these statements is entirely accurate either. A short sketch of Wesley’s involvement with the poor will help us introduce the Methodists attitudes and programs relative to the poor. In his early years at Oxford, Wesley demonstrated a concern for the widows, orphans, and prisoners in the city. He contributed to the Grey-Coat School in town (a charity school). He helped provide a teacher for poor children in a school that William Morgan had started, by which the Methodists taught at least twenty poor children.41 He gave money to debtors in the Castle prison and Bocardo jail. He gave of his resources to many in Oxford who lacked the necessities of life. Wesley often furnished more than just money. In some instances, he bought flax for children in the workhouses to use, and he gave food to families for their health and strength.42 He was convinced that he should not enjoy the comforts of life if others did not have the necessities. In one instance, he tells the story of a poor girl (whom the Methodists kept in a school) who, visiting him one winter day, looked cold and hungry. “You seem half starved,” he said. “Have you nothing to cover you but that thin linen gown?” When she said that was all she had, Wesley put his hand in his pocket and found that he had scarcely any money left, having just purchased some framed pictures for his rooms. His later recollection of this scene drips with self-critical sarcasm:

It immediately struck me, will not thy Master say, “Well done, good and faithful steward!’ Thou hast adorned thy walls with the money which might have screened this

41 See Journal (3 Oct. 1739), Works, 19:100. He visited the teacher, Mrs. Plat, and discovered that the school was “on the point of being broke up.” 42 See references to Wesley’s philanthropy at Oxford, exhibits 16 and 17a.

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poor creature from the cold!” O justice! O mercy! Are not these pictures the blood of this poor maid!43

The Oxford Methodists regularly visited two workhouses—at Whitefriars in Gloucester Green and near Little High Bridge in the parish of St. Thomas—where they led services, assisted the elderly, taught the children, and provided supplies for their work. They visited inmates in the county prison (at the Castle) and the city jail at the north gate (Bocardo), leading services, giving counsel, furnishing relief, and in at least one case, drawing up a legal brief to assist in a prisoner’s defense.44 Benjamin Ingham visited Bartlemas House in St. Clement’s several times looking to help the poor men who lived in that almshouse.45 The Methodists also visited the poor in their homes, especially in The Hamel, a poor area in St. Thomas’s parish west of the Castle.46 And for all these causes, they raised money from friends and relatives to bolster their own funds in support of this important focus of their work.47 These public activities helped earn them a succession of nicknames by which Oxford students derided them: Holy Club, Supererogation Men, Bible Moths, and finally, Methodists. As the century wore on and the Methodist revival moved beyond Oxford, this combination of serious stewardship and personal concern for the plight of the poor became a hallmark of the Methodist movement. Not surprisingly, the Wesleyan revival attracted a large following from the ranks of those who might be considered poor. To say, as some do today, that Wesley had a “preferential option for the poor” is simply to say that he did not categorize more than half of the population as outsiders (as “them”), as the Church seemed to do.48 In fact, if Massie’s figures are right and more than half of the population in 1760 were in occupational categories that averaged under £30 per year in wages, the Methodists in the last half of the century seem themselves to have been even slightly poorer with 65 to 75 percent of the members falling into those same groups of the poor.49 Based on a sampling of class lists from the period, 65 percent of Methodists belonged to occupational groups whose income averaged less than B20 per year, while 25

43 Sermon 88, “On Dress,” §16, Works, 3:255; see also exhibit 21; cf. MS Oxford Diary IV (1 Feb. 1734), Methodist Archives and Research Centre, John Rylands University Library of Manchester. 44 Wesley drew up papers for the trial of Thomas Blair, who the Methodists were convinced was falsely accused of sodomy. The trial at Thame proved their case. See Richard P. Heitzenrater, “John Wesley and the Oxford Methodists” (Ph.D. Diss., Duke University, 1972), 392-93. 45 Richard P. Heitzenrater, ed., Diary of an Oxford Methodist (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), 27, 171-72. 46 For Wesley’s later advice on visiting the poor, see exhibit 22. 47 For Wesley’s diary for the Oxford period is liberally sprinkled with entries that record funds raised and spent for these purposes. 48 In fact, visiting the poor was not Wesley’s preference, as he explained to Miss March (7 Feb. 1776), Letters (Telford), 6:207: “Creep in among these in spite of dirt and an hundred disgusting circumstances, and thus putt off the gentlewoman. Do not confine your conversation to genteel and elegant people. I should like this as well as you do; but I cannot discover a precedent for it in the life of our Lord or any of His Apostles. My dear friend, let you and I walk as He walked. 49 See Clive D. Field, “The Social Structure of English Methodism: Eighteenth-Twentieth Centuries,” British Journal of Sociology 28 (No. 2, June 1977): 202. It is difficult to derive specific percentages and annual wages from representative lists of occupations, not knowing where the particular individuals fell in the possible range of wages for that group.

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percent were in groups that averaged over £30.50 In the former category, the poor, the largest number were in the manufacturing group—weavers, bakers, candle makers, and so forth. Defining Poverty Within Methodism We now must ask more particularly, who were these poor whom Wesley helped? Wesley had a fairly constant definition: The poor were those who lacked the necessities of life.51 Many of them did not have enough good food to eat, decent clothes to wear, or a suitable place to live (although they never used the word “homeless”). Such conditions were the result of underemployment, unemployment, illness, age, or misfortune. These people were victims of a rapidly changing economy and of a failing parochial system of poor relief. And, most important to notice, many of them became members of the Methodist societies. Wesley did not have to search out the poor; they sat right there in front of him on the benches of his preaching houses. He did not have to go to another part of town to find some poor people to assist—he could have put signs on the Methodist preaching houses that read, “The Poor R Us.”52 Just how did Wesley deal with poverty and the poor? In short, Wesley declassified the concept of poverty, identified the breadth of the problem, and universalized the responsibility for dealing with it. Actually it might be more accurate to say that Wesley reclassified poverty, moving away from the absolute economic values established by the government and using instead a relative scale of human wealth and need. Instead of viewing the £30 per year benchmark as the poverty line, Wesley used the graduated terms of superfluities, conveniences, necessities, and extremities. His classic definition of the principle comes in a sermon on the Golden Rule (Matt. 7:12):

We would that all men should love and esteem us, and behave towards us according to justice, mercy, and truth. And we may reasonably desire that they should do us all the good they can do without injuring themselves; yea, that in outward things (according to the known rule) their superfluities should give way to our conveniencies, their conveniencies to our necessities, and their necessities to our extremities. Now then, let us walk by the same rule: let us do unto all as we would they should do to us. Let us love and honour all men. Let justice, mercy, and truth govern all our minds and actions. Let our superfluities give way to our neighbour’s conveniencies (and who then will have any superfluities left?); our conveniencies, to our neighbour’s necessities; our necessities to his extremities.53

50 Ibid. This information qualifies Wesley’s own statement in Advice to the People Called Methodists, “You are poor, almost to a man, having no more than the plain necessaries of life” (Works, 9:126). 51 This definition is fairly common in the eighteenth century; see Eden, State of the Poor, 1:3. 52 See Matt 26:11, “For ye have the poor always with you.” Wesley’s comment on this scripture is, “Such is the wise and gracious Providence of God, that we many have always opportunities of relieving the Wants, and so laying up for ourselves treasures in heaven.” John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (London: William Bowyer, 1755), 84. 53 Sermon 30, “Upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, X,” §26, Works, 1:662. Wesley’s terminology follows very closely that of Robert South: “The measures that god marks out to thy charity are these: thy superfluities must give place to thy neighbour’s great convenience; they convenience must vail to thy neighbour’s necessity; and lastly, thy very necessities must yield to thy neighbour’s extremity… This is the gradual process that must be they rule.” South, Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1823) 1:282-83, quoted by Outler in Works, 1:662.

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The concept of “necessities” was not based on an absolute level of sustenance that would prevent destitution. His definition of “necessities” includes very significant descriptions: the necessities are seen in terms of sufficient food, decent apparel, and proper housing. Similar adjectival qualifications can be found in his sermons and letters. On housing, he says: “Who have not a dry, or warm, much less a clean abode for themselves and their little ones?”54 IN a letter to a friend in Ireland, he included (among some “small things” to inculcate among the people) the following suggestions regarding clothing:

Whatever clothes you have, let them be whole; no rents, no tatters, no rags. These are a scandal to either man or woman, being another fruit of vile laziness. Mend your clothes, or I shall never expect you to mend your lives. Let none ever see a ragged Methodist.55

Contentment seems to be a measure of necessities having been met. He frequently quotes 1 Timothy 6:8, “And having food and raiment [‘includes lodging,’ Wesley], let us be therewith content.” In using these qualified terms, Wesley was following the typical English view of “relative deprivation,” soon to be enunciated (in 1776) by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: “By necessaries, I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without.”56 Wesley’s level of relative necessities (sufficient, decent, adequate) may have been higher than what some of the rich felt was really necessary for the poor. Nevertheless, it was probably below what we would think of as necessary today. Such expressions of relativity, however, do not necessarily indicate that Wesley was going noticeably beyond the government guidelines in his support of the needy. He did feel that the connection should provide support to maintain the preachers and their families, support that he defined as furnishing the necessities and conveniences of life to assure freedom from debt and sufficient provisions for the family, both before and after the preacher’s death.57 Just how much assistance did that entail in monetary terms? The connectional level of support for retired preachers, their widows, and children was much lower than the £30 per year poverty line. The average pension from the Preachers’ Fund for “tired and worn out preachers, their widows and children” in 1780 was £16 to four preachers and about £7 each to eight women. Presumably the local society helped supplement the connectional support since the Large Minutes of 1780 provided more generous guidelines for such support: preachers’ wives were to be furnished with lodging, coals, and candles of £15 per year; widows and children were to receive £10 per year.58 This level of support is, nevertheless, still well within the range of government-defined poverty at that time. It is also important to notice that Wesley’s scale was both relative and sliding. It was based not only on relative levels of need or comfort between the rich and the poor but also on a sliding scale that applied to everyone. Since his listeners ranged across the

54 Sermon 47, “Heaviness through Manifold Temptations,” III.3, Works, 2:227. See his following passionate comments on the want of bread. 55 Letter to Richard Steel (24 April 1769), Letters (Telford), 5:133. 56 Quoted in Beckerman, “Measurement,” 47. 57 See Wesley’s “Address to the Clergy,” Works (Jackson), 10:494-97. 58 “Large Minutes,” Q. 53, Works (Jackson), 8:326-27.

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economic spectrum, he stressed that there were richer and poorer folks at every level. This approach differentiated Wesley’s view from most of the social and legal programs of the day. From his point of view, everyone could find someone who was worse off than they were. And non one was so poor that they could not give something to their neighbor in need.59 His biblical model for this last point was the widow with the two mites.60 Wesley not only relativized the concept of “necessity” on a sliding scale but also shifted the focus of his advice as more Methodists moved up the economic ladder and enjoyed the conveniences of life. By 1760, he felt it was permissible to have more than the bare necessities, so long as one did not actively pursue that goal.61 Motivation—purity of intent—was thus a major consideration. Everyone should realize, he constantly pointed out, that having anything beyond the necessities makes one rich: “Whoever has sufficient food to eat and raiment to put on, with a place where to lay his head, and something over, is rich.”62 In some sense, then, Wesley thereby divided everyone into two groups, the rich and the poor. But he never stated a quantifiable standard or dividing line—one’s conscience must be the guide. And in the end, all, even the poor, are compelled to help those who are worse off than oneself. No one is exempt from the law of love for neighbor.63 Giving to the Poor Wesley used both a personal and an institutional approach to charity. He gave liberally from his own pocket, and he raised money through the Methodist connection. Wesley’s rule with regard to money, applicable (as we have seen) to persons at all levels of society, was his well-known advice to gain all you can, save all you can, and give all you can—with an emphasis on the third point.64 In this matter, he seems to have consistently followed his own dictum. In 1790, he decided to stop keeping his financial accounts (which he had kept since 1725), “being satisfied,” as he noted after the last entry, “with the continual conviction that I save all I can, and give all I can, this is, all I have.” Among other channels of charity, John occasionally gave coins to beggars on the street even though such begging was illegal. His brother Charles was often annoyed by such public actions, which he considered to be self-righteous displays of charity.65 John also raised money and collected resources of all kinds from those who could help. HE privately “begged” from the rich, many times soliciting known benefactors door to door. One particular week, he noted his disappointment that he could find only six or

59 See Sermon 98, “On Visiting the Sick,” III.4, Works, 3:393-94, where he quotes this “excellent rule” again. 60 Mark 12:42; Luke 21:2. For the former verse, Wesley exclaims, “How acceptable to [the judge of all] is the smallest [outward action], which springs from Self-denying Love!” Wesley, Explanatory Notes, 128. 61 Sermon 28, “Upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, VIII,” §15 “Riches, dangerous as they are, do not always ‘drown men in destruction and perdition’. But the desire of riches does.” Works, 1:621. See also his comment on Thomas Jones: “Yet when riches increased one very side, he did not set his heart upon them.” Journal (29 June 1762), Works, 21:371. 62 Sermon 87, “The Danger of Riches,” I.1, Works, 3:230. 63 One of his stories tells of one of the Oxford Methodists (himself?) who, though his annual income ranged from £30 to £120, lived on £28 and gave away the remainder; Sermon 89, “The More Excellent Way,” VI.4, Ibid., 275-76. 64 Sermon 50, “The Use of Money,” in Works, 2:266-79. See exhibits 11 and 23. 65 Rupert Davies, A. Raymond George, and Gordon Rupp, eds., A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain (London: Epworth Press, 1965—), 4:222.

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seven people that would give £10 apiece (now worth £900 or $1,400). On another occasion, he spent the week slogging through the slush of the wintry London streets to “beg” £200 from such friends. This was no tin cup on the street corner method—he had raised today’s equivalent of $30,000 for his programs of charity for the poor.66 A more efficient way for Wesley to raise money within Methodism was to establish connectional collections in the societies.67 It might seem ironic to be collecting money from the poor for the poor. But as early as 1742, Methodist people were expected to give a penny a week to their class leader in support of the beneficent programs of the connection. Captain Foy, a lay leader in Bristol, suggested that if a poor person could not meet that expectation, the class leader should make up the difference. He backed up his suggestion by volunteering to assume responsibility for twelve of the poorest people in the society.68

The Methodist program of assistance to the poor was, first and foremost, a way to help those in their own societies who had special needs. Wesley pointed out that, like the Quakers, the “poor despised” Methodists felt that their primary responsibility was to provide for their “own” poor.69 He hoped that the Methodists would differ from the Quakers, however, by helping those of other societies when they themselves were able to relieve more than their own poor.70 Wesley appointed stewards in each society to manage the incoming funds and administer the various distributions of money.71 In this sense, the Methodist system within each society was not unlike the parish administration of the poor tax—some money was used locally, some was sent to a regional or national fund. Although many of Wesley’s friends gave money to the Methodists, Wesley was always careful to let the stewards manage the funds, though he provided direction for them and was very particular about their exactness in the matter.72 The Wesleyan Program Wesley’s program of assistance to the poor followed the general outline of national policy categories but with a different attitude and a different approach.73 To begin with, Wesley did not consider the poor to be lazy and indolent, as did many of the upper class and some of the lawmakers. He worked very hard to counteract that view, which was contained in much literature of his day, especially as voiced by critics of the Poor Laws. From his extensive traveling about the country, Wesley concluded that the problems of hunger and unemployment were caused by poor government policy, 66 See exhibit 18. 67 See exhibits 17b and 20. 68 For Wesley’s work with the poor in Bristol, see exhibit 14. 69 This practice also follows the priorities enunciated in Galatians 6:10, “let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.” 70 Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, Part II, iii.7 (in 1746 Bristol edition and following), Works, 11:257. Wesley did support the work of the Strangers’ Friend Society, which was organized in London to assist people in society at large; see chapter 6. 71 See exhibits 19a and 19b. 72 Wesley never took any money for himself directly. He was supported by a quarterly allowance from the London steward, just like the other preachers. This protected him from the charge of becoming rich from the collections, the gifts, and the profits from the publishing enterprise. One of his letters (exhibit 24) explains to his friend Ebenezer Blackwell the exact distribution of the bankers’ most recent benefaction. 73 Some of the particulars of the Wesleyan program of ministry to the poor are outlined in exhibits 25-36.

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economic management, and societal choices, seen especially in three areas: distilling, taxes, and luxury.74 For instance, he pointed out that too much grain had been used for distilling liquor, leaving a shortage of grain to make bread, which drove the price up and especially hurt the poor. From his point of view, most everyone who was able to work was, in fact, working, and yet many were still hungry. In one sermon, Wesley lambasts those who quote the classical poet who said that “poverty brings no unhappiness worse than this: it exposes men to ridicule.”75 His response exudes his passion for the poor:

Has poverty nothing worse in it than this, that it “makes men liable to be laughed at”?...Is it not worse for one after an hard day’s labour to come back to a poor, cold, dirty, uncomfortable lodging, and to find there not even the food which is needful to repair his wasted strength?...is it not worse to seek bread day by day, and find none? Perhaps to find the comfort also of five or six children, crying for what he has not to give. Were it not that he is restrained by an unseen hand, would he not soon “curse God and die?” O want of bread! Want of bread! Who can tell what this means unless he hath felt it himself?76

Wesley continually developed programs to deal with a variety of problems faced by his people. First, To relieve the helpless (the impotent poor), he took nourishing food to the hungry, collected decent clothes for the threadbare, and furnished adequate housing for widows and orphans.77 Second, To assist those who were unfortunate (the able poor), he boosted their employment by sending the weavers yarn for their looms and establishing a loan program to distribute seed money to struggling merchants or manufacturers.78 Third, For the children, Wesley established schools to train the minds, bodies, and spirits of young boys and girls.79 Fourth, For the literate but uneducated adults, Wesley established a prolific publishing program that provided important literature for his people—much of which was produced inexpensively—to be given away to those who could not afford to purchase it.80 Fifth, To assist the sick and infirm, Wesley

74 See his “Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions” (exhibit 12), which contains a political tirade against views held by people such as Joseph Townsend (Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a well-wisher to mankind, see exhibit 4a) and John M’Farlan, D.D. (Inquiries Concerning the Poor, see exhibit 1). Townsend, a former Calvinist Methodist preacher, viewed the Poor Laws as, in effect, providing a guaranteed wage for the indigent and lazy and promoting “drunkenness and idleness clothed in rags,” while being paid for by the industrious farmers who were thus oppressed themselves by poverty. M’Farlan, a minister of Canongate, Edinburgh, began his work by pointing out that poverty has a number of unavoidable and adventitious causes, but the most frequent causes are sloth, intemperance, and other vices. He proceeds with the assumption that charities are designed “to relieve absolute want.” He then criticizes those programs that seem to promote a social and political agenda beyond that basic goal. See exhibits 1 and 2. 75 Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se, Quam quod ridiculos hominess facit! (Juvenal, Satires, iii.152-53 [Loeb, 91:42]). 76 Sermon 47, “Heaviness through Manifold Temptations,” III.3, Works, 2:227-28. 77 See exhibits 17b, 18, and 20. 78 See exhibit 35. One beneficiary, James Lackington, was an especially remarkable success story financially, but he left the Methodist society and became a critic of the Wesleyans; see exhibit 36. 79 See exhibits 30-32. 80 The establishment of the Tract Society by Wesley in 1782 is the best example of the institutionalization of this ministry, which is evident from nearly the beginning of Wesley’s publishing interest: an advertisement in the front of his first edition of Christian Pattern (London: Rivington, 1735) announces a forthcoming smaller-sized edition for which there will be given “a handsome allowance…to all such who shall take a number to be disposed of charitably.” See exhibits 33 and 34, and Richard Heitzenrater, Faithful Unto Death (Dallas: Bridwell Library, 1989), 46-47.

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hired apothecaries and doctors to staff free medical clinics in his preaching houses in London, Bristol, and Newcastle.81 Behind these programs lay a desire to encourage industry, thrift, learning, health, and godliness. Wesley was in some ways ahead of his time, though in many ways his programs and attitudes would not measure up to twentieth-century standards. On the one hand, although “perfect poverty” was an ideal that Charles Wesley had enunciated for the Methodists in his hymns,82 John’s quarterly allowance was twice the poverty level and five times that of many Methodist preachers. Wesley’s views of providence also led him occasionally to see poverty as God’s punishment to bring people to an awareness of their sin.83 On the other hand, it is interesting to note that Wesley did pinpoint some of the systemic causes of the problem in the structures and attitudes evident in government and society. He did occasionally connect poverty with human oppression.84 On occasion, he also used the language of justice in relation to the need to free the poor from their plight.85 And he did think that poverty could actually be eliminated from the Methodist societies. In answer to the question, Is it possible to supply all the poor in our Society with the necessaries of life? Wesley answered that it certainly was possible in larger societies than theirs, such as the early church in Jerusalem as well as the Quakers and Moravians in their own day. His estimate was that with two thousand pounds, the Methodists “could supply the present wants of all our poor, and put them in a way of supplying their own wants for the time to come.” And he was quick to point out that there were Methodists who could provide those funds if they were so inclined and if they simply practiced his rule of “giving all you can.”86 Summary In his attitudes toward and programs for those in need, John Wesley was a man of his time. He followed models that were available to him from Scripture, government, Church, and society. But there were important differences in his approach from the societal models that defined, criminalized, and perpetuated poverty in his day. (1) Wesley communalized the program of assistance. His people were expected to help each other in the community of faith. This was not just a local program for individual societies. They were expected to contribute to connectional funds that cut across the boundaries of societies, parishes, towns, and cities. (2) Wesley broadened the concept of community to include everyone, from the top to the bottom of the economic scale. No longer was there an us-and-them dichotomy. 81 See exhibits 27-29. 82 See his hymn on Matt. 5:48 in Short Hymns on Select Passages of The Holy Scriptures (Bristol: 1762) 2:139; reprinted by S T Kimbrough in Songs for the Poor (New York: General Board of Global Ministries, 1993), no. 7. See also exhibit 15. 83 Sermon 113, “The Late Work of God in North America,” II.14, Works, 3:607. 84 See his Doctrine of Original Sin (Part I, ¶11) in which he poses several questions to test whether or not “the generality of Attorneys and Solicitors in Chancery” follow the Great Commandment or the Golden Rule, such as “Do they never deliver the poor into the hand of his oppressor, and see that such as are in necessity have not right? Are they not often the means of withholding bread from the hungry, and raiment from the naked, even when it is their own, when they have a clear right thereto, by the law both of God and man?” Works (Jackson), 9:229. 85 See, for instance, his desire for “truth, justice, mercy, and common sense” in his impassioned plea against the Declaration Bill and its victims 86 Sermon 122, “Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity,” §§10 and 11, Works, 4:92-93.

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In a sense, this view reverts to a pre-seventeenth-century perspective in which the poor are not made to think of themselves as distinguished by their poverty or as a disadvantaged class. In fact, in this period of English history, most of the people were in that condition at some point in their lives. (3) Wesley relativized (reclassified) the concept of poverty, ignoring the idea of an absolute or quantifiable poverty line. He viewed deprivation in terms of relative needs based on a sliding scale (superfluities, conveniences, necessities, extremities) with each level defined in terms of specific contexts. There could almost always be someone found with fewer conveniences or less adequate necessities, if not destitute of extremities. (4) Wesley universalized the concept of charity so that no one was exempt from responsibility for assisting the needy. Everyone could be a Christian neighbor, even the widow with her two mites. (5) Wesley theologized the motivation for charitable activities. His basic goal in this regard was for Methodists to imitate the life of Christ not improve the national economy. He conceived of the problem theologically in terms of love of God and love of neighbor rather than in terms of defining minimum wage, improving the country’s wealth, or solving a social problem. Everyone in every level of society was a child of God and deserved to be treated as such. He tried to remove the stigma of poverty—we are all poor in some way or another. Wesley’s goal appears to have been a harmonious society not unlike the Christian community idealized in the Acts of the Apostles.87 His method was not to pacify the poor or manipulate their submissiveness and industry but rather to prick the conscience of everyone by breaking down the barriers that helped cause and perpetuate poverty.88

Conclusion The Methodist program to help alleviate poverty was not as successful in eliminating it as Wesley had hoped. However, his method did not exacerbate or perpetuate the problem of poverty either, as was often the case with the Poor Laws. But Wesley’s approach, which included encouragement for all people to practice industry, thrift, and charity, did cause another unforeseen problem by virtue of its success: Methodists moved up the economic scale. They did well at making and saving money. But some forgot their roots and neglected the third element of the Wesleyan scheme: charity—giving all you can. This situation left them in danger of falling back into an “us-and-them” mindset with the same economic and social class barriers that Wesley had tried so hard to tear down. There is nothing more proud than a self-made person. It is very easy to forget ones’ roots in such circumstances. And few are more oppressive than the oppressed who are liberated and then become oppressors. Methodism, however, did well serve both the rich and the poor as long as the group syndrome did not become part of the defining structure or self-conscious identity.89

87 For a time, he promoted economic communism on the model of the early church, as in Acts 2:44-45. See John Walsh, “John Wesley and the Community of Goods,” in Keith Robbins, ed., Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany, and America, c. 1750-c. 1950: Essays in Honor of W. Reginald Ward, Studies in Church History 7 (Oxford; Basil Blackwell, 1990), 25-50. 88 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), 351. 89 Ibid., 356.

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Any degree of success was proportional to the degree in which they recognized and dealt with any and all degrees of poverty in their midst. This approach entailed tearing down the barriers that separated the children of God and the community of faith, as well as turning with compassion to all neighbors and responding to their needs as Christ would have, “who went about doing good.” Can the problem of poverty be solved? Wesley thought so. At the very least, he thought the Methodists could do away with destitution in their midst—and not simply by eliminating the poor from their membership roles or by narrowing the definitions of poverty. He saw the model solution in the New Testament—in the sharing community in Acts, which was bound not by secular laws but by the law of love.90 To love God and neighbor will always result in acts of assistance for those with needs greater than one’s own. Love and empathy are at the heart of the Wesleyan theology and the “method” of the Methodist mission. As he told the stewards in his societies, “Put yourself in the place of every poor [person] and deal with him as you would God should deal with you.”91 Dealing with the poor was simply a consistent part of his overall scheme that looked toward the building of a community of faith in which everyone’s needs would be sufficiently met. Wesley launched toward that goal, held to that hope, and acted consistently with that purpose, supported by a host of followers who were themselves mostly “the poor.” The question that faces us today is whether we, like the rich or the eighteenth century, will follow the natural tendency to impose our ideologies upon the human condition of poverty in order to define “the problem,” or whether we, like Wesley, can imitate the life of Christ and conscientiously become one with the reality of poverty in order to let the deprivations of all our neighbors help shape our moral imagination, our ethical consciousness, our theological categories, and our social programs.92

90 Walsh, “John Wesley,” 50. 91 Journal (4 June 1747), Works, 20:177. 92 See Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, 19.

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Nazarene Manual Statements That Deal with Compassionate Ministries

From the Historical Statement The Church of the Nazarene In October 1895, Phineas F. Bresee, D.D., and Joseph P. Widney, M.D., with about 100 others, including Alice P. Baldwin, Leslie F. Gay, W. S. and Lucy P. Knott, C. E. McKee, and members of the Bresee and Widney families, organized the Church of the Nazarene at Los Angeles. At the outset they saw this church as the first of a denomination that preached the reality of entire sanctification received through faith in Christ. They held that Christians sanctified by faith should follow Christ's example and preach the Gospel to the poor. They felt called especially to this work. They believed that unnecessary elegance and adornment of houses of worship did not represent the spirit of Christ but the spirit of the world, and that their expenditures of time and money should be given to Christlike ministries for the salvation of souls and the relief of the needy. They organized the church accordingly .—Nazarene Manual 2001-2005 From the General Rules

(5) Seeking to do good to the bodies and souls of men; feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and ministering to the needy, as opportunity and ability are given (Matthew 25:35-36; 2 Corinthians 9:8-10; Galatians 2:10; James 2:15-16; 1 John 3:17-18). —Nazarene Manual 2001-2005 From Ministry and Christian Service 413.5. To care for the people by pastoral visitation, particularly the sick and needy.—Nazarene Manual 2001-2005 From Auxiliary Constitutions NMI officers in the local church

In consultation with the pastor, a local council may add other officers, namely, a Work and Witness coordinator, an Alabaster secretary, a World Evangelism Broadcast secretary, a Publicity secretary, and a Compassionate Ministries coordinator, and any other officer deemed necessary. The nomination and election of these officers shall follow the same procedure specified for officers other than the local president.

These officers, together with chapter chairpersons, children's and youth mission directors, and pastor, shall constitute the local NMI Council. —Nazarene Manual 2001-2005 NMI District Officers When a District Council in consultation with the district superintendent shall desire, other officers may be added to the District Council, namely, a Work and Witness coordinator, an Alabaster secretary, a World Evangelism Broadcast secretary, a Compassionate Ministries coordinator, a Publicity secretary, a Deputation secretary, and children and youth mission directors. The nomination and election of these officers shall be by the District Council or shall follow the same procedure specified in Article III, Section 2, for officers other than district

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presidents. The determination of election method of the additional officers shall be the decision of the District Council, in consultation with the district superintendent. —Nazarene Manual 2001-2005

From the Appendix Responsibility to the Poor

The Church of the Nazarene believes that Jesus commanded His disciples to have a special relationship to the poor of this world; that Christ's Church ought, first, to keep itself simple and free from an emphasis on wealth and extravagance and, second, to give itself to the care, feeding, clothing, and shelter of the poor. Throughout the Bible and in the life and example of Jesus, God identifies with and assists the poor, the oppressed, and those in society who cannot speak for themselves. In the same way, we, too, are called to identify with and to enter into solidarity with the poor and not simply to offer charity from positions of comfort. We hold that compassionate ministry to the poor includes acts of charity as well as a struggle to provide opportunity, equality, and justice for the poor. We further believe that the Christian responsibility to the poor is an essential aspect of the life of every believer who seeks a faith that works through love.

Finally, we understand Christian holiness to be inseparable from ministry to the poor in that it drives the Christian beyond his or her own individual perfection and toward the creation of a more just and equitable society and world. Holiness, far from distancing believers from the desperate economic needs of people in our world, motivates us to place our means in the service of alleviating such need and to adjust our wants in accordance with the needs of others. (2001)

(Exodus 23:11; Deuteronomy 15:7; Psalms 41:1; 82:3; Proverbs 19:17; 21:13; 22:9; Jeremiah 22:16; Matthew 19:21; Luke 12:33; Acts 20:35; 2 Corinthians 9:6; Galatians 2:10) —Nazarene Manual 2001-2005

AIDS (Human Immunodeficieny Virus/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome)

Since 1981, our world has been confronted with a most devastating disease known as HIV/AIDS. In view of the deep need of HIV/AIDS sufferers, Christian compassion motivates us to become accurately informed about HIV/AIDS. Christ would have us to find a way to communicate His love and concern for these sufferers in any and every country of the world. (2001) —Nazarene Manual 2001-2005

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Why Servanthood is Bad By John McKnight

(Samarinating Note: Though this article is dated, it raises many significant issues concerning compassionate ministry philosophy. More recent publications on these themes include The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits (1996) and Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing Community Assets (1997). In a small, relatively isolated community on Martha’s Vineyard, about every tenth person used to be born without the ability to hear. Everybody in the community, hearing and non-hearing alike, spoke a unique sign language brought from England when they immigrated to Massachusetts in 1690. In the mid-twentieth century with increased mobility, the people ceased to intermarry, and the genetic anomaly disappeared. But before the memory of it died, and the sign language with it, historian Nora Groce studied the community’s history. She compared the experience of the non-hearing people to that of the hearing people. She found that 80 percent of the non-hearing people graduated from high school as did 80 percent of the hearing. She found that about 90 percent of the non-hearing got married compared to about 92 percent of the hearing. They had about equal numbers of children. Their income levels were similar as were the variety and distribution of their occupations. Then Groce did a parallel study on the Massachusetts mainland. At the time, it was considered to have the best services in the nation for non-hearing people. There she found that 50 percent of non-hearing people graduated from high school compared to 75 percent of the hearing. Non-hearing people married half the time while hearing people married 90 percent of the time. Forty percent of the non-hearing people had children while 80 percent of hearing people did. Non-hearing people had fewer children. They also received about one-third the income of hearing people. And their range of occupations was much more limited. How was it, Groce wondered, that on an island with no services, non-hearing people were as much like hearing people as you could possibly measure? Yet thirty miles away, with the most advanced services available, non-hearing people lived much poorer lives than the hearing. The one place in the United States where deafness was not a disability was the place with no services for deaf people. In that community all the people adapted by signing instead of handing the non-hearing people over to professionals and their services. That community wasn’t just doing what was necessary to help or to serve one group. It was doing what was necessary to incorporate everyone. I’ve been around neighborhoods, neighborhood organizations, and communities in big cities for thirty-six years. I have never seen service systems that brought people to well being, delivered them to citizenship, or made them free. When I’m around church people, I always check whether they are misled by the modern/secular vision. Have they substituted the vision of service for the only thing that will make people whole, community? Are they service peddlers or community builders? Peddling services is unchristian, even if you’re hell-bent on helping people. Peddling services instead of building communities is the one way you can be sure not to help. We all know that at the Last Supper Jesus said, “This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” But for mysterious reasons, I never hear the next two sentences. “You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you servants, because servants do not know the business of the one

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they serve. But I have called you friends because I have made known to you everything I learned from God.” It’s not right to be hung back by service and servantry. The goal is to be a friend. I’m consistently impressed by how dangerous people are who want to serve others. The service ideology and its systems don’t work for three reasons. First, they constantly steal money from people who are poor. At the center where I work, we’ve added up how much money the four levels of government—federal, state, county, and city, specifically target for low-income people in Cook County. It adds up to about $6,000 for every person with an income below the poverty line. (That figure is low; not everyone below the line participates in low-income programs.) For a mother with three children, that’s the equivalent of $24,000. Three years ago, the median income in Cook County was $23,000. In one sense, we spend more for every poor person than half the people in Cook County make. But Chicago still has poverty! So I asked our researchers. “Of the money appropriated for low-income people, how much did they get in cash and how much in services? They replied, “They got 63 percent in services and 37 percent in income.” Now, if you’re a family of four, that means your servants walked away with over $15,000 of the money appropriated for you while you got less than $9,000. Bureaucracy is not the problem. (Bureaucracy eats only about 6 percent.) The money goes to health and human service professionals: nurses, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrist, social workers, public-housing administrators, land clearance officials, and welfare workers. It doesn’t go to poor people. The second problem with service systems is that they base programs on “deficiencies.” I fight whenever I can, in legislatures and before policy-making bodies, and against “needs surveys” in low-income neighborhoods. Here is why: I was organizing block clubs in West Side neighborhoods. I wasn’t very good. But people responded. They understood what I was saying. Then the antipoverty program came, and within three years organizing became incredibly difficult. The antipoverty program sent people out to interview people this way: “Mrs. Jones, we’re from such-and-such. We’re doing a survey. Can you tell me how far you went in school?” She looks down a little and says, “Well, I just got through tenth grade.” So they write on the clipboard, “Dropout. Two years.” Not “educated ten years” but “dropout two years.” Then they say, “I wonder if you could read this to me.” She looks at it, embarrassed. “No. I can’t read.” “Illiterate,” they write. Then they say. “Just now you squinted your eyes. Do you have trouble seeing?” “Yes. I think I need glasses.” “Visual deficit,” they write. “Do you have any children?” “Three daughters, ages fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen.” “Do any of them have children?”

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“The fourteen-year-old has a child, and the eighteen-year-old has a child.” “Teenage pregnancy,” goes on the clipboard. Then they say, “We’re going to get you some help. Just wait. We’re going to make a service center here.” And they cash in their needs inventory for a G.E.D. dropout training center and three people who work there, for an illiteracy program with four staff people, for a neighborhood optometrist who is responsive to the community, and for a new teenage-pregnancy counseling program that gets the schools more money. This poor woman is a gold mine. That’s how she ended up getting one-third what the service system got. When I go back to this woman, organizing, I say, “Mrs. Jones, I’m organizing for the local neighborhood organization, and your neighbor told me to talk to you. She told me that when her daughter was hit by an automobile down at the corner, you took charge while she took her daughter to the emergency room. And when the tree fell down across the street, you’re the one who came out and told people who to call, what to do about the tree. She told me you’re the leader on this block. People trust you. People believe in you. People follow you. That’s one of the most wonderful things in the world, because you have the opportunity to join with other people like yourself in the neighborhood to begin to do more things than just deal with the tree and the crisis with the little girl. So would you come with me to a meeting tonight?” “No” she says, “I’m waiting for the people in the white coats.” Service systems teach people that their value lies in their deficiencies. They are built on “inadequacies” called illiteracy, visual deficit, and teenage pregnancy. But communities are built on the capacities of drop-out, illiterate, bad-scene, teenage-pregnant, battered women like Mrs. Jones. If the church is about community, not service, then it’s about capacity, not deficiency. Third, the service system displaces the capacity of people’s to solve problems. It says, “Don’t form a community organization. Sit and wait for the white coat to come save you.” The proliferation of an ideology of therapy and service as “What you need” has weakened associations and organizations of citizens across the United States. Many churches and pastors have become the agents of systems. They themselves may not understand who they represent, but they refer people to systems. Instead of building community, they help take responsibility away from the community and give it to professionals. People who do this in the name of the church and of Jesus are community busters. They are not agents of Christ. Here are five rules to protect yourself from being the agent of the devil in the middle of a church. (I could give you ten if I had more space.) Saul Alinsky referred to the first rule as the “iron rule”: Never do for others what they can do for themselves. Second, find another’s gifts, contributions, and capacities. Use them. Give them a place in the community. Third, whenever a service is proposed, fight to get it converted into income. Don’t support services. Insist that what poor people need is income. There’s a point where things called services can be useful. Most low-income communities are well beyond that point. If you improve the professional credentialing of big-city schoolteachers and

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systems, knowing and wisdom will decrease in direct relationship to the increase in that system’s poor. The increase in medical resources in Chicago is now decreasing the health status of poor people. The fourth rule is a sort of subhead of the third. If those in power are hell-bent on giving poor people services rather than income, then fight for those services to come in the form of vouchers. That way the persons who must be served at least have a choice as to who will serve them. And there may be some competition. Fifth, develop hospitality. Abraham, the head of a tribe, decided to follow a God who claimed to be the only God. That made Abraham and his people strangers in their own land. They journeyed as strangers through the world. And they developed some unique ideas about responsibilities to strangers because they were strangers themselves. Jesus’ disciples were also people who decided to become strangers, in their own land and in others. They built communities based on their decision. That renewed their understanding of obligations to strangers and hospitality was renewed. In every household, in every tent, the door was open to the stranger, the outsider, the enemy, or potential enemy. And the stranger was one with whom one acted not in service but equality. Then a terrible thing happened in third-century Italy. At the side of a monastery, they built a little room for strangers. And they called it a hospice. The church took over responsibility for the stranger. And Christians forgot what had been unique about their community, how to welcome the person who was outside and hungry. The hospice took hospitality out of the community. “Hospice” became “Hospital.” The hospital became Humana, a for-profit corporation buying up church hospitals. Communities and churches have forgotten about hospitality. Now systems and corporations claim they can produce it and sell it and that you can consume it. You must struggle with all your might to reclaim the central Christian act of hospitality. You will have to fight your local hospitals. You will have to fight Humana. You will have to fight the United Way. You will have to fight the social services. They have commodified hospitality and called it a service. They have made a market of the temple. And you know what you’re supposed to do there. Get ‘em out! Or bring into the church the hospitality that is at the center of understanding a relationship as a friend not a servant. A church’s response to people without should be hospitality not services.

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Insights from Jeffrey Sachs "The End of Poverty" Compiled by Mindy Bowne Hancock “Fifteen thousand people dying needlessly every day from AIDS, TB, and malaria. Mothers, fathers, teachers, farmers, nurses, mechanics, children. This is Africa’s crisis. That it’s not on the nightly news, that we do not treat this as an emergency—that’s our crisis.” ~Bono Eight million people die each year because they are too poor to stay alive. One billion people, 1/6th of the world’s population, are too ill, hungry, or destitute to do anything but attempt to survive each day. They cannot escape the poverty trap. They are trapped by disease, physical isolation, climate stress, environmental degradation, and extreme poverty. There are very practical solutions for their most basic survival needs, but they and their governments cannot afford them. The “end of poverty” refers to ending the plight of the one sixth of humanity that lives in extreme poverty and struggles daily for existence. “Everybody on Earth can and should enjoy basic standards of nutrition, health, water and sanitation, shelter, and other minimum needs for survival, well-being, and participation in society.” In order to accomplish the end of poverty, modest financial help from the rich countries will be required— more than is now provided, yet no more than what they have long promised. “Our safety and prosperity depend…on collective decisions to fight disease, promote good science and widespread education, provide critical infrastructure, and act in unison to help the poorest of the poor.” The US often thinks of itself as a great beneficiary, regularly giving away large amounts of money in the form of aid to poor countries. The reality of it, though, is that after considering the amount taken out for consultants, technical cooperation, emergency aid, and administrative costs, the aid per sub-Saharan African for one year came to 6¢ in 2002. Six cents a year isn’t helping anybody. On a larger scale, turning things around for Kenya would require $1.5 billion, yet they only receive $100 million in support; furthermore, their resources, like so many other poor nations, are continually drained as they pay on their debts to richer nations. There is not a list of quick-fix solutions that will end poverty. Poverty’s sources as well as its solutions are multidimensional. Yet, a good first step is overcoming misconceptions. Those who live in extreme poverty do not do so because they are lazy or because their governments are corrupt. It isn’t that simple. They can’t even begin to help themselves until structures are in place which give them a chance to overcome things like geographic isolation, disease, and harsh climates. The rich nations are not rich because of cultural or biological dominance; they’re rich because they were fortunate enough to find themselves in places of natural abundance: good harbors, favorable climates, adequate energy sources, and a lack of indigenous diseases, that all made the conditions favorable for technological advance.

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Taking into account that each situation is different and that each village or city needs the personalized care of a doctor/patient relationship, some of the development interventions that would make the difference between life and death for the poorest people are:

1. Booosting agriculture: With fertilizers, cover crops, irrigation, and improved seeds, farmers could triple their food yields and end chronic hunger. 2.Improving basic health: Health clinics with a doctor and nurse would provide free antimalarial bed nets, effective antimalarial medicines, and treatments for HIV/AIDS infections. 3. I nvesting in Education: vocational training, meals at school, and higher quality education which empowers youth. 4. B ringing power: Electricity could provide pumps for safe wells water, refrigeration, computers for schools, power for milling grain, and lights for students to be able to study after dark. 5. Providing clean water and sanitation: This would save women and children countless hours fetching water each day, and provide safe drinking water for the people. These interventions would have to be funded almost entirely by developed nations. The governments of the poorest nations bleed out most of their income in debt repayment; they have no resources for their people. Even new democracies do not receive the support they need from the international communities currently. “The end of poverty will require a global network of cooperation among people who have never met and who do not necessarily trust one another.”

Nine steps towards the goal of ending poverty are: 1. Commit to the task 2. Adopt a plan of action 3. Raise the voice of the poor 4. Redeem the US role in the world 5. Rescue the International Monetary Fund and World Bank 6. Strengthen the UN 7. Harness global science 8. Promote sustainable development 9. Make a personal commitment

Jeffrey Sachs economic philosophy is as follows: “that sustainable development can be achieved only through an approach that considers everything from geography to infrastructure to family structure.” It’s a holistic approach that studies the uniqueness of each situation and works to apply the specific strategies that will improve life in that place; there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach that will be effective. But our generation can witness the end of poverty if enough people catch the vision and commit their lives to realizing the goal.

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Bibliography on the Poor

Brown, Robert McAfee. Speaking of Christianity: Practical Compassion, Social Justice, and Other Wonders. Westminster John Knox Press, 1997. Jennings, Theodore W., Jr. Good News to the Poor: John Wesley's

Evangelical Economics. Abingdon Press. 1990. Grigg, Viv. Companion to the Poor. MARC, 1990. -----. Cry of the Urban Poor. MARC, 1992. Hoppe, Leslie J. There Shall B e No Poor Among You. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004. Kraybill, Donald B. The Upside Down Kingdom. Herald Press.

Anniversary Edition. 2003.

Linthicum. Robert. Empowering the Poor. MARC, 1991.

Lupton, Robert. Theirs is the Kingdom. New York: Harper And Row, 1989.

Myers, Bryant L. W alking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development. Orbis Books. 1999.

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Blessed are the poor

Spiritual

Transcript of Blessed are the poor