Church Of The Poor

Poverty and affluence are two striking realities of our time. On onehand, half of the entire human family in our time is living in abject poverty. Day by day, their number is increasing and their situation is deteriorating. It is a hard and brutal reality, says Mary MelL’Ecuyer.Their very survival is under constant threat. On the other hand,there is another quarter of the world’s population living in unprecedented affluence. Their standard of life is steadily increasing. This contradictory situation is fraught with many problems and serious challenges.
Today, this tension has been increasing sharply in the name ofglobalization that creates a single world economy, which eliminates all traditional and small-scale societies and economies by the centrality of the market. Some people are enriched fabulously, but many more are not only not better off, but are actually being driven deeper into poverty and misery. In 1996, the United Nations Development Program noted that with the increase in wealth, the disparity between the rich and the poor is growing worse in nearly all parts of the world, with roughly 20 percent enjoying the fruits of global capitalism, and the rest struggling to hold their ground and slipping away into deeper poverty.

Why are people poor? And what can or should those who are not poor be doing about it?

There are several reasons why one might want to avoid talking about poverty. One is that talking about “the poor” means giving people a label, and that’s almost always a mistake, because it leads to treating people as objects, making their humanity invisible and thus increasing their poverty. Another is that there are so many party political flags in the ground that it’s quite a challenge to slalom through them to a genuinely theological understanding. And another is that poverty seems such an abiding aspect of human society that engaging it feels depressing, guilt-inducing and disempowering. Despite these good reasons, people in churches and universities talk about poverty all the time.

But what is poverty? Why do people become and stay poor? And what can be done about it? Theseare questions we don’t so often ask.

Let’s start with the question “What is poverty?” Lets talk about aa woman from the two-thirds world called Lakshmi .

Why start with a woman? Well, women perform two-thirds of the world’s work, earn one-tenth of the world’s income, are two-thirds of the world’s illiterate, and own less than a hundredth of the world’s property.

Lakshmi lives in substandard housing with inadequate sanitation. She doesn’t have the regular means to feed herself, with little or no land, livestock or spare cash. She doesn’t get enough nutritious food to give her a lot of energy and help her fight off infections. She doesn’t live near places where goods are bought and sold, or places where capital or credit are available. What money she is able to save is likely to be blown away by obligatory cultural rites of passage. She lives in fear, because she’s so close to the edge that a natural disaster could force her to sell what few assets she has simply to secure short-term survival. She’s easy prey for the forces of exploitation, the moneylender, the protection racketeer, the merciless landlord, the bogus holy man, the drug dealer. Under pressure on all sides, her key domestic, extended family and community relationships become fragile, and she is isolated from trustworthy people on whom she can rely. Deprived of the trust that is at the heart of faith, it’s hard for her to hear or believe in the utter and endless love God has for her. This accumulation of circumstances leaves her powerless. It’s hard for her or anyone meeting her to identify what she’s done wrong, and it’s hard for her or anyone meeting her to identify exactly what a willing person could do to help.

This is poverty.

Such a description of poverty shows how many of the issues cross over from the two-thirds world to the developed world. A person in Africa can share most of these experiences with Lakshmi . While universal education is a massive opportunity, in many cases the other pressures of life that I’ve just been illustrating make it hard for a child in poverty to take advantage of that opportunity. And it’s worth noting that many of the characteristics of social isolation I’ve listed can confront those with money too. If your network of relationships becomes so fragile that you live in fear and can’t trust any of the key people in your life, your bank manager may still say you’re rich but your experience may be so damaged that poverty might seem a good word to describe it. In that sense, poverty really can come upon anybody.

The question of why people become and stay poor is a controversial one, to say the least. It’s a huge subject.

There are three key metaphors that dominate a lot of thinking about it.

(1) The first is the metaphor of the desert.

People are poor because they don’t have enough. They don’t have enough money, food, good relationships, skills, education. This isn’t really anyone’s fault. It’s more about a problem of scarcity of resources or poor distribution. The solution is to give people more – in the short term more nutritious food and clean water, in the long term more education, more training in sustainable agriculture and healthy work and family patterns, more stable institutions, more access to credit and outlets for their skills. The desert metaphor motivates many non-poor to active involvement in relief and development, but it can lead to a quasi-colonial attitude that misses people’s humanity. It can assume an us-and-them where “we” are defined by what we have and “they” are defined by what they lack.

(2)     The second metaphor is favored by those who are disillusioned or angry about the naïveté of the desert metaphor.

They see the problem as not about scarcity but about sin. This second metaphor is that of the prison. Poverty is a kind of incarceration. Many see poverty as a prison in which people are put by others. They see the poor as kept in poverty by a widening circle of exploiters: by the local non-poor who siphon off resources and benefits that were intended for the poor, by local authorities who use blackmail and violence to rob the poor, and by local employers and traders who use their strong bargaining position to force the poor to sell their goods and labor for way below market value. Others see poverty as a prison in which people put themselves, either by passive characteristics such as laziness or lack of ambition or by more active destructive tendencies such as reckless behavior or substance addiction. The prison metaphor motivates many social justice and evangelistic responses, but it can get so caught up in social theory or theological paternalism that it can like the desert metaphor, miss people’s specific humanity. It can overlook the extraordinary ingenuity required to live in poverty and demonstrated by those poor people who survive.

(3)The third metaphor sees poverty as disease.

This regards poverty as a kind of sickness. Sickness is usually not something you’re born with, but something you can quickly pick up from those around you. Sickness is a kind of compromise between the metaphors of desert and prison. To use this metaphor one must always remember that the sickness lies fundamentally in relationships, communities and societies rather than in individuals. I think despite the stigma of the word disease it’s still potentially the most helpful metaphor of the three. Unlike the prison metaphor the language of disease isn’t about blame, but unlike the desert language it takes the complexity of poverty seriously. Disease language helps us recall that poverty, in some of its dimensions, can afflict even the circumstantially rich. A disease is a condition with a non-human root cause and physical, mental, social and spiritual symptoms, which nonetheless requires a very human response in every dimension. Like any other disease, that response is sometimes aimed at identifying and facilitating a cure, and sometimes focused on continuing to care when a cure is not perceivable. Either way it’s about balancing the general characteristics of the disease with its particular manifestation in each person and community, and realizing that physical change is only part of an ecology of relational, spiritual and communal dimensions of healing.