But over the years working in various churches I’ve noticed that the desire to feed people and help those in need often comes with certain assumptions about the people we are helping. In several churches and even non-profits that I’ve worked with, I’ve heard many people express concerns that we are being “taken advantage of.” There are constant conversations about how to guard against people who want to “cheat the system.” The assumption seems to be that a significant number of the people coming to us for aid are not really in need and are using our services to avoid having to work or pay for their own food or bills. I’ve even seen this concern lead to good ministries getting cut out of fear of being taken advantage of. It is so frustrating to see people who really care and want to help people let their fear stop them from actually doing anything.
I’ve come to realize that these fears come from how our society thinks about wealth and poverty. Our culture aligns wealth with morality. We think wealthy people earned their wealth because they are good hardworking people. This idea has invaded our churches as well. In it’s most extreme form it manifests as the prosperity gospel, which teaches that God rewards strong faith and good deeds with wealth and prosperity, but even many churches that don’t teach prosperity gospel associate wealth with goodness and God’s blessing. Of course the reverse of this is that if someone is poor it must be because they are lazy and immoral. If wealth is the result of hard work and God’s blessing, poverty must be the result of laziness and God’s punishment for bad deeds. This creates a strong prejudice against those who live in poverty, and when we let that prejudice invade our churches, even the most generous among us can fall prey to fears of being taken advantage of. The problem of course is that poverty isn’t the result of personal immorality. Poverty is systemic. It’s the result of lack of access to education, healthcare, living wages, and housing. It’s the result of exploitation of the most vulnerable by the most powerful. Poverty is a cycle, passed down through the generations due to a lack of access to resources and a lack of protections from exploitation.
We often talk in church about the need to help people in need. But far too often the solutions we come up with are only band-aids. Feeding people, giving them clothes and shelter, paying people’s bills, those things are absolutely necessary because people are in need now. But those things do nothing to make it so people don’t need food again tomorrow or even a year from now. While we’re feeding people, we also need to be advocating for living wages so that families can afford food. We need to be advocating for equal access to quality education. We need to be advocating for affordable healthcare so that people don’t go bankrupt from unexpected medical expenses. Our churches need to be working for societal change that will break the system of poverty.
But our churches are never going to do those things until we challenge their prejudices. We can tell our churches that we need to do more than just feed people, that we need to advocate for a living wage, but they’re not going to want to do that as long as they believe that poverty is the result of moral failure. We have to start by educating our churches on the causes of poverty. We have to help our churches understand that we live in a system that privileges certain people over others. The powerful in our society profit from keeping people in poverty and that’s not going to change until we challenge them and tear down the system.
Jesus didn’t just teach us to feed people, he also taught us to challenge unjust systems. A few days before his arrest and crucifixion, Jesus went to the temple in Jerusalem and overturned the tables of the money changers. The money changers were taking advantage of the requirements to perform sacrifices in the temple. They charged exorbitant fees for changing the Roman currency into the temple currency that was required to purchase the animals for sacrifice. The animal sellers overcharged for their animals, knowing that the animals had to be purchased in the temple to ensure they were unblemished. They were profiting from cheating people, and the system put the most burden on poor people. So Jesus turned over their tables and sent them running in protest of an unjust system.
Feeding people is good. It is necessary because people are going hungry right now. But while we’re feeding people, we also need to be doing something about the unjust system that leads to them being hungry in the first place.
The Presbyterian Peacemaking Program provides a daily lectionary of scriptures based on themes of peace and peacemaking. Over the course of 2019-20 I’ll be basing some of my blogs on one or more of the scriptures from each week’s lectionary. If you would like to follow along in the lectionary with me, here are next week’s scriptures:
Sunday – Exodus 6:28-7:7
Monday – Numbers 7:1-11
Tuesday – Hosea 2:14-20
Wednesday – Psalm 32
Thursday – John 3:1-17
Friday – Romans 3:21-26
Saturday – Philippians 4:10-13