Caring For The Poor: The Early Church vs. Today's Church

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus asks His followers, “What are you doing more than others?” (Matt. 5:47). Centuries later, this question still haunts the church. In our last post, we discussed how little, if any difference exists between the lives of today’s “Christ followers” and the world around them. Yet in the early church, a striking difference between them and the world around them would be readily apparent. In the eyes of any first century Roman, the difference between the “followers of the Way” and the pagan world around them would be clear and unmistakable; in no area was this contrast greater than in their love and care for the poor. How ironic that in the church-activity saturated lifestyle of today’s American Christian, time spent with the poor is conspicuously absent. For more than any other description or characteristic, serving and caring for the poor defined the life of an early Christian.

The early church was known throughout the empire as the selfless ones who took it upon themselves to feed the poor, house the oppressed, and care for the underprivileged. The list of persons supported by the early church was enormous; they cared for the elderly, widows, orphans, prisoners, those who suffered shipwreck, and those who lost their livelihoods due to their faith. The common descriptor of the first century Christian was that of caring for the poor, marginalized, and oppressed as they would their own family. Even the pagan skeptic Julian confessed, “the godless Galileans feed not only their poor but ours as well.”

Throughout the pages of the New Testament, we see that serving and providing for the poor was to be the guiding principle for Christ’s followers. Providing for the needy was the main mission of the early church to those outside their community (Gal. 2:10). The first official church ministry was to feed the poor (Acts 6:1-6). In fact, the Bible teaches that the poor are the primary beneficiaries of the good news of the gospel (James 2:5). When asked what the gospel meant, John the Baptist responded: “anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none” (Luke 3:11). Similarly, James tells us what the Christian faith is when boiled down to its essence: “Pure religion is this: to visit the orphan and widow in their affliction” (James 1:21). In some of the most terrifying words of the New Testament, Jesus tells his followers that those who will inherit eternal life are those who provide food for the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, and visit the sick and the prisoner (Matt. 25:34-40). Clearly, the abundant teaching of the New Testament is that the gospel is good news to the poor.

The early church took these teachings seriously, and attempted to live them out as an integral part of their worship. As they did so, they did not settle for merely meeting their physical needs of the needy, but by welcoming them into their homes, feeding, clothing, and housing them as they shared with them the good news of Christ. For in the early church, the gospel was indeed “good news to the poor” (Isaiah 61:1).

Yet how different things are today. This ethos of providing for the poor has been long lost in the church today. Though today’s American Christian might agree in theory with the church’s mandate to serve the needy, their actions too often speak otherwise. For the vast majority of us, serving the poor has been reduced to an occasional church-sponsored serving event rather than a lifestyle of serving the disenfranchised that characterized the early church. In a survey done by Shane Claiborne, he asked participants who identified themselves as “strong followers of Jesus” whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Not surprisingly, nearly 80% agreed with this statement. Later in the survey, he asked that same group of self-identified strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2% said that they did. Though many of us sense the importance of coming to the aid of those in need, few of us actually get around to doing it. Today, we’ve come to believe that caring for the poor among us is merely an attitude of the heart rather than a choosing of a lifestyle.

But how can it be any other way in the face of our American schedule? Take our already crowded day timers, add Sunday morning church, add weekly small group meetings, add volunteering in the church to the mix, and there’s little time for anyone outside of one’s own family, let alone for the needy. Combine the craziness of our schedules with the middle class neighborhoods in which most of us live, and our contact with the poor and needy among us is a rarity that few believers ever have the opportunity to engage in. It is a special event that must be scheduled, usually weeks to months in advance, shoehorned into an already jam-packed schedule. The net result is a church that has a heart for the poor, but no hands for the poor, insulated from the needs of the world in our detached Christian ghettos.

So what must the church do to begin to address its mandate to care for the poor? We will begin to explore this in our next post.