Serving the Poor: The Importance of Relationships

In our last post, we contrasted the glaring contradiction between how the early church cared for the poor and the church today. Though the early church was known throughout the Roman empire as radical lovers of the poor, this is certainly not the case for the church today. Christ has given His church the responsibility to share His gospel, described as “good news to the poor”, with all people, yet today’s church has lost sight of this call. What steps must the church take today to realize that its message truly should be good news to the poor?

If the answer to this dilemma was conducting a periodic serving event, this would be an easy problem to solve. Church-sponsored serving projects at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen every few months are certainly a step in the right direction, and short term mission trips are to be applauded. Yet these types of endeavors, although of value, fall far short of the lifestyle of serving that Christ desires for His followers. Though these occasional events make us feel good about ourselves, how much lasting impact do these things accomplish in the world around us? Too often, the sporadic church-sponsored serving event does little but further insulate us from the plight of the poor by appeasing our consciences in the midst of our materialism. Steps need to be taken in today’s church to build a lifestyle of serving in its members that far transcends the sporadic serving event that characterizes our efforts today.

Nor can the mission of the church to serve the poor be fulfilled by mere charitable giving. Instead of individuals in the church housing, clothing, and feeding the poor themselves, these functions have increasingly become the domain of the various institutions and parachurch ministries that dot the Christian landscape. Our “providing for the poor” has been reduced to food drives at the church, where members bring the raw materials and the institutional employees do the dirty work of distributing. In this scenario, the churchgoer is able to feel good about his participation in “ending poverty” while sparing him the uncomfortableness of a one-on-one encounter with those in need. Similarly, independent charities can serve the same function to the wealthy suburbanite as the occasional serving event, as they appease our consciences while insulating us from the suffering of the poor. In both cases, the institution does the dirty work while the individual simply throws money or goods at the problem. Yet as Martin Luther King said, “true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.”

Christ’s intent for His followers is not the performance of sporadic acts of charity that serve our consciences more than the poor for whom it is intended. Neither should the church be a faceless distribution center where the poor receive what the rich have dumped. Sadly, this common approach leaves no one transformed and forms no radical new community. Rather, the church needs to remove itself, in words of Shane Claiborne, from “distant acts of charity that serve to legitimize apathetic lifestyles of good intentions but rob us of the gift of community.” Christ’s call to the church is that its members would not only open their wallets to the needy, but their lives, their hearts, and their homes to them as well.

As Shane Claiborne once said, “the problem is not that we don’t care about the poor; it’s that we don’t know the poor.” How true this is. Sporadic acts of charity and donations are wonderful things, yet these practices are limited in value because they are incapable of building relationships with those in need. This is the biggest limitation to traditional models of compassion ministries: they fail to build relationships with those in need. God’s kingdom is primarily spread by His followers loving one another; these loving relationships prove to the world that Christ’s message is true (John 13:35, 17:23). If in fact God’s kingdom is built by His followers “loving one another” in the context of relationship, how can we spread the good news to the poor without doing the same? As Paul says in I Corinthians 13, “though I give all my good to feed the poor, if I have not love, I am nothing.” This is what compelled the early church to bring the poor into their homes; even more than meeting their physical needs, they sought to demonstrate the love of the Savior first hand to those in need. Spreading the kingdom in the face of poverty is not by done by random or distant acts of charity; it is spread “like a mustard seed,” through one life at a time and through one relationship at a time. For the church is called not only to meet the needs of the poor, but to build loving relationships with them as well.

In our next post, we will explore the concept of the "good soil" on which today's church must be built if it is to again prosper in our day.