It Is Time For New Thinking About Poverty

Insanity

in·san·i·ty  \ in-ˈsa-nə-tē \

- Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

That is not the actual definition of insanity but it is a time tested understanding in our culture. If you hit you head on a brick wall and it hurts and you do it ten more times to see if it keeps hurting, that might be a sign of insanity.

I was reminded of this today by an item in Facebook's trending stories that linked to this article: Report: Inequality remains 50 years after Kerner Report. The Kerner Report was the result of the Kerner Commission which originally carried the unwieldy name The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and was organized in response to race riots. The article being passed around contains a lot of unsurprising statements:

Barriers to equality are posing threats to democracy in the U.S. as the country remains segregated along racial lines and child poverty worsens, says a study examining the nation 50 years after the release of the landmark 1968 Kerner Report.

The new report released Tuesday blames U.S. policymakers and elected officials, saying they're not doing enough to heed the warning on deepening poverty and inequality as highlighted by the Kerner Commission a half-century ago, and it lists a number of areas where the country has seen "a lack of or reversal of progress."

"Racial and ethnic inequality is growing worse. We're resegregating our housing and schools again," former U.S. Sen. Fred Harris of Oklahoma, a co-editor of the new report and last surviving member of the original Kerner Commission created by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. "There are far more people who are poor now than was true 50 years ago. Inequality of income is worse."

And so on. The report is long on bemoaning things like schools re-segregating, black homeownership getting worse, income inequality, etc. The "solutions" demanded by the report are about what anyone paying attention would expect:

The new report calls on the federal government and states to push for more spending on early childhood education and a $15 minimum wage by 2024. It also demands more regulatory oversight over mortgage leaders to prevent predatory lending, community policing that works with nonprofits in minority neighborhoods and more job training programs in an era of automation and emerging technologies.

More spending, more regulations, more sweetheart deals to "nonprofits" to keep "community organizers" employed and of course the ubiquitous $15 minimum wage, a favorite of people with no clue how economics and businesses work. I posted a slightly different take on Facebook:

So maybe the lesson here after half a century is that the solutions that we have tried: income redistribution, forced desegregation, affirmative action, etc. have not worked so instead of doubling down on policies that failed and in many ways made things worse, we should look for different solutions?

We have tried spending trillions in alleged anti-poverty measures and income redistribution and mostly succeeded in cementing generational poverty. We tried forced desegregation and people just keep fleeing urban areas entirely, meaning that blacks and whites just don't seem to attend the same schools. We are drowning in diversity officers and multicultural centers and anti-racism programs and the only people who seem to benefit are those that have learned to game the system for their own advancement. We give people funds that they can use as conveniently as possible to buy food and 20% of their purchases go to pop and salty snacks with soft drinks the largest single category of spending for food stamps, at the same time that obesity and obesity related diseases like diabetes are epidemic among the poor.

It is pretty clear that half a century of fighting poverty and racism, real and imagined, in the way "progressives" have demanded has not only wasted a lot of money and not worked, it has actually made things worse. Maybe we can try something different?

• With almost 3/4 of black births to unwed mothers, maybe we should stop subsidizing behaviors that lead to unwed motherhood and stop providing incentives to poor decision-making?
• Instead of pouring money into four year degrees that don't provide any job skills and saddle students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt while enriching universities, we instead focus on vocational schools? Learning a trade will move people out of poverty, sinking them in debt to get a degree in Intersectional Queer Theory won't and just makes them dumber.
• Maybe structure food and other aid programs to reward people for transitioning from dependency to work instead of punishing them for trying to better themselves and giving them incentives for destructive behavior?

You get the idea. I don't pretend to have all of the solutions but I do know what has not worked and it is the exact sort of stuff we keep being harangued about: arbitrarily raising the minimum wage, more bureaucratic oversight over every aspect of our lives, spending even more money on an education system that already consumes an enormous amount of money and is giving us a worse result from year to year. The very people who clamor the loudest about these issues are also the ones who are the most dug in when it comes to opposing new ideas. Just look at the response to President Trump suggesting replacing a part of the EBT/food stamps benefit with prepackaged nutritional foods. You would have thought he was suggesting we force feed poor kids drain cleaner.

After half a century of trying it the "progressive" way, it is time to admit that it didn't work and give some actual new ideas a chance. Doing the same thing we have been doing is guaranteed to do one thing, give us more of the same and this country can't afford that any longer.

Will we step back up?

Back in the day most of the social welfare in this country was handled by the church. I work with a lot of hospitals and it is amazing how many of them are affiliated with a church organization, whether Roman Catholic, Jewish, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, etc. Before the modern welfare state the church was probably the single biggest source of social services. Over the last century, starting in the aftermath of the Great Depression, that role gradually has moved from the church to the government. First with the “New Deal” and later the “Great Society”, the American social contract changed from a private sector focus to a decidedly security based and government focused arrangement. As the social contract has changed, the church has quietly slid into the background and become more inward focused. Whether the church was pushed out or abdicated is a topic for another day but the end result is what I am concerned with.

The results of a century of social welfare spending are stark. The government is broke. There simply is no money and no political appetite for higher taxes. In Michigan the state has announced that cash welfare assistance will be capped at 48 months. For quite a few families this means that they have already exhausted their cash assistance and are being cut off immediately with more to follow each month. Michigan has been one of the hardest hit states and still finds itself in a pretty dire situation. This means that many families are going to be in trouble. Sure you can say they brought it on themselves and only have themselves to blame but will the church look the other way? The major Federal entitlement programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid, are eating up an ever larger portion of the Federal budget and are running toward financial ruin. As a result we find ourselves in a situation unique in my lifetime where there appears to be an appetite for real entitlement change and a potential dramatic reordering of the social contract in America. Political conservatives are giddy with the prospects of the 2012 election.

In 2011 we as the church find ourselves in an odd situation. The church, while still a source for social welfare services has largely been removed from the role of being a primary provider for the needy. Sure there are still lots of groups who have that as a primary mission (the Salvation Army for example) and a lot of organizations like Samaritans Purse focus on disaster relief, often overseas but for the most part mercy ministry is an add on or an afterthought or completely absent. Perhaps a church might sponsor a food pantry or a denomination may have a relief group like the Mennonite Central Committee but generally speaking among American churches the primary focus is not on social welfare but is on the internal operations of the church. More specifically on the Sunday morning service and all that goes with that and then also on the other programs of the church (Sunday school, VBS, small group/Bible studies, etc.). This has worked up until recently in our society because for all of the rancor and disdain directed at “the gubmint” the reality on the ground is that the social welfare system has made it much easier for the church to be inward focused and prioritize the sustaining of the local church instead of serving the needs of the poor. For example, in 2009 the Southern Baptist Convention reported total receipts of nearly $12,000,000,000 from its approximately 45,000 churches or about a quarter of a million per church on average (obviously a few really big churches skew that number!). The vast majority of that giving stays within the church. Christians bring their “tithe” to the “storehouse” and that is where the church “stores” those offerings, in salaries, in buildings and in bank accounts.

We have been comfortable with this set up for decades, even if we didn’t admit it. Much as we love to hate the government, we also love being able to spend money on ourselves. We comfort ourselves with verses like these:

For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. (Mark 14:17)

For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. (2 Thessalonians 3:10)

We provide ourselves theological cover and likewise view any sort of call to social justice as skirting the line between justification by faith alone and a “works righteousness”. We are told the church should be about the business of preaching (i.e. sermons to believers) and worship (i.e. singing songs on Sunday morning) and the occasional fellowship meal. Never mind that in the very earliest days of the church, when it faced the daunting combination of a brand new religion that was exploding in size and being persecuted, it was also taking the time to feed people in need (Acts 6:1-6) and ensure that Christians had their material needs met (Acts 2:44-45). Also never mind that Jesus placed an enormous emphasis on how we treat “the least of these’ (Matthew 25:40 and the converse Matthew 25:45). In spite of this the overwhelming majority of evangelical Christians are also the most energized and reliable conservative voting block. I am starting to wonder if we are prepared for the results of what many of us are working toward.

Defeat Obama in 2012! Cut Medicaid and Medicare! Overturn Roe v. Wade! Get rid of welfare! Victory for conservatives!

Um. Then what do we do?

Don’t misconstrue what I am saying. I think that the social welfare state in America is on its face an unconstitutional usurpation and a grotesque overstepping of the powers delegated to the Federal government. I likewise think that the secular social welfare system is dehumanizing, inefficient and has directly led to generational poverty especially among minorities. I have no tolerance for Christians who use the faith as cover for conservative economic policies, even though I support those self-same policies, but I have even less use for starry eyed utopian socialism dressed up in Christianese. I believe abortion to be legalized infanticide that should be outlawed just as we outlaw people shooting one another. My conservative credentials are above reproach. My question has to do with the aftermath. What happens if we “win” and we are faced with the question: “Now what?” Will the same conservative evangelical Christians who consistently vote Republican and rail against the Federal government be ready to step in if the social welfare state is dismantled? Will the poor needing assistance with heating bills, the hungry in need of food, the pregnant teen in need of support find it in the church? Or will the church be to busy playing church and putting on our religious theater to be bothered?

Will we be ready to step back up?

We better be.

Surrendering social justice to the liberals

Pick an issue. Any issue (almost) and conservative Christians will go charging into battle against their liberal foes. Not only will conservatives rise up to defend their position against liberals, often we seek out fights if none are forthcoming. When Rob Bell tries to redefine the concept of hell, Christian conservatives came out of the woodwork to squash him (and probably helped double his book sales). Suggest that maybe gay marriage isn’t something the church needs to concern itself with and plan on getting jumped on with both feet. On virtually every issue there are defenders of the faith and apologists of all stripes willing to stand in the breach….

With one major exception…

When it comes to poverty, to caring for the poor, the widow, the orphan, the sex slave, the imprisoned? In that fight, an issue with far deeper Biblical basis than squabbling over U.S. politics or Ten Commandments monuments or prayer in secular schools? In that fight, the conservative often goes silent or mumbles angrily about liberalism or shrugs it off with "you will always have the poor with you". Guys who once looked like Richard the Lionhearted turn into Brave Sir Robin. Even in churches where there is some care and concern for the poor, it seems to be an "add on", something else we do when we aren't listening to sermons or having VBS or working on building improvements for "the church". In our quest for doctrinal precision and standing fast for the faith, making sure people understand the eternal nature of hell and justification by faith alone, it often at least appears that we cannot be bothered to worry about issues that fall under the umbrella of “social justice”.

We cannot claim to take the Bible seriously and ignore the places the Bible makes demands on us that make us uncomfortable. It is far more comfortable for me to argue the fine points of theology over coffee (or better yet safely behind my computer keyboard) than it is to get out in the unpredictable world of people, especially people with problems. Fleeing the field when human suffering in this life comes up but rising to the challenge when eternal suffering is the topic is inconsistent and disingenuous.

That isn’t to say that most of the “solutions” put forth by our liberal brothers are rock solid. Income redistribution, government subsidies, etc., the sort of stuff advocated by the Jim Wallis crowd, have done more to create a perpetual dependent class and incentivized behavior that leads to generational poverty than any evil Wall Street tycoons. So I am not advocating for liberal social engineering dressed up in religious language. I am saying that we need to not only win the war of ideas but put action to our words in the lives of real people with real needs. When Biblically orthodox, visible leaders like David Platt start to (very gently) question why we are so unconcerned with human suffering, they get shouted down as promoting a works righteousness. That is not even remotely true but it allows us to brush off calls to look up from our keyboards and books to see the real suffering of people in the world, people who need our love and our help more than we need a new building or more denominational bureaucrats.

Conservative, “Bible believing” Christians should be leading the way when it comes to matters of human suffering, not fleeing the field to hide behind our orthodox creeds and confessions.

Can we all please stop using Jesus to advance our political positions?

This is a somewhat political post but in light of a few conversations on “What Would Jesus Cut” (i.e. in the U.S. Federal budget, as if Jesus spent a lot of time writing policy papers on the proper role and scope of government in a free republic), I think it is appropriate to step back from the emotionalism and take a hard look at the topic of government spending and faith. While I am typically far more critical of my fellow conservative believers, I was inspired this morning to look at some of the statements made by Christians on the political left and what better place to look than the leading voice of that group, Jim Wallis of Sojourners.

Please let me be clear. I have no reasonable doubt that Jim Wallis is a believer. Certainly a believer that gets a lot of stuff wrong (as I do) but also one who appears to love Jesus and who is often correct in his criticisms of the political right. Where he often stumbles is when he moves away from critiquing the “Religious Right” and advocates replacing it with the “Religious Left”. This is from his February essay, Budget Cuts and Bad Faith :

I believe that vaccines that save children’s lives; bed nets that protect them from malaria; and food that keeps their families from starving are more important to Jesus than tax cuts for the rich; bigger subsidies for corporations; and more weapons in a world already filled with conflict. I also believe that tested and effective domestic programs that clearly help to lift people out of poverty are more reflective of the compassion of Christ than tax and spending policies that make the super-rich even richer. And I don’t believe, as the Republicans keep saying, that the best way to help everybody is to keep helping the super-rich. That’s not smart economics and, as we say in the evangelical community, it’s not biblical. So many of us in the faith community are ready to make a moral argument against the proposed budget cuts to our members of Congress, especially to those who claim to be people of faith.

Very eloquent and impassioned to be sure. I would agree in part and have said so. There seems to be an odd disconnect between evangelicals who claim to follow the Lamb who was slain, the Prince of Peace, and at the same time support military spending and the death penalty without question. I also am a big fan of vaccines for children, bed nets and food for the poor. Whether that is something that is properly the responsibility of the Federal government is a separate issue. Where I am questioning the whole line of Jim’s thinking is the reliance on the Federal government to facilitate the execution of justice as a Kingdom priority. There is a line that is crossed when we start to see the secular government being assigned as proxy for the church.

There are two problems with this theory of government as proxy for the church. One is theological. The Bible spends a great deal of time speaking about the poor and the responsibility of Christians to aid those in need, especially among fellow believers (see Acts 4:35 as well as the multiple places where we see Paul taking up a collection for the church in Jerusalem). The Bible is clear that we are called to care, sacrificially, willingly and joyfully, for the least of these, to be concerned about the poor, to not have Christians in need in the Body, to visit the widow and orphan in their affliction. The Bible says nothing about taking money away from people, believers and unbelievers alike, by confiscating that money through taxes and under the threat of imprisonment and giving it to other people as a means to alleviate poverty. It seems that the Biblical message is that poverty is one of the signs of a sinful world, something that is never going to be “conquered” but something that requires sacrifice on the part of Christians to help one another. Advocating taxing the “super-rich” to support the poor is an abdication of our responsibility and without Biblical support.

The other problem is practical. It doesn’t work. At all. In fact, it is pretty apparent to all but the most dense that the “War on Poverty”, i.e. transferring wealth from one person to another after filtering it through a bureaucracy and doing so under the threat of imprisonment, has been not only a failure but in many ways has made things worse for the poor.

Those on the political Left certainly have emotion on their side so we on the Right have to rely on old fashioned facts and reason. For example, this is from a great article this morning from the conservative Heritage Foundation, Morning Bell: How Many Trillions Must We Waste on the War on Poverty?:

Which American politician said the following? “The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” Had to be a mean-spirited Tea Party conservative, right? Wrong. President Franklin Roosevelt included these words in his 1935 State of the Union Address.

Twenty-nine years later, the American welfare state was still relatively small, consuming only 1.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). The American family was also still intact, with 93 percent of children born into stable families. But then President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty happened. Forty-five years and $16 trillion later, thanks to big government, poverty is winning. Thanks to over $900 billion a year (over 5 percent of GDP) of spending on over 70 means-tested welfare programs spread over 13 government agencies, more than 40 million Americans currently receive food stamps, poverty is higher today than it was in the 1970s, and 40 percent of all children are born outside of marriage.

One of the cruel ironies of pie-in-the-sky thinking about the Federal government fixing poverty is that not only does it not help the poor but it actually promotes generational poverty. I read somewhere else this morning, from the delightfully named Mortimer Zuckerman, that some 50,000,000 Americans are receiving some sort of tax-payer funded program (food stamps, unemployment, etc.). That is 1 of every 6 Americans and that is the fruit of 45 years of trillions of dollars in a misguided and failed “War On Poverty”. Not only is the church not called to care for the poor through political means, those very means tend to make things worse!

Christians should and must do more to be selfless and care for the least of these. We need to stop seeing one another as competitors but rather as co-laborers. We really need to question our support for, not mere acceptance of, military spending and capital punishment. We really, really need to stop confusing the church and the state.

Conservative Evangelicals Are In Large Part Responsible For Big Government

How did Evangelical Christians, so proud of our political conservatism, get to the point of effectively abdicating the care of the poor to the political left and surrendering the cause of mercy to the government that we then rail against for trying to do what we should be doing?

We have turned over care of the fatherless to the child welfare system. Widows are relegated to being cared for the Federal government for income, health care and food. The homeless, the drug users, the prostitutes are all problems for the police to handle. Keep them out of our way and more importantly keep them out of our sight. The last thing we want our kids to see on our way to church wearing our Sunday best is some bum or a hooker. We need to focus on worshipping Jesus, not on the downtrodden that probably deserve to be on the streets anyway.

Where did we lose our way?

This is by no means a call for larger government. Quite the opposite. The net result of the Federal government’s “war on poverty” has been generationalized poverty and an enormous welfare state that has done nothing to alleviate poverty. Disincentivizing work and achievement and subsidizing poverty has led to an entitlement nation. Bigger government doesn’t lead to more income equity, it just leads to more misery equity for everyone.

Conversely, free markets are clearly the better choice for the greatest number of people. Creating incentive to work hard, to save and invest leads to greater prosperity for more people. As an economic policy, I see no contradiction whatsoever between Christianity and free market capitalism. The other option, a social welfare state, replaces the church with Caesar in the care of the poor and downtrodden and is inherently inefficient and proven to worsen poverty over the long term, not help it.

But being in favor of free markets is not enough. Voting Republican does not get us off the hook. There will always be those who are not able to thrive or even survive in a free market environment and saying "tough luck" to them is not an option. In trading away the mutual misery of a welfare state, free markets inherently will have people falling through the cracks. In a competitive marketplace, some people win, some people lose. Some catch all the breaks or make breaks for themselves but some people don’t. I am the most conservative person I know, a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of guy but I fully recognize that a child born to a single teenage mother in the inner city of Detroit is going to have a much harder time being successful than the child born to an intact upper class family. How much more so for the orphan in the Sudan or the child sold into prostitution in Thailand. What to do about those that are unable to succeed is the elephant in the room for evangelicals.

While we are smug about our superior political position and cast aspersions on political liberals, conservative Christians have effectively abdicated our responsibility to the poor, widows and orphans to the very government we love to hate and complain about (thanks to Jason Anspach for this insight). Why are we surprised and outraged that the inherently inefficient government is inefficient at caring for the poor and orphans that we are not caring for? More importantly, why have the redeemed people of Christ left this important task by and large up to the very government we despise? At least liberals in their misguided way and with their solutions that make things worse are at least concerned about the poor. Granted, many churches do a lot for the poor as do many individual Christians but I think by and large if you look at where the focus of the Christian church is, it is more often than not on sustaining church organizations, whether that is local churches (programs, staff, buildings, etc.) or parachurch ministries.

When Paul was commended to take the Gospel to the Gentiles, he was encouraged to remember the poor: “Only, they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do. (Galatians 2:10). The distribution of care to the widows in the church was such a big deal that when it became contentious, the church called seven men with good reputations who were “full of the Spirit and of wisdom” to care for the widows (Acts 6:3), including Stephen “a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 6:5). This was not the creation of the “office” of deacon, it was reflective of how important this whole topic is, caring for those who are most in need and most vulnerable. The focus of the early church was on the proclaiming of the Gospel to the lost and the care for the needy. The focus of the church today is the church.

Some may reply (as I would have) that we show mercy by preaching the Gospel to the lost. I say amen to that but there is far more to the justice and mercy ministry of the church than people who already Christians are listening to the Word and being content with that. Polls consistently show that many, if not most, people who claim to be evangelical Christians rarely or never share their faith with others. So if you are not preaching the Word and you are not caring for the poor, explain to me how exactly you are following Jesus? By dressing up and going to church? By listening to sermons? By grudgingly putting a couple of bucks in the plate when it is handed to you? I will be the first to admit that I haven’t been terribly faithful here. I used to content myself with teaching in the church and homeschooling our kids and thinking that was being a faithful servant of Jesus but now when I see the pictures of children without much hope around the world and look at what I have done to help them, it is like a punch in the stomach. I can no longer hide behind God’s sovereignty as a cover for my inaction.

The words of James are a searing indictment of the church and the general apathy of many of us who claim the name of Christ but reject any claim He has on our lives.

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (James 1: 22-27)

Anyone who thinks he has the promise of life everlasting in the future and no calling to be a follower of Christ in deed as well as word in the present doesn’t really understand what the Bible is saying to us in the first place. “Hey thanks for heaven Jesus, I will check back in with you when I die” is not the mantra of a faithful, born-again follower of Jesus. Take up your cross daily does not equate to show up at church once a week.

I have been guilty of storing up treasure on earth for too long and I am fixing to do something about it, not because I think it will make me more righteous but because the One who is righteous, the One who paid for my sin and redeemed me from an eternal hell and imputed His righteousness to me has commanded me to store up treasure in heaven. Jesus didn’t spend His time hanging around in the religious establishments talking about theology and planning out budgets, He was out among those that society rejected: the lepers, the poor, the lost. We who claim to follow Him ought to be doing the same instead of hiding in our sanitary church buildings.

A tale of two sins

From Radical:

So what is the difference between someone who willfully indulges in sexual pleasures while ignoring the Bible on moral purity and someone who willfully indulges in the selfish pursuit of more and more material possessions while ignoring the Bible on caring for the poor? The difference is that one involves a social taboo in the church and the other involves the social norm in the church. (David Platt, Radical, pg. 111)

Ouch. We are quick to condemn sexual immorality, whether extra-marital sex or homosexuality but boy when it comes to something that hits a little closer to our affluent middle-class values, we seem to clam up. The Bible is every bit as harsh and unequivocal in its condemnation of ignoring the poor as it is on sexual immorality but we accept one and not the other. The church makes it easy on us, drop a check in the plate and feel like you are doing your part. Then go out to lunch in your nice car and go home to your nice house without a thought to those who are starving all around us and all around the world.

Case in point was something I read about a "megachurch" in my hometown of Toledo celebrating a milestone and making plans to raise additional funds:

...the goal is to raise $4.5 million by 2013 - $1.5 million for each of the two new sites, $500,000 to pay down debt on the West Toledo property, and $1 million to give to local, regional, and Third World ministries.

Give them credit for raising money for unnamed ministries but the real goal is building a bigger empire.

It seems incomprehensible that a reading of the Scriptures would lend itself to multi-million dollar building projects but the sad truth is that much of what we understand as Christianity in America is a social construct more than a Biblical reflection. We turn to the traditions of our culture and fit the Bible in where we can (and sometimes cram it in where we cannot).

I think David Platt raises a troubling and unanswerable question in this paragraph. The sin of ignoring the poor is a very real one and one that is as unacceptable among the followers of Christ as sexual immorality because it is associated with many of the same core sinful attitudes: selfishness, hard heartedness, pride, idolatry. Granted, Christians by and large are very generous when it comes to giving compared to unbelievers but when you look at where those dollars go and how relatively little most Christians give away, it is more than a little shameful. Being a little better than unbelievers is hardly something we should hang our collective hats on. Why then is it so easy to stand behind a pulpit and rail against sexual promiscuity and sexual deviancy but seemingly so difficult to address poverty and Christian responsibility to the poor? Perhaps, as David suggests, because one is a comfortable topic among our middle-class churches and the other hits a little too close to home and makes people uncomfortable.

The implications for what David is saying, if true and I think they are, raises some very troubling questions for the church.

Mercy ministry and the local church

Les Prouty at Reformation Faith Today posted In Praise of the parachurch?. His point is that the “parachurch” organizations can fill a mercy role that the local church should not fill. In other words, the local church should not involve itself in things like soup kitchens because its mission is the Gospel. I like Les even if he does dribble water on babies, but that whole line of reasoning kind of nagged at me and I think it is pretty common among my fellow Reformed brothers.

It is often said that the role of the “local church” is the ministry of Word and Sacrament. Calvin is famously quoted as labeling as the marks of a “true church” as “The Word rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered”. Along with that comes the addition of properly exercising church discipline. Part of why I can’t stand listening to the White Horse Inn anymore is the constant mantra of “Word and Sacrament” as if that is the real key to the gathering of the church. Any time you list the signs of a “true church” and don’t start with or even mention love you are missing the key right out of the gate.

The purpose of the local church, as I understand what Les is saying, is to be the place where the Word is rightly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered. Caring for the poor is the role of individual Christians and not of the corporate body of Christ.

Is that correct?

Can we and should we separate the lives of individual Christians and the life of the church? I guess at its core this gets down to the nagging question of what exactly is the local church, an entity with a life and purpose of its own or a gathering of Christians in a particular locale?

It seems that there is an awful lot of fellowship in the New Testament church and a preoccupation with caring for the widows and the poor as an outworking of loving our brothers (Acts 2: 44-45; 1 Tim 5: 9-10; Acts 6: 1-3; Rom 15: 25-28; Gal 2:10; James 2: 14-17; Acts 20: 34-35; Acts 4: 32-37). The early church seems awfully concerned with mercy ministry, and it seems to be something done corporately as well as individually (see the above passages especially Acts 4: 32-37 where we see the leaders of the church distributing to those in need). I am not sure it is a function as such of the local gathering of the church (because I am not sure that the local gathering of the church has “functions” in the first place) but it certainly seems to be a focus and a natural and proper outgrowth of the “love one another” attitude.

What about preaching the Word and the administration of the Sacraments?

There doesn’t seem to be much about preaching within the church. There is certainly an emphasis on the Apostle’s teaching (Acts 2:42). There is “one another” teaching and edification among all of the brothers (1 Cor 14: 26-33). Preaching a prepared sermon to the local church? Not so much. Many of us like preaching. I like preaching. Many of us think the church needs more and better preaching. I am not as sure that preaching as we understand and practice it is something that happened in the local gathering of the church. We might feel that we need more preaching for our spiritual health, but that is an argument based on our own failings, not an argument that preaching monologue sermons is something the New Testament church should be engaged in.

I am convinced that the church broke bread together when they met but I am far less convinced that it was a ritualistic observation such as we have today. In fact what Paul was complaining about in 1 Corinthians 11 is that there was social stratification when the church gathered, and that because of this it was not the Lord’s Supper that they observed because some ate like gluttons and drank to excess while others went hungry. I think the unworthiness that Paul speaks of here has nothing to do with church membership in good standing and everything to do with what Paul is talking about, i.e. social stratification when the church gathered for the supper. It seems odd that we have taken what appears as a full meal among believers, both in the institution of it during the Last Supper and subsequent mentions of it later in the New Testament, and turned it into a ritualistic nibble of bread or crackers and thimble sized glasses of wine or grape juice. You would have to chug a ton of those little cups of wine to get even a little buzz, much less get drunk. (I read a comment on Facebook where someone referenced people passing out on the communion table, as if the early church had the ubiquitous table with “Do This In Remembrance Of Me” engraved in it!)

As far as baptism goes, I see nothing that would indicate that it is something that is reserved to, a function of or even took place in a local church. I wrote about this in an earlier post, Are baptism and the Lord's Supper an (exclusive) function of the local church.

What about Acts 6? Doesn’t that support the idea that ministers and by extension the local church should not get involved in mercy ministry because they are supposed to be preaching the Word? The apostles didn’t want to get entangled with the daily food distribution for widows, not because it wasn’t important or a function of the gathered church, but because they were out daily preaching the Gospel in the temple and from house to house. I think their concern is at least as much that this not be missed as it was that it interfered with their evangelism. They also knew that it still had to happen and that the Body of Christ should minister in acts of mercy to one another. So they appointed seven men including Stephen and Phillip to take care of it. It is interesting to note that Stephen and Phillip are both also engaged in proclaiming the Word to unbelievers later in Acts, so I don’t think that they saw caring for the poor to be an impediment or beneath them (nor did Paul, see Gal 2:10 and Acts 20: 34-35). I think it is highly suspect for a local pastor to think that they have no responsibility as a minister to care for the poor. I also think it is unhealthy and perhaps even unscriptural for ministers to eschew mercy ministry so that they can spend even more time in their studies preparing sermons. The apostles travelled all over the world preaching the Gospel to the lost but I don’t think they spent much time in their church offices reading commentaries. Paul worked to support himself financially and also so that he could help the poor (Acts 20: 34-35).

So I guess I would object to any number of the underlying presuppositions regarding the role of the local church in mercy ministry. Let me rephrase that. If the local church as we understand it is correctly set up, then this makes sense. However, if the local church is not a proper reflection of the local gathering of the church we see in the New Testament, which is my position, then I would say that we have an unhealthy preoccupation with church functions that don’t seem to appear in the Word of God and that conversely we are far less faithful in doing what we do see the local gathering of the church doing in the New Testament. Can it be that churches that don’t get the Gospel right (Roman Catholicism) or even out-and-out heretical groups (mormons) have a view of mercy ministry that is more in line with the Bible than some orthodox Evangelical churches?