Deadbeat Mother Church

 Once upon a time, charity meant something good. What comes to mind is A Christmas Carol, one of my favorite stories of all time. I mostly like that story because I love Christmas, but Dickens in general hated just how much the rich of his time took advantage of the impoverished.  He particularly hated child labor, because children should be allowed to have childhoods.  He helped transform the popular perception of Christmas, making it about family and caring for those less fortunate.  

In that time period, where there were companies that made it their job to produce as much as they could as cheaply as they could and sell it for as much as they can, the other side of the spectrum had a respected Church, that took it upon itself to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, treat the sick. The Church did that because you know who else hated when the rich dehumanized the poor and used them to enrich themselves? 

Jesus. 

The disparity between the richest and the poorest in today's American society is greater than the disparity was in France, just prior to the French Revolution. Prior to Ronald Reagan and his disaster of an economic policy, after FDR had put things in motion to enrich the middle class, a person could get a basic job, even if they dropped out of high school, and make enough to buy a house, a car, support a family, on one income. Now, you'd be hard-pressed to find a home that didn't need multiple streams of income, whether its from one person working two or three jobs, or two or three people in the home each working one or more each, just to cover basic expense like rent, food, and health insurance. 

The time of the church that has nothing to offer but sermons is coming to a close. In a world that has been dehumanized by other people, notable through corporations and bureaucracies, and abused or neglected by the Church, for any given church to be effective, it has to add value to the community it's trying to reach. It does this through services and jobs. When a person is actively looking for a church, it's for one of two reasons: either they are looking to help, or they're looking for help. 

I've worked in and lived in proximity to ministry of one form or another for almost 15 years. There are people who make a good deal of money and look for ways they can volunteer their time so that they feel less dirty about just making good money. They want to feel connected to their fellow humans.  People who have enough money to pay for what they need generally have more free time to do other things and some of those people like to help others with that time.  These are the key populations churches can tap into for volunteers, and probably funds. Unfortunately, there are also people who really care about their communities and can't afford to volunteer themselves or give a good amount of money towards it, because they make poverty wages and need to support themselves and, usually, their families. 

This is where programs come into play. Especially in America, one of the last real holdouts of mostly laissez faire capitalism, there is no universal healthcare, there is no real public housing, there is no real welfare. So the Church has plenty of ways to funnel money from those that have the time and money, to those that don't.  But we have to be careful here, too.  As the book Toxic Charity, among others, points out, certain ways we serve our communities can do more harm than good.  Oftentimes, traditional charities create unhealthy mindsets in both the givers and the receivers.  In the givers, oftentimes, giving in the wrong way can create a kind of savior complex.  They become proud of how "generous and giving" they are. This pride in its own way can obstruct them from treating the people they're meant to serve as human. In the receivers, there is fostered a kind of entitlement. That by very nature of them not having anything, they deserve something. On a systemic scale, this is also why the level of welfare in the US is detrimental to those subsisting on it. Oftentimes, people who try to work their way out of needing government assistance make less than they do if they don't work and just live off the government. 

There is still plenty to do for a church that wants to empower their communities and provide opportunities to those who are a part of them. Strangely, this tends to dip into a realm that many churches don't like to dip into: providing jobs. Oftentimes, people who have been affected by poverty can have the biggest hearts of compassion for those victimized by the same state. Unfortunately, many of them can't afford to volunteer at their local church to help their neighbors. If they made some money doing it, they'd be much more likely to join the cause. 

I've said it before, I'll say it again, I think every church that can afford to do so owes its community an inexpensive, preferably free, and high quality education, particularly in impoverished communities because our public schools fail our kids.  Impoverished communities often also live inside food deserts, so food co-ops are a good idea, as are free medical clinics, preferably focused on nutrition first, because impoverished communities tend to struggle most with chronic, preventable illnesses, like cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and many autoimmune disorders. 

I haven't said it yet, but most of these most vulnerable and victimized communities happen to be communities of Brown and Indigenous People of Color, or BIPOC's.  There is a long list of reasons why this is so, 500 years of slavery and 100 years of segregation being one of the most prominent. That being said, these communities also happen to be unfairly targeted for more aggression from those organizations meant to protect them, namely police agencies, which has resulted in protest movements, most recently the Black Lives Matter protests. While I am not fully on board with abolishing police departments, I'm all for defunding them and reallocating those funds to agencies that can actually help reduce crime rates in those communities. Something else a church can offer is a Neighborhood Watch organization. If we reduce the need for the police, we can offer a solid foundation to deny them so much funding. 

I don't pretend to have all the answers, and I could be wrong about any one of these suggestions, maybe even all of them. What I do think is that the churches ought to involve their communities, creating a space where they can air their own suggestions for community outreach, voice their own thoughts on what they need from a church that cares.  Then I think the church has an obligation to act on that, so they can serve their communities in more ways than name. I think dignity and opportunity are tools that every church can use to actually make itself more relevant in today's world. 

Let's get out there and be the Body of Christ, people!