The church needs welfare reform every bit as much as the government did.
A coalition claiming to represent 250 Maryland congregations is thumbing its nose at Gov. Parris Glendening's call for help in moving welfare recipients off the dole. In what the Washington Post calls a "grassroots rebellion against welfare reform," religious leaders are accusing the government of abdicating its responsibilities and "dumping" the poor on the churches. "We will not participate in this dehumanizing, misguided effort called welfare reform," declares the coalition's leader, the Reverend Doug Miles.
It is difficult to imagine a more unhelpful response to the new welfare regime. Like it or not, the old entitlement system is dead, and it is not going to be resurrected. For churches genuinely concerned about the poor, it is time to redouble outreach efforts and creatively adapt to the new era.
Step one is admitting that the church's welfare system needs serious reform, because it makes many of the same mistakes that crippled the government's old system. Both have too often helped people to manage their poverty rather than to escape from it. Both have too often handed out Band-Aids-cash and commodities to meet immediate material needs-instead of offering developmental assistance that provides a hand-up to self-sufficiency. Both have too often been clinical, bureaucratic, and impersonal in their interactions with needy families. And both have engendered dependency.
The new welfare bill demonstrates that politicians have recognized the problems in the government's system. Now, as the state looks increasingly to civil society-and particularly to churches-to assume greater responsibility for the poor, church leaders need to re-evaluate and, in many instances, dramatically change their benevolence programs. Scripture, church history, and the example of effective church-based community ministries provide helpful guidelines on how to do so.
Jesus' Ministry Model
Some liberal Christians seem to consider Jesus a lobbyist. For them, love of the poor equals political efforts to advance "social justice" -- pressuring the government to provide big, expensive programs while neglecting to remind church members of their personal responsibility to love the needy. Some conservative Christians are also guilty of truncating Jesus' multifaceted ministry. They proclaim Christ as Savior and engage in vigorous efforts to "win souls," but fail to address physical needs or fight injustices. Neither approach adequately grasps Jesus' example of holistic ministry that meets material and spiritual needs and challenges both personal and social sin.
Jesus' compassion leads him not only to feed the 5,000 but also to exhort them to seek the Bread of Life (John 6:1-13, 25-58). He physically heals the hemorrhaging woman (Mark 5:25-34) but also encourages her emotionally. Given her medical problem, she would have been considered perpetually unclean. Ashamed, she wants to remain unnoticed. Yet Jesus insists that she tell her story and then publicly praises her for her faith. Jesus deals with people as whole persons, and our outreach must similarly touch heart and mind, body and soul.
Jesus also rails against social injustices while not failing to confront individual sin. Incensed at the exploitive temple merchants who prey on the poor, Jesus scatters their tables (John 2: 13-16). His eyes flash with anger at the cruelty of legalistic religious leaders who oppose his sabbath healing (Mark 3:1-5). In both in stances, Jesus delegitimates unjust structures erected by the powerful. But Jesus is much more than a political revolutionary. He insists on personal holiness and obedience by the poor as well as by the rich. He loves not the proletarian masses but each individual person. He disciples 12 close, personal friends and heals people one at a time.
This means that churches should not merely lament or laud the welfare reforms. Critics and supporters alike should be in the trenches, actively assisting low-income families. Such personal engagement makes our voice in the public square more credible. In addition, frontline experiences can help us more wisely to evaluate specific policies.
The Samaritan Risk Taker
The holistic outreach we Christians need to pursue will be personal and often risky. In the third century A.D., a terrible plague struck the city of Alexandria, claiming many lives. The pagans interpreted the event as the gods' punishment and refused to help the sick since they "deserved" their calamity. Alexandrian Christians responded differently. Out of love for God, they nursed the weak and buried the dead-often contracting fatal illnesses. These brave souls won the nickname paraboloni, which means "one who takes a risk." Today, we should make it our aim to earn this title of honor.
As pastor Tim Keller notes in his helpful book Ministries of Mercy, the Good Samaritan was a risk-taker. The treacherous, winding road from Jerusalem to Jericho was a frequent site of crime and violence. Keller likens the Samaritan's compassion for the wounded traveler to that of a brave person who, while walking down a littered street at night in the inner city, hears a moan from a darkened alley, and rushes in to help. May God grant us such courage as we go to the unfamiliar and disconcerting places "on the wrong side of the tracks" to a trend to the needy.
When the Good Samaritan encounters the battered victim, he doesn't toss the man money, canned goods, used clothing, or religious tracts. Instead, he gets up close and personal. He dirties his hands tending to the man's wounds. He gives sacrificially-of his time and money. By contrast, many of our traditional outreach programs keep the poor at arms' length and offer merely "commodified" mercy.
We need instead a relational mercy ministry. The church father Gregory of Nyssa defined mercy as "a voluntary sorrow that joins itself to the sufferings of another." Genuine compassion entangles our lives with the lives of the needy, and sometimes brings grief. On Thanksgiving Day, the 23-year-old mother of a little boy in our church's urban tutoring program was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. There were few dry eyes in our sanctuary when our pastor announced the tragedy. Because of the church's connection to this family, because this was the mother of one of "our" students, the news pierced us more deeply than if this were merely another grim crime statistic. True mercy is rarely sterile; it allows pain into our lives that we would rather avoid.
Sometimes, mercy cannot be confined to a predictable schedule but spills over into time slots that we would rather protect. It requires building genuine friendships with poor people -- friendships where mutual learning and giving occurs. Anything else, as Octavia Hill, a daring Christian who battled poverty in the slums of nineteenth-century London, argued, is a cheap benevolence that wants to help poor people but isn't willing to know them.
Ed Kirk, a retired businessman in a Maryland suburb, has lived out this kind of mercy. Last year he helped "Jane," a 32 year-old single mother, to get off welfare. It was a 14-month roller coaster ride of hirings and firings, health problems, an eviction, and family reconciliation. For four months, Ed rose daily before 7:00 A.M., picked up Jane and her son, dropped the toddler off at the babysitter's, and drove Jane to work. During the day, Ed tried to resolve tl1e numerous administrative nightmares in which Jane was enmeshed. She had had her license revoked because of unpaid traffic fines. She owed back taxes. An acquaintance had borrowed, and crashed, her car. Her family had disowned her years ago, when she was hooked on drugs.
"To get people back on their feet," Ed explains, "is not just about getting a job. It's about getting all their problems solved."
Ed met Jane through the Community-Directed Assistance Program, an initiative of Maryland's Anne Arundel County's Department of Social Services in which churches are matched with individuals trying to get off welfare. Similar welfare-to-work mentoring efforts are under way in Mississippi, Michigan, and Virginia. These programs offer a greater promise of success than do traditional social-service initiatives because they provide poor people with volunteers who can give substantial amounts of time and personal support. Social workers struggling to manage anywhere from 50 to 100 or more cases cannot offer the individualized attention welfare recipients need to overcome the multifaceted obstacles they face in achieving independence from the dole.
New welfare rules give recipients two years to find stable, permanent employment. In many states, transitional assistance in the form of Medicaid, daycare, and transportation vouchers is available in the third year. Properly mobilized, churches can help a significant portion of families on welfare to make t1:J.e transition to the workforce. Some individuals -- like those recipients who are finishing college degrees or who have been on welfare only briefly due to temporary unemployment -- need just a little extra help. It could come in the form of a daycare scholarship to a church preschool, a one-time grant to a student for her final semester's tuition, or a donated used car that would enable an unemployed person to widen her job search.
Other individuals -- like the woman Ed Kirk's church helped -- have been out of work longer, have multilayered personal problems, and confront significant barriers to self-sufficiency (such as lack of affordable child care). They need persevering, intense assistance. These realities are sobering; nonetheless, most congregations possess key resources for aiding welfare recipients, though they may not realize it.
In Mississippi, churches that participate in the Faith and Families Welfare-to-Work program are providing such resources: budget counseling; modest financial aid; and assistance in finding affordable daycare, writing a resume, and preparing for job interviews.
The Stronger Hope Baptist Church in Jackson has helped five welfare recipients to locate stable employment. In areas of the state where the unemployment rate is higher, Faith and Families churches have facilitated recipients' enrollment in six-month certified nurse's assistant (CNA) programs. Upon graduation, these individuals are qualified to work in hospitals and nursing homes. A rural Methodist church in the delta has hired its Faith and Families participant as a pastor's assistant and has plans to aid a small team of welfare recipients in opening a daycare center that will offer evening and weekend care. Business is likely to be good since many area residents with children work odd-shift jobs in a local factory and need child-care at nontraditional hours.
The Geneva Method
These successes are not achieved "without bruises," as Ed Kirk is quick to admit. But real people are winning independence from welfare with the help of ordinary church members. It can be done-though it involves a deliberateness that is too often missing in church benevolence endeavors.
In John Calvin's Geneva, the church operated a thoughtful, well-conceived, effective assistance ministry that today's churches could imitate. Poor families in Calvin's Geneva were categorized according to the different nature of their needs. Some were unable to work and required charity. Those who could work -- and were willing to do so -- were given tools or no-interest loans to start their own businesses. The able-bodied poor who refused to work were exhorted to change their ways. Deacons paid quarterly home visits to every family that received financial aid from the church. They knew personally those they helped and used their knowledge to shape an individually tailored, strategic assistance plan. In the context of these personal relationships, they could address recipients' spiritual needs. They encouraged the drunkard toward sobriety, gave practical money-management advice to the young widow, and placed orphans into apprenticeships. They personally investigated needs to prevent fraud, and they refrained from indiscriminate charity that engendered dependence. In short, they employed their minds as well as their hearts when loving the needy.
As Marvin Olasky has described in his important book The Tragedy of American Compassion, evangelicals in nineteenth-century America conducted similarly clear-headed, warm-hearted outreach ministries among the poor. These Christians befriended just a few families at a time and worked with them over the long term, until they no longer required help. By contrast, today we too often practice a "bigger is better" approach. We are busy doing many charitable things-like operating soup kitchens or handing out holiday baskets at Christmas-but we are changing nothing. Our efforts gloss over real needs and fail to encourage lasting change.
Community outreach programs that truly transform lives share several common features. First, they employ a team approach, rather than one-to-one mentoring, in their welfare-to-work initiatives. This reduces the chances of volunteer burnout, enlarges program participants' network of contacts, and allows volunteers to find their particular niche in the ministry.
Second, successful programs clearly define expectations, so that church members and welfare recipients each know what their responsibilities are.
Third, they are marked by regular, face-to-face, structured contact between the volunteers and the participants. They do not rely on spontaneous interaction but set defined meeting times and articulate specific goals and deadlines. The friendship developed between the participant and the church volunteers is purposeful, directed toward a specified end.
Fourth, effective programs demand individual responsibility. They challenge participants to take small steps toward change and provide incentives for taking those steps. New Focus, a Christian nonprofit that shows churches how to transition from commodity-based ministry to relational, holistic ministry, encourages congregations to establish a weekly "life skills" training class. Individuals who have a history of repeatedly requesting financial help from the church must attend the weekly class and meet regularly with a budget counselor in order to receive further aid. They are also linked with a Compassion Circle of six to eight church volunteers who provide practical help (such as temporary babysitting, transportation, car repairs, or help with job searching) as well as prayer and emotional support. Participants and church volunteers draft a strategic plan for achieving independence from the public (and private) welfare system. As participants complete aspects of that plan, they receive groceries or household items in recognition of their progress.
Making the shift to relational ministry is difficult because it requires that we give more of ourselves and our time, as well as our money. By concentrating church resources on fewer families, though, we are able to make a long-lasting impact. Through time-intensive, individually tailored aid, we can address the root causes of persistent poverty and help people become economically self-sufficient. As participants no longer require assistance, our funds are freed up to help new families. As a deacon from a New Focus-affiliated church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, noted, this is just "better stewardship of God's money."
And there is another important benefit. As the Warrenton Baptist Church in north-central Virginia discovered, relational ministry can invigorate greater congregational participation in community outreach. When this 350-member, middle-class church ran its Deacons' Family Ministry, it provided groceries and cash aid to about 50 families each month. But only a few deacons and church members volunteered in the initiative. Pastor Doug Harris admits that no ongoing relationships with the assisted families materialized. "Follow-up," he recalls, "was basically zero." There was no ministry that addressed the families' spiritual needs, and since the same families returned again and again for assistance, the temporal help the church was providing accomplished nothing.
Last year, Harris was approached by local officials of the Department of Social Services. They wanted to know if Warrenton Baptist would "adopt" two women and their families who wanted to get off welfare. Harris agreed-and the congregation's response was overwhelming. A committee of several women stepped forward to befriend the two families. The youth group began meeting weekly with one of the families and raised money to purchase business attire for the mother so she would look nice at job interviews. A group of senior citizens wanted to know what they could do to "help our families" and ended up sewing window treatments. Benevolence programs aimed at "the poor" rarely excite concern. But when the poor become specific families with faces and names, church members enthusiastically assume ownership of outreach efforts.
Investing in Anathoth
In Jeremiah 32, God tells the prophet to purchase a field in Anathoth, a community outside of Jerusalem. It is a bewildering request, for the Babylonians have already attacked Israel and laid siege to Jerusalem, and the fields of Anathoth lie behind enemy lines. Jeremiah wonders why God would ask him to make such a foolish real-estate investment. God answers by promising to redeem Israel from her oppressors; he foretells the day when feasts and weddings will sound in the fields of Anathoth and across Judea when he restores the fortunes of his wayward children. As Chris Rice, an inner-city missionary, explains, God is asking Jeremiah to invest in a neighborhood others have given up as lost. By doing so, Jeremiah makes tangible God's future promise to reclaim and restore.
God is still in the reclamation business. He is still calling his followers to "foolish" investments. Impoverished neighborhoods in our communities are also behind enemy lines; Satan has a grip on them through drugs, crime, violence, abuse, and despair. But God has not forsaken this territory, and neither should we. Moreover, he has followers in these neighborhoods-even if they may be besieged by the destructive "street culture" that surrounds them. Christians outside such troubled neighborhoods should invest in them, embracing these brothers and sisters.
Such investments can take at least two forms. First, suburban churches can reach out to urban congregations that are trying to improve their communities. In Richmond, Virginia, a network of suburban churches is partnering with an urban church, Victory Christian Fellowship, located in the heart of the Gilpin Court public housing complex. These churches work together in a ministry called S.T.E.P. (Strategies to Elevate People), which runs an adult education and job-training program for Gilpin residents (most of whom are on welfare). Suburban churches provide financial support, and volunteers serve on Family Share Teams that are linked with residents participating in the S.T.E.P. Academy. Victory Christian Fellowship supplies motivational speakers to the academy and offers participants pastoral counseling and discipleship programs for themselves and their children. Through the academy, high-school dropouts are receiving their GED certificates; some have even gone on to college. Others have secured new jobs and have left welfare behind.
Second, in the absence of a Christ-centered urban mission, churches outside troubled communities can establish their own presence in the neighborhood. My church is doing this in the low-income Blue Ridge Commons housing community in Charlottesville. Through our Abundant Life Family Center, a renovated three-bedroom townhome in the housing complex, we offer educational programs for children and job skills training for adults.
Another church that is following this model is Christ United Methodist Church in Jackson, Mississippi. This 4,OOO-member, white, middle-class congregation is making a difference in North Midtown, an inner-city neighborhood. A few years back, crime and violence were so rampant in North Midtown that residents would not allow their children to ride bikes outside. Elderly folks were afraid to walk to nearby shops. Christ United hooked up with Habitat for Humanity and provided financial aid and volunteers to build four new homes in the neighborhood. The church also rented an apartment in the center of North Midtown and hired an African-American pastor to serve as the director of this urban outreach. Neighborhood residents and church members work together running an after-school tutoring program, boys and girls clubs, and parenting classes. As Habitat continues to buy up abandoned properties, the crack dealers have gradually been pushed out. Pride in the neighborhood has returned; the Neighborhood Association has been resurrected, and a "beautification committee" has cleaned up the streets and yards. For the first time in many years, children are once again able to play outdoors in safety.
These outreaches in Richmond, Charlottesville, and Jackson are incarnational. Each church has established a physical presence in the target neighborhood to demonstrate its long-term commitment to the community and its identification with the residents' sorrows.
Some church members have relocated into the neighborhoods; others visit regularly and have developed genuine friendships with locals. By focusing their resources on a single community, these churches have been able to make a noticeable impact.
Reconnecting
Church leaders desiring to strengthen their community outreach should investigate what is already going on in their community and learn how they could assist successful, established ministries. They can also contact their local social services department to hear how they could help a needy family get off welfare. For inspiration and practical advice on how to start a new ministry, church leaders can attend the annual conference of the Christian Community Development Association. The conference brings together thousands of Christians engaged in urban ministry and offers numerous workshops.
Relational ministries like Faith and Families, New Focus, and S.T.E.P. build bridges that reinvigorate civic connectedness. Many welfare-dependent families are isolated from much of mainstream society, unable to access educational and vocational opportunities others take for granted. Middle- and upper-class families are increasingly isolated in gated, "comprehensive service" communities.
Welfare reform offers us the opportunity to bring the disadvantaged and the advantaged together. And the haves, as well as the have-nots, need this reconnection. Our culture is in danger of imploding in self-indulgence; recapturing a commitment to others beyond our small circle of family and friends may prove an essential step in avoiding the traps of hedonism, materialism, and anomie.
In short, Christians must reform church benevolence not only for the sake of the poor, but for the sake of the church itself. The absence of an incarnational, holistic, befriending ministry among the poor impoverishes our own spiritual health. As Charles Spurgeon argued:
A church which does not exist to do good in the slums. . . of the city is a church that has no reason to justify its longer existence. . . . Not for yourself, O Church, do you exist any more than Christ existed for himself. His glory was that he laid aside His glory, and the glory of the church is when she lays aside her respectability and her dignity and counts it to be her glory to gather together the outcasts, and her highest honor to seek amid the foulest mire the priceless jewels for which Jesus shed his blood.
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