The Disorder and Order of the Poverty Alleviation Ministry

　　In response to social and economic disparities, many congregations in Hong Kong attempt to enter into relationships with their neighborhood, identify the impoverished, and improve their livelihoods. Some of them, however, have seen their passion for the poor dissipate, while others have been disillusioned by the poverty alleviation ministry and quit altogether. From the perspective of practical theological reflection and with a case study as an illustration, this essay examines some of the most common confusions and myths about the poverty alleviation ministry. Then, it offers a solution to re-order the disordered poverty alleviation ministry. Hence, the purpose of this article is twofold: first, to introduce readers to the problems and solutions of the poverty alleviation ministry; second, to commend to readers the usefulness of practical theology for pastoral care and church leadership.

A Congregation’s Story

　　An evangelical congregation started a toy giveaway service at Christmas a few years ago, which aimed to serve children who lived in the nearby public estates. Most of the volunteers were middle-class professionals who have never met a materially poor person in their everyday lives. Since they believed that poverty was all about lack of material possessions, most of their efforts focused on toy donations. They were also convinced that the toy giveaway service was an adequate expression of love and care.

　　At first, many church members felt that the toy giveaway service might offend the children and their families. Most of them required encouragement from their pastor before they could walk into the public estate, visit people door-to-door, introduce themselves, and give away their Christmas card and nicely-wrapped toys. During the debriefing, most volunteers’ hearts were touched by the smiles and warm reception of the children and their mothers. Needless to say, they decided to organize another toy giveaway service the next Christmas, and later expanded the scope of ministry to giving away cakes during Chinese New Year and sweets during Easter.

　　As the ministry dwindled, the number of participants also went downhill after a few years. Unable to contain his disappointment, the pastor challenged the congregation in a monthly church meeting and inquired as to why they lost their passion. After a brief moment of silence, a member stood up and responded:

Pastor, we are tired of helping them. The giveaway service cannot improve their lives at all. Year after year they are just waiting for our gifts. And don’t you realize that we’ve never seen a man in our visitations? Because all the residents are unwed mothers! They bore children only to obtain more social welfare! They don’t deserve our help! ¹

If you were the pastor, how would you respond? Church leaders may see the members’ spiritual lives as the root of the complaint, accusing them of being spiritually superficial and not being faithful enough. If pastor’s private talks with them do not work, pastor and church leaders cannot but accept the deteriorating situation.

Practical Theological Reflection: Starting Point, Purpose, and Method

　　There is good news: practical theology can effectively solve the predicament above. The effectiveness of practical theology does not lie in offering instant and quick-fix answers—if quick-fix answers existed, pastors and leaders would not need to immerse themselves in time-consuming and complicated practical theological reflection. In his book Practical Theology: An Introduction, ² Richard Osmer, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, explains that there is a unique starting point where people begin engaging in practical theology. Practical theological reflection begins when church leaders feel that they are incapable of understanding or improving the situation. The purpose of practical theological reflection is to identify a church practice that is faithful to God. As John Swinton of the University of Aberdeen explains in his book Practical Theology and Qualitative Research, practical theology is “a critical, theological reflection on the practices of the Church as they interact with the practices of the world, with a view to ensuring and enabling faithful participation in God’s redemptive practices in, to and for the world.” ³ Methodologically speaking, practical theology, as Osmer suggests, comprises of four main tasks: (1) the descriptive-empirical, (2) the interpretive, (3) the normative, and (4) the pragmatic. The remaining article will carry out practical theological reflection based on these four tasks as well as the context of the congregation outlined in the case above, with a view of illustrating the processes and results of the four tasks of practical theological reflection.

Task 1: The Descriptive-Empirical Task

　　There is an increasing number of congregation members who ceased to be a part of the church’s poverty alleviation ministry. As Osmer suggests, church leaders should systematically collect all the information in order to answer this question: “What is going on?” Osmer suggests that church leaders use qualitative approaches such as conducting personal interviews or a focus group. The purpose is to discern certain verbal or behavioral patterns among the serving members. In this case, we can imagine that three serving members interviewed may all be disappointed by the attitude of the poor (e.g., lack of self-motivation, dependency syndrome, etc.), even though they may each have other different reasons for quitting.

Task 2: The Interpretative Task

　　The interpretative task attempts to find convincing explanations for the situation. According to Osmer, pastors should try to find relevant academic research to answer this question: “Why is this going on?” Numerous researches have already found that helpers’ discontent toward the poor is usually caused by their misunderstandings about poverty rather than their poor spirituality. It can be illustrated by the case above, which is a modified version of a real story recorded by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert in their book When Helping Hurts. Based on their experience and research on community development and the church’s program of poverty alleviation, Corbett and Fikkert have concluded that the church’s ministry for the poor requires both good will and knowledge. Church’s ignorance about the issue of poverty may mean that their work will do more harm than good. Corbett and Fikkert formulated an equation that illustrates how the church’s efforts may be detrimental to both the poor and the helpers:

The efforts of the congregation in this case may have hurt both themselves and the poor. First, the congregational members misunderstood poverty as material insufficiency. Second, they may have “God-complex symptoms,” believing that they were better than the materially poor and were able to change them. Lastly, they became disillusioned because of false expectations and discontinued the ministry due to their negative impressions of the poor. Moreover, the above congregation members may have intensified the sense of inferiority of the poor. The original story recorded by Corbett and Fikkert reveals the predicament of the poor dads, who left home by the back door in shame whenever they heard the Christmas carols outside their front door. In general, African males in North America struggle to obtain a full-time job and a fixed income. Hence, Christmas is the hardest time for most of them, because not only can they not earn a living for their families as the head of household, they also cannot afford any Christmas presents for their own kids, while knowing that other children will receive gifts from their fathers. To make the matter worse, they would feel even more shameful when they see others buying gifts for their own children.

　　In fact, international researches have discovered that the sense of inferiority and shame can cause far more harm than material poverty. ⁴ A large-scale research conducted by Deepa Narayan et al. interviewed the materially poor in 47 countries, and concluded that what caused the poor the most pain is the “poverty of social network” such as being isolated, despised, and rejected. For example, a blind woman from Moldova explains:

For a poor person everything is terrible — illness, humiliation, shame. We are cripples; we are afraid of everything; we depend on everyone. No one needs us. We are like garbage that everyone wants to get rid of.

The following words clearly express that the pain of poverty lies with their inability to make themselves heard and the feeling of powerlessness:

When one is poor, she has no say in public and feels inferior. She has no food, so there is famine in her house; no clothing, and no progress in her family.

——A woman in Uganda

The forces of poverty and impoverishment are so powerful today. Governments or the big churches can only manage them. So we now feel somewhat helpless. It is this feeling of helplessness that is so painful, more painful than poverty itself.

——An elderly man in Uganda

In 2014, a researcher also found that shame is the most common experience among the materially poor. In his book The Shame of Poverty, ⁵ Robert Walker studied the poor in seven countries (including China and South Korea). He concluded that shame is both the consequence of poverty and the systematic element that continues and transmits poverty.

　　To avoid harming the poor, the church should carefully consider the works of Narayan et al. and Walker. In alleviating the poor, the church should listen to the voices of the poor and to understand their experience. Furthermore, for the church, poverty alleviation is not just about humanitarian relief but a ministry of the church. Hence, when setting the objectives and directions of the ministry for the poor, the church should consult its faith tradition instead of merely social-scientific knowledge.

Task 3: The Normative Task

　　According to Osmer, pastors and church leaders should employ biblical and theological knowledge to answer the question: “What ought to be going on?” Regarding the case in this article, I would recommend that the congregation should redefine the targets of its poverty alleviation ministry based on the Word-centred theology of ministry and Jesus’ understanding of the poor.

　　In his book Walking with the Poor, ⁶ Bryant L. Myers, former vice-president for international program strategy at World Vision International and professor of transformational development at Fuller Theological Seminary, exhorts the church not to lose its true nature, even in its involvement in poverty alleviation. He emphasizes that the church is the body of Christ, the only symbol of the kingdom of God on earth, and the community that preaches and lives out the calling of faith. The church’s ministry of the Word and sacrament are the only dynamic that motivates Christians to bring the gospel into the world. The church has to be a Word-centred hermeneutical community, so that they may know how to interpret the Bible faithfully in their world, to sharpen the mission of the community, and to receive the grace of repentance when the community goes astray.

　　The Word-centred theology of ministry that Myers proposes enables the congregation in this case to place its poverty alleviation ministry under its preaching ministry, connecting the poverty alleviation ministry to the church’s ministry of the Word and sacraments. It implies that discipleship is a prerequisite for the ministry of social concern, and therefore it should be Jesus Christ’s teaching on the poor that determines both the orientation and content of the church’s poverty alleviation ministry. Nonetheless, the teaching of Christ—the Lord who called the materially poor “blessed”—may even astonish people in the 21st century.

　　In my opinion, John 9:41 can best illustrate the reversal motif of being rich and poor in Christ’s teaching. Jesus says to some Pharisees: “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.” ⁷ In his sermon in 1518, Martin Luther preached on this verse ⁸ and explained that if the Pharisees were able to confess “We are blinder than the person who was born blind!” after witnessing the sign of God, they would not be guilty; since they did not, they remained guilty.

　　“We are blinder than the person who was born blind.” This is a judgment on the ability of self and others, but an unusual one. Jesus tells those who have sight to regard themselves blinder than those who are born blind, and implies that the highly respected leaders should see themselves as more inferior than the beggars. Luther’s interpretation reveals the revolutionary nature of the gospel: humbling those who are in high positions, challenging the rich to identify with the poor, and uplifting the poor. It is what happened in John 9: Jesus chose the one who was born blind and sent him to work for God, “so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind” (John 9:39).

　　The profundity of Luther’s sermon lies with its ability to demonstrate how God works on the rich through the poor. In other words, God places the poor as His servants among the rich, so that the rich may realize how spiritually poor they themselves are before God: they can neither understand God’s mind, nor are they even aware of their spiritual blindness. Luther challenges the rich that they should learn to receive help by their humble and materially poor neighbors. If they are healed by grace, they should praise God and say:

Oh God! You have prepared this man for me! He is a mirror so that I can clearly see who I am; he is also a book that describes my real self. Lord! I can finally see! The poverty of my brother reveals my soul.

Luther’s interpretation of John 9:41 highlights that the objectives of the church’s poverty alleviation ministry differ from those of the social welfare organizations. For the church, the principal objective is neither poverty reduction nor empowerment—though these are admirable per se. In Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit, the church seeks to learn to identify itself with the poor, to manifest God’s power in its own poverty, and to teach those who are spiritually poor, yet enlightened, to follow its example. Indeed, a disciple community does not have any merit on its own; it is merely a group who are enlightened and know their own poverty—poor in the knowledge of God, and aware of their own depravity in need of Christ’s redemption. Therefore, the church as a poor community enters the life of the materially poor and alleviates the problem of poverty through identifying with them, just as a beggar tells another beggar where they can find a free meal.

Task 4: The Pragmatic Task

　　This final task concludes the findings of the three previous tasks and proposes a new practice for the church. As shown in the case study, the congregation’s poverty alleviation ministry is in a state of disorder because of the congregation’s ignorance about the problem of poverty, their deviation from the ministry of the Word, as well as their insufficient knowledge of God and of self. Hence, the new practice requires more than listening to the hearts of the poor. Most importantly, the congregation needs to help its own members listen to God, and to relocate its ministry of social concern under the ministry of the Word. As a ministry, Christians establishing relationships with their impoverished neighbors is to witness the work of Christ as the mediator rather than offer any humanitarian relief. Hence, what matters most is discipleship, not the collection of resources. Church members should always follow Christ: seeing the materially poor brothers and sisters with the eyes of Christ, listening to their voices with the ears of Christ, being ready to receive help and mercy through them from Christ, and giving thanks to Christ who is gracious to us and to our neighbors.

Conclusion

　　With an illustration from a case study, this article examines the disorder and order of the church’s poverty alleviation ministry. Also, it demonstrates how the function, method, process, and results of practical theological reflection can equip church leadership to cope with pastoral predicaments. It is hoped that this essay can assist the church in re-ordering its ministries upon the Word, with a view to ensuring and enabling the church’s faithful participation in God’s redemptive actions in the world.

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^* This article is a modified version of the author’s speech in a workshop of “The 7th Business as Mission Forum: Practical Theology of Community Transformation” (27 October, 2018).