Lausanne World Pulse – Reducing Poverty, Not the Poor: Reclaiming Community with the Victims of Oppression
By Christopher L. Heuertz
September 2007
A Call to Relationship: Moving From Donor to Receptor in Mission
My community, Word Made Flesh, lives among the suffering and oppressed. Although we are young people, it routinely seems we go to more funerals than weddings, visit more gravesites than delivery rooms. It is not uncommon for our friends to fall because of AIDS, police violence, street fights or domestic abuse. We live in a world that cries out for justice—a world that needs God’s kingdom to come.
We are a community of 250 board members, staff and interns who have given ourselves to serving Jesus among the poorest of the poor. We have sought to fuse ministry and spirituality in such a way that our commitment to justice is an extension of our relationship with Christ. With communities in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, India, Nepal, Peru, Romania and Sierra Leone, we marvel at the movement God has allowed this to become.
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We have been called to give ourselves in selfless service among the poor. We have fallen so deeply in love with Jesus that our love compels us to love him in the world.
To find us, you might need to search the trash heaps behind local businesses in Galaţi, Romania, where our staff go to find the children who have nowhere else to sleep; you might need to stumble down the streets of some of Asia’s most notorious red-light districts where our community goes to visit women and children enslaved in the commercial sex industry; you might need to brave the darkest corners of South America’s worst neighborhoods, the places where homeless youth smoke their paint or glue bags to forget their hunger and fear.
For most evangelical Christians, ministry with the poor lacks intimate relationships because of their disregard for the intrinsic dignity of people who are poor. This view causes programs and projects for the poor to lead to a subtle, paternalistic dehumanization of the poor. As Christians, we need to move away from the place where our attempts at compassionate ministries degrade poor people by turning them into beneficiaries, and we must embrace poor persons in relationships that affirm their identity and dignity. The poor must not continue to be the objects and recipients of our good works and good deeds; they must instead be included in our lives as active participants who receive our respect and honor.
Scripture is clear. Our righteousness is qualified and validated in our relationships with the poor (Proverbs 19:17, 21:13, 22:9, 29:7; Isaiah 28:17; Jeremiah 22:16; 1 John 3:16-18) as the Lord uses the poor as a standard for judgment (Matthew 25:31-46). Jesus must remain at the center of our community. As he identifies himself with the poor, we must place the poor at the center of our communities, allowing them to be in influential positions that speak into the identity and direction of our churches and ministries.
I am invariably struck by scripture alluding to the conclusion that the integrity of our Christian virtue is defined in relationships with the poor. Even the basis of our intimacy with the Lord is cradled in how our intimacy with the poor is expressed in our social lives: “‘He defended the cause of the poor and needy so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me?’ declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 22:16).
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