I’ve spent the last couple of decades working in social action and for the last 15 years almost exclusively with those experiencing street homelessness and its surrounding issues.
In the last three years, I’ve moved into full time church leadership. For this reason that I was acutely struck by the points raised by Jon’s article on the future direction of Christian Social Action.
For a long time I’ve asked ‘Why the church isn’t doing more?’ Now, as a church leader I’m asking ‘How the church can do more?’ I think the answer might be found somewhere in this discussion…
Wheels of injustice
As Jon points out, a lot of church activity, energy and resource is taken up ‘applying first aid to the terrible wounds inflicted by poverty and homelessness’. He refers to ‘a theological commitment to addressing poverty’ but I want to ask: Are we really ‘addressing’ poverty if so much of our activity is centred around ‘first aid’?
Christian social action presents itself in remarkably compassionate and kind ways, but we need to be challenged by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words:
“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
Propping up the system
If we continue to just address the symptoms of poverty – debt, hunger, homelessness – are we not propping up a broken system that continually churns out victims of injustice?
When I started work in the charity sector foodbanks didn’t exist, now they’re an accepted part of our community landscape. ‘Compassion ministries’ are a mainstay in local churches, working hard on a daily basis in communities up and down the country. Yet the demand for these ministries only increases.
There is a difference between compassion and justice. But where are the justice ministries? Where are those willing to drive a spoke into the wheels of injustice?
Soothing or slaying?
Recently I came across an interview with J.T Thomas, founder of Civil Righteousness, a US based organisation seeking ‘Reconciliation & Restorative justice through spiritual, cultural, and economic renewal.’
In his interview, Thomas talks about the difference between peace-making and peace-keeping from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. I found myself asking what the poverty equivalent of that might be?
So many of our efforts in addressing poverty are soothing the victims. But what can we do to direct our energies towards slaying poverty at source? How can we stop people from falling into the river, instead of rescuing them from drowning? How can we build fences at the top of the cliff rather than providing ambulances at the bottom?
Imagination and motivation
Drawing on my own area of experience in homelessness, I’ve seen so much hard work go into helping people on the streets when it would be more beneficial to pool resources to help people off the streets. Better yet, we could put energy and resources into preventing people becoming homeless in the first place!
I think we lack the imagination and motivation needed for slaying poverty at root because we crave the immediate impact and the warm fuzzy feelings that soothing poverty offers.
In their book When Helping Hurts Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert suggest that relief work should be ‘Seldom, Immediate and Temporary’. But how many of our interventions fit that criteria?
So much our work sees people coming back time and again and never escaping from the wheels of injustice. Perhaps a true measure of whether our efforts are achieving justice would be to see how many compassion ministries are closed because they’re simply no longer required.
King and kingdom
Many of us have seen effective forms social action work which have split from the Christian motivation and expression which started them. Sometimes such work is described as seeking the ‘kingdom without the King’; pursuing a world of justice without acknowledging God.
We should resist this secularisation of social action. But equally, we need to avoid becoming a church which seeks the King without the kingdom. The kingdom of God that Jesus inaugurated is a place of justice, empowerment and transformation for the poor. This should be our vision. As Corbett and Fikkert put it:
“The church needs a Christ-centred, fully orbed kingdom perspective to correctly answer the question: ““What would Jesus do?””
Phil Conn is Senior Pastor at Hope Vineyard Sunderland and Director of Chaplaincy at Oasis Community Housing
Read Justice, Empowerment & Faith: the future direction for Christian social action
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Thanks for this, Phil. But it did leave me with a “yes but what can we do?” Or as I wrote that I thought maybe I need to be pondering and praying and finding God’s imagination on how to “put a spoke in that wheel”. So I’m now feeling challenged. But if there is anything practical please suggest 🙂
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Thanks Phil – thought provoking piece – and a call to action? As Diane commented the problem has been clearly outlined so now the hard work- how? The magnitude of the problem and the likely scale of effective solutions goes way beyond the resources of the church and is likely to require us to partner with secular and political organizations with whom we will not agree on many issues but share common goals on some. It is perhaps worth revisiting Francis Schaeffer and his notion of cobelligerents and allies which speaks into these issues.
’Schaeffer introduced a concept I think really helpful as we navigate our own causes—racial injustice, immigration, poverty, abortion, presidential politics, and so much more. It’s the distinction between being a “cobelligerent” and being an “ally.” In Schaeffer’s usage, a “cobelligerent” fights alongside someone for a particular cause while an “ally” is someone who aligns himself more completely with another. With a “cobelligerent” we’re united for a particular cause at a particular place and time, but with an “ally” I’m all in for them, and they’re all in for me.
see fuller article here:
https://cornerstoneapex.org/blog/francis-schaeffer-on-being-cobelligerents-and-allies
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Really grateful for this excellent piece. It made me think of what I’ve seen you say a few times, Jon, about the inverse relationship between how good a response to homelessness looks on social media, and how long-term helpful it acutally is. Driving spokes into wheels of injustice sounds glamorous, but it’s often long-term, slog-it-out work, isn’t it? I was reminded of that at an event about seeking equality in the north east this week, where the most impactful speaker was a Citizens community organiser, who talked about the long-term strategy work to accredit Real Living Wage employers in the north east. That’s not fast work and it’s not as social-media-shiny as pretty community grocery pictures, or deliveries to unhoused people on the streets, but it’s meant that 90,000 people in the north east are now far less at risk of in-work poverty. Would be so good to see the church continue to lean further into these questions – thanks to you and Phil for asking them.
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