Some people can debate until the cows come home about the causes of poverty (and they do!): socially unjust systems, political bias, economic inequality, laziness etc. In Niddrie, that is not the issue. I have a church to pastor and a community to serve. I have to work every single day with what is. I will leave the debating to others with far greater intellectual capacity (and time) than I. I have to deal with the lady who has been raped by multiple family members, the rent boy selling himself to men to feed his meth habit, the murderer, the child abuser, the pimp. I have to bring the gospel to bear on these people and help them to work out what it means to walk in step with the Spirit of God as they begin the slow, painful walk of the Christian life. These people are not part of an outreach programme. We don’t do ‘ministry’ to them out of the back of a van every Thursday evening with a small group of believers. We don’t do it a couple of times a week in a school assembly. We do it day in and day out as we work and live in a broken, diseased and spiritually bleak environment. Mercy ministry is not a tag line or a line in our church’s financial budget because we happened to get hold of a copy of Generous Justice.
Tim Keller (and others) have argued for the complexity of poverty. Not all of the poor are lazy. There are other issues too. Poverty can be the result of oppression, disaster and sin. The issue I have is that in Brazil I saw injustices and people working 100-hour weeks for peanuts. But they slogged and still remained poor. The answer? The gospel. In the scheme here many people don’t work a jot (nor even intend to) and earn far more than a Brazilian could ever hope to. The answer? The gospel. Its pastoral out workings may be different and how we get there may be different. But it is the same gospel message to the same lost sinner in need of the same one and only Saviour. There is no deserving and undeserving poor. There are just undeserving people who may receive salvation through a great and gracious God. That is the bottom line in any of this debate. The only real, true way that love, mercy and justice work together is seen in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is only the gospel that can truly paint that picture for our fallen world and our broken communities. Feed people, clothe them, love them but, for goodness sake, hold out the gospel to them loud and clear. That’s the only thing that is going to save them from what is to come. If I have any time left after that I might consider thinking about the bigger picture. For now, I want to preach Christ, disciple His people, and begin to work on planting more churches in housing schemes across the country.
The rest I will leave to the armchair theologians.