Words'nTone

Our ways of doing church are not neutral and have an affect on our responsibilities toward the poor. Church leaders should, at least, question who benefits and who does not benefit from current church structures and bureaucracies (i.e., our way of doing church). The building-centered and business models that most modern church-systems emulate can result in provincial and parochial habits that have a negative impact on our patterns of discipleship. Perhaps, it is not the construction of buildings and religious, hierarchical bureaucracies per se, but the allocation of human capital and financial resources to maintain such a system and promote the status of its own authorities and stakeholders that can distract (to put it blandly) from the church’s responsibility toward the poor. Church (that is, religious) systems and structures need to promote its responsibilities of discipleship, and in particular, those related to the poor.

The cost of doing church business and the maintaining of church bureaucracies are not neutral to the church’s role as advocates of the poor. This includes the allocation of human and social capital available in a church for use in the public (where the poor live, work, go to school, and are neighbors). The resources and capacity of the local church need to be evaluated in light of, not our cultural expressions of church life (e.g., buildings, worship services, exercising so-called spiritual gifts that support church bureaucratic structures and function, and technology), but in terms of the kingdom of God, which absolutely should include addressing the causes of poverty and advocating for the poor.

Andrew Davey, in his book Urban Christianity and Global Order: Theological Resources for an Urban Future, exhorts that a church concerned about “its own sustainability must have strategies other than the growth paradigm” (p. 112 ). As a church seeks “strategies” to promote its growth, assessment should be made of its impact on the local community, especially how such growth—including the means of growth—would affect the poor. Contemporary Church growth models are not only multimillion-dollar business ventures with huge marketing campaigns, they, as well, have celebrities and elites of their own, all which promote expectations for a local church that can (and do) divert resources away from its responsibilities regarding the poor, and may also contribute to the causes of poverty as well (e.g., burdening those in poverty to pay for the growth, the appearance of a “spiritual-minded” or “faith” budget, or even religious-fraud). A church’s sustainability does point toward a future, but it also has consequences for the community, with special consideration for its vulnerable populations.

Listeners to the story of Jesus are not only urban (and rural) congregations that have a natural association with vulnerable populations. There should be suburban church communities who are listeners of the Gospel story as well.  Suburban churches are not exempt from being such gospel-listeners just because they are removed from urban poverty. In fact suburban Christianity’s departure and distance from poverty might actually be one of the causes of poverty. Suburban churches should consider that they are participating in the same socio-economic system that has removed social capital, human resources, and financial resources from the social network, housing, and system of workforce development available to the poor in urban centers.

The story of the Gospels does not solely contrast the conduct of the religious who support the very structures that create barriers to assisting the poor, but also unveils how religious appearance can mask duplicity and systems that actually cause and/or perpetuate the causes of poverty. Jesus had condemned a religious system that had lost its redemptive reason for existence, one that had developed values and a structure that had actually contributed to the condition of the poor. Local congregations and their leadership ought to question whether its current value system, church bureaucracy, and structure contribute to the causes of poverty or whether it promotes advocacy for the poor.

© Chip M. Anderson (October 2007)
    Words’nTone, Habits of the Mind,

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Adapted from my paper, “Widows in our Temple Courts (Mk 12:38-44): The Public Advocacy Role of the Local Congregation as Christian Discipleship,” presented at the 2006 annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Washington D.C.

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