David Lumpkins; The Church & The Poor II

[Editor's Note: This is Part II in David Lumpkins' three-part series about the Church & the Poor. See Part I from yesterday (here). David is the founder and Chairman of  Yellowstone Academy, an inner city Christian private school in Houston.]

See Part I and Part III.

God is deeply concerned for the poor. The Bible has some 300 verses on social justice and the poor in both the old and new testaments. Perhaps none are more devastating, though, than Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats. The final verses of this familiar passage in Matthew 25 read as follows:

⁴⁴ “Then they themselves also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’

⁴⁵ “Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’

⁴⁶ “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Yikes! Does he really mean that? I’ll leave it to others to unpack this passage in its full theological depth. But suffice to say that care of the poor is something really, really important to Jesus and therefore it is something that must be really, really important to us as well.

So what does that mean? What can we do? The problem is so big we don’t know where to begin. What can be done that will really make a difference? What works?

Let’s start with what we know doesn’t work. Having the government write checks to poor people with virtually no strings attached doesn’t work. It makes matters worse. The last thirty years of societal experimentation in that vein has demonstrated that beyond a reasonable doubt. Connecting with the poor only episodically on a limited basis, say around the holidays, doesn’t work either. It arguably makes matters worse as well by fostering a sense of “difference” and dependence.

So then what does work and what can the Church reasonably be expected to do?

There are no easy answers and no quick fix. Generational poverty involves the continued transmission of habits and practices that are deeply ingrained in the culture of families living in the low income communities of our cities. Those habits and practices and ways of viewing the world are hard to change when virtually everything and everyone in a person’s environment serve only to reinforce the culture of defeat. Breaking the cycle of poverty involves ‘life change’ that is too radical to be effected by less than radical means.

But by its very nature, though, the Gospel is a radical message. And the goal for the Church, therefore, must be to deliver the Gospel to the poor in its full radical measure, addressing the spiritual, physical and practical needs of the poor.

To do that, the Church at large must become deeply and permanently invested in the inner city. Let me emphasize those two elements– Deeply and Permanently. We have got to have an active and substantive presence in the neighborhoods where the poor live. We have got to have consistent and intensive interaction with the poor from the platform of institutions that are accepted and highly regarded by the poor. And we have got to be there, in person, week in and week out and year in and year out, in relationships with the poor. And to really break the cycle we have got to start investing in the lives of the poor at an age before the habits become simply too hard to break.

To summarize, the elements of successful intervention in the lives of the poor in a manner that will effectively achieve the desired life change include:

1. intensive interaction

2. over a long period of time

3. starting at a very early age

So what is the best platform from which to effect such a program? Numerous groups of Christians around the country who have sought to take on the problem of the poor have concluded that the answer lies in the one institution that is universal in the lives of every family with children: a school.

© 2005, David Lumpkins.

See Part I and Part III.