If the church of the twentieth century had NOT abandoned historic Christianity’s two thousand-year radical commitment to the urban poor, many of the rising generation who are deconstructing their Christian faith would NOT be doing so. What do you think of this claim? This episode seeks to examine what the church’s commitment to the poor of our cities should look like. We then examine three serious flaws in the progressive view of social justice, an ideology which is captivating many young adults leading them to abandon Christianity. Finally, we examine how only the church can bring about the restoration require to solve the problems of our urban poor but raise the question, “Will middle class Christians care enough to do it?”
What young adult do you know who does not want to be a part of a group that Is actively pursuing justice for the poor, financial support for single moms, practical help for the addicted, the homeless, and the victims of heartbreaking gun violence? Could it be that American Christianity is losing young adults because we have lost the true biblical understanding of why Jesus came? Jesus’ earthly ministry began in a synagogue in Nazareth. Let’s examine how Jesus, Himself, understood His mission:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” …And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing (Luke 4:17-21). Author Brian Fikkert describes the scene:
“A shiver must have gone down the spine of the worshippers that day. Isaiah had prophesied that a King was coming who would usher in a kingdom unlike anything the world had ever seen. Could it be that Isaiah’s prophecies were really about to come true…Was it really possible that justice, peace, and righteousness were about to be established forever? Would this King really bring healing to the parched soil, the feeble hands, the shaky knees, the fearful hearts, the blind, the deaf, the lame, the mute, the broken-hearted, the captives, and sinful souls, and proclaim the year of jubilee for the poor (Isaiah 35:1-6; 53:5; 61:1-2)? Jesus’ answer to all these questions was a resounding ‘yes,’ declaring, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing’" (When Helping Hurts).
In the same chapter of Luke, Jesus further explained his mission in a way that perfectly parallels these words from Isaiah 61. “I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns as well; for I was sent for this purpose.” As you hear me often say in this blog, the gospel is NOT the gospel of personal private salvation—it is the gospel of the kingdom. The kingdom is the renewal of the whole world through the entrance of supernatural forces. As things are brought back under Christ’s rule and authority, they are restored to wholeness—to health, beauty, freedom, and rightness. There is a “NOW” and a “NOT YET” to the kingdom. The complete manifestation of the kingdom will not occur until there is a new heaven and a new earth. Nevertheless, two thousand years ago, Jesus clearly stated that there is a “now” to the kingdom, stating, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” The “nowness” of Jesus’ kingdom was largely forgotten by the Bible-believing American churches in the twentieth century whose imbalanced eschatology led them to see Christ’s kingdom as almost entirely FUTURE--spiritualizing the mission of Jesus. Brain Fikkert identifies this view:
“We have asked thousands of evangelical Christians this most basic question—why did Jesus come to earth? —and fewer than 1 percent of respondents say anything even remotely close to the answer, Jesus, Himself gave. Instead, the vast majority of people say something like, ‘Jesus came to die on the cross to save us from our sins so that we can go to heaven.’ While this answer is true, saving souls is only a subset of the comprehensive healing of the entire cosmos that Jesus’ kingdom brings and that was the centerpiece of his message….God was pleased through him to RECONCILE TO HIMSELF ALL THINGS, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross (Col 1:19-20). Jesus died for our souls, but he also died to reconcile—i.e., to put into right relationship—all that he created. We reflect this bigger truth when we sing the Christmas carol, “He comes to make His blessings known far as the curse is found.” The curse is cosmic in scope, bringing decay, brokenness, and death to every speck of the universe. But as King of kings and Lord of lords, Jesus is making all things new. This is the good news of the kingdom (Ibid).
Jesus proclaimed this news—that the Messianic King has come to make all things new—in both word and deed. When John the Baptist momentarily doubted Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, Jesus said, ‘Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them’ (Luke 7:22). How useless it would have been if Jesus had only used words and not deeds to declare the kingdom. Imagine if the story about Jesus passing by the blind man in Luke 18 read like this. “Hearing the blind man call out, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me,’ Jesus said, ‘I am the Messiah of Isaiah 61. I could heal you today of your blindness but I only care about your soul. Believe in Me,’ and then walked away.” Jesus proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom in both word and deed, and so must Christ-followers.
“It is strange indeed to place the poor at the center of a strategy for expanding a kingdom, but history indicates that this unconventional strategy has actually been quite successful. Sociologist Rodney Stark documents that the early church’s engagement with suffering people was crucial to its explosive growth. Cities in the Roman empire were characterized by poor sanitation, contaminated water, high population densities, open sewers, filthy streets, unbelievable stench, rampant crime, collapsing buildings, and frequent illness and plagues. (Ibid).
“Rather than fleeing urban cesspools, the early church found a niche there. Stark explains that the Christian concept of self-sacrificial love for others, emanating from God’s love for them was a revolutionary concept to the pagan mind, which viewed the extension of mercy as an emotional act to be avoided by rational people. Hence paganism provided no ethical foundations to justify caring for the sick and the destitute. Stark notes, ‘To cities filled with homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violence and ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity, and to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services’” (Ibid).
As Christianity expanded across the world, the urban poor were on center stage. This rich heritage of Christ’s church has always been to lead the way in ministries of mercy to the cities of the world. It is still happening today. In Africa and Latin America, where explosive growth of Christianity is taking place, mercy ministry to the urban poor is center stage. But, shockingly at the start of the 20th century, Bible-believing Christianity in America reversed this rich history of proclaiming the good news of the kingdom in both word AND DEED: Corbett and Fikkert explain:
“This all changed at the start of the twentieth century as evangelicals battled theological liberals over the fundamental tenets of Christianity. Evangelicals (those committed to the infallibility of Scripture) interpreted the rising social gospel movement, which seemed to equate all humanitarian efforts with bringing in Christ’s kingdom, as part of the overall theological drift of the nation. As evangelicals tried to distance themselves from the social gospel movement, they ended up in large-scale retreat from the front lines of poverty alleviation. This shift away from the poor was so dramatic that church historians refer to the 1900-1930 era as the “Great Reversal” in the evangelical approach to social problems.
Interestingly, this Great Reversal preceded the welfare state in America.” Both FDR’s New Deal policies of the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty in the 1960s took place after the Bible-believing churches in America retreated from poverty alleviation and began to promote a half gospel that focused on the soul being saved instead of the intrusion of the kingdom of God into earth to begin to restore everything ruined by sin. There is, praise God, among the rising generation of Christians a welcome return to a fuller understanding of the necessity of proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom both in word and in deeds of mercy. Yet, much damage has been done. When the Gospel Coalition asked Biola Professor Thaddeus Williams to address young adults who were considering rejecting Christianity, he began, “Have you ever felt like many Christian churches today don’t care about injustice the way they should, like they are on the wrong side of history? Maybe you even feel like that has become a deal breaker for you, that your passion for a more just world could be more deeply gratified if you simply cut ties with the church” (Before Your Lose Your Faith, Edited by Ivan Mesa). With the large-scaled abandonment of its calling to the urban poor over the past 100 years in America, the church has opened the door to false ideologies that are taking captive those with an idealistic passion for social justice. But such ideologies have major flaws. Let’s consider three.
Destructive Approaches to Alleviating Poverty
A. “Economic Equality” ideology. We often hear, “In America, the richest 1% have 40% of all the wealth. This kind of inequality is unjust.” However, this apparent injustice is based upon the FALSE idea that the total amount of wealth in a society is FIXED, like the size of an apple pie. If someone gets a bigger slice, that means someone else will only get a smaller slice. If there is only so much to go around, the richer Tom is the poorer Harry is. No one should have more than his fair share. However, that is NOT how economies work. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, didn’t make homeless people poorer by stealing their iPhones; he invented them—he created new wealth. Economic and political freedom enabled Steve Jobs to grow rich; but that same FREEDOM is what led millions of others to get richer. The pie grew. Steve Jobs getting richer didn’t make everyone else poorer. In fact, the wealth he added to the pie, provided jobs and economic value to millions of people in the US and around the world. This Economic Equality ideology has been used since the time of Karl Marx to deceive the naïve into thinking that giving economic control to the government (namely THEM) would lead to justice, when in fact it has always led to the shrinkage of the economic pie and to oppressive governments like that of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Hugo Chavez.
B. Relying upon government spending for welfare programs. I am not arguing for zero government involvement. The question of how the government should help I leave to those wiser than I. But we must recognize the serious limitations and failures of government efforts to alleviate poverty.
- Over the past 50 years, US taxpayers have invested $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs, yet according to the Census Bureau, there has been no net progress in reducing poverty. The poverty rate has remained the same, fluctuating between 12% in good times and 15% in down times.
- Black Pastor John Perkins, the son of a sharecropper, points out that many well-intended people have actually done considerable harm to poor people, by trying to help them the wrong way. He writes, “The federal government made this mistake for decades. Well-intentioned welfare programs penalized work, undermined families, and created dependency.” This view seems to be confirmed by a Los Angeles Times survey that asked poor women whether poor women “often” get pregnant to get additional welfare benefits. Sixty-four percent said, "yes." Reliance upon government to alleviate poverty fails.
C. Critical Race Theory ideology. There is systemic racial injustice and Christians do need to root out such injustice. But it is not caused by birth into a particular class and is not solved by stoking the fires of class warfare as CRT does. One tenet of CRT is especially problematic: Excusing law-breaking instead of punishing it. Last week, we saw that according to CRT, the more oppressed someone is, the less they are morally responsible for their actions. Following the murder of George Floyd, May 26, 2020, we saw this worldview expressed by the refusal of woke mayors and governors to stop the widespread looting and vandalism that led to over a billion dollars of damage. We continue to see it today when woke mayors and governors refuse to enforce vagrancy and sanitation laws on city streets. It is black communities that suffer most by the destruction of property and the exit of businesses needed from their neighborhoods when woke politicians don’t enforce the law. It is black children being gunned down in gang-infested neighborhoods. But it is not just the innocent victims in black inner-city communities being harmed by woke-enabled lawlessness; those committing the crimes are victims as well. Bible-believing Christians know that one of the ways God restrains evil in society is through the governments rewarding good and punishing evil as taught in Romans 13. The fact is that those who LOVE lawbreakers PUNISH them. Whom the Lord loves, He disciplines. God is very, very clear at this point: Proverbs 13:24. Whoever spares the rod HATES his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. Out of love for the black community Christians must stand against the lawlessness of CRT-driven politicians and judges. Excusing lawlessness is exactly the wrong approach to the problems of our cities.
Biblical Approach to Alleviating Poverty in Our Cities—RESTORATION
Understanding the true cause of poverty. Human flourishing in God’s design was to be the result of shalom in the 4 relationships of life: 1) walking in harmony with God and his righteousness, 2) experiencing wholeness--internal peace with themselves—no sense of inferiority, 3) experiencing pre-fall harmony in their relationships with each other; 4) experiencing harmony with the created order—no natural calamity like, earthquakes, floods, or volcanoes erupting. Poverty is caused by Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God. Their relationship with God is broken leading to spiritual poverty. The health of their inner soul is shattered leading to a poverty of being. Sin caused the fracturing of human relationships with each other—a poverty of relationships. And sin caused a curse to fall on the ground causing work to be harder leading to a poverty of stewardship. Let’s examine alleviating poverty by overcoming these four categories of poverty. This process is RESTORATION.
A. Overcoming the poverty of being. Only God knows how profoundly slavery and racism have crushed black men and women’s dignity. I wonder how many centuries it may take to undo such evil attacks on the self-esteem of those who bear the image of God. I’m told by those engaged in city ministry that this shattered self-esteem is linked to many outward symptoms of this brokenness:
- a teen boy’s desire to prove himself a man through his sexual prowess.
- a teen girl looking for love in the arms of a male who just wants sex.
- a teen girl who wants to feel needed by getting pregnant and having a baby who needs her and, to some degree, loves her back.
- a boy committing violence to win the respect of the others in his gang.
The wounds to the self-esteem of those in our cities, especially blacks are so severe and so deeply rooted, it is doubtful their inner confidence and sense of worth can ever be restored apart from the power of Christ’s Spirit indwelling them day by day building confidence that they have enormous value as God’s image bearers, and pouring into them that love of Christ—so that they know how long and deep, and wide and high is the love of God for them. The urban poor need help overcoming their poverty of being.
B. Overcoming a poverty of family relationships. In my view the single most significant cause of poverty in our cities is father absence. Barack Obama says,
- Children who grow up without fathers are 5X more likely to live in poverty and commit crime,
- 9X more likely to drop out of school
- 20X more likely to end up in prison. (Barack Obama)
Larry Elder observes that,
- 75% of black children are raised without fathers
- For blacks, out-of-wedlock births have gone from 25 percent in 1965 to 73% (Black Fathers Matter, Larry Elder).
While Christian ministries, like Great Dads have been teaching fathers in our prisons and cities how to be a godly, self-giving father, our teens are hearing that Black Lives Matter is the organization that is really caring for our cities. But Black Lives Matter has stated publicly that it is committed to destroying the gender differences that are foundational to the nuclear family. It wants to tear down a man's sense of fatherly resppnsibility. It takes a creation view of male, female, and the family to bring this restoration to our cities.
C. Overcoming spiritual poverty. A recent L.A. County Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration study found that of the homeless (Cited by John Bakas, Dean, St Sophia Cathedral)
- 38% are alcoholics
- 26% are addicted to drugs and other substances
- 25% suffer from Mental illness
Poverty’s cause is not a shortage of money. It is the result of complex components to human brokenness that only Christians have the resources to restore. Furthermore, the root cause of poverty, fatherlessness, can’t be addressed apart from confronting the 73% out-of-wedlock birth rate. This high percentage can’t be separated from the spiritual issue of teen pregnancy and having sex before marriage. Christians alone realize that God did not begin the world with a government or even a church. He started it with a wedding. That is also, how it will end. Until Christians get more serious about taking the gift of marriage to the teens of our cities, it is hard to envision much change taking place among the poor.
D. Overcoming a poverty of stewardship. One of the most exciting ministries that I have been privileged to support is the founding of a Christian school in SE Washington, D.C. called, Cornerstone. The biblical worldview is that God has entrusted to humans the responsibility of developing the potential of his creation—not only the earth, but especially human beings. The biblical alleviation of poverty requires helping every human discover and develop his or her potential, gifts, and talents, becoming economically self-sufficient. That is why good schools for the urban poor, be they secular or Christian are so foundational for overcoming poverty. The goal of mercy is not just to provide spot relief to stop the suffering. Our real goal must be to restore the person. We must carefully build up the person until he or she is self-sufficient.
I want to close with just one more thought. Even when it is true that poverty or suffering is self-inflicted, no Christian can shut his heart to the anguish and hardship of being poor. Honest Christians know “I am only where I am by the sheer unmerited mercy of God.” As those who daily drink from a fountain of grace poured out to us by God a life poured out in deeds of mercy for the poor is the only possible fitting response. So, may we each contemplate this question, “What are you doing about the misery of the poor in the cities of our land?”
Questions for Guiding the Rising Generation to think about this material.
- What is the biblical case for Christians being very engaged with alleviating the poverty and other suffering in our cities?
- What would you say to a church leader who said Jesus’ mission for us is to preach the gospel not feed the hungry?
- What flaws of progressive ideology’s approach to poverty most stood out to you?
- How would you make the case that the true causes of poverty—the breaking of harmony between us and ourselves, each other, God, and creation can best be achieved by the church?
Recommended Resources
- When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert.
- Before Your Lose Your Faith, Edited by Ivan Mesa
