The Deserving Poor

(originally posted on Beth's personal blog)

Not long ago, I read a blog that raised an interesting question: why do Christians and churches in North America tend to give more to the poor overseas (especially to Africa and to places where natural disasters have occurred) than to the poor in their own cities?

Robb Davis, the writer of the blog I read, thinks it has very little to do with the fact that overseas poor people are poorer than our poor people.  He thinks it has more to do with the fact that we generally see overseas poor people as deserving, and our own poor people as undeserving, or at least less deserving.  I tend to agree.

Whether or not we care to admit it, I think we all have a subconscious scale of who really deserves our help (money, mission trips, prayers, attention).  It probably looks something like this:

MOST DESERVING

Children born into poverty in third-world countries

Victims of natural disasters
Adults in third-world countries
Prostituted women in other countries, trafficked into North America
Children born into poverty in North America
Adults in North America who have lost their jobs due to the recession
Adults in North America who have never had stable jobs
Prostituted women born in North America
Drug addicts
Drug dealers and other criminals
Sex offenders

LEAST DESERVING 

Ok, maybe that list is splitting hairs a bit.  But I do think we have this natural tendency to decide who deserves our help based on how much we think their choices led them into their circumstances, that is to say, based on how much we think their poverty is their fault. Children in Africa definitely didn't choose to be born into malnourished, war-torn environments where they will receive little education and few opportunities.  We have no qualms about helping them.  Natural disasters are nobody's fault (or the developed world's fault, if you consider climate change), so we're definitely supposed to help those people.  Trafficked women were kidnapped or tricked into prostitution, so they're deserving - the worst we could accuse them of is naivete.


But prostitutes in my neighbourhood?  The popular opinion is that they're choosing to do that work.  And probably choosing it because they need to fund their drug addictions, and it's their fault that they're addicted.  No one forced them to do drugs.  And look at all the social assistance programs and advantages they have!  They get an education and plenty of opportunities like everyone else in North America.  So if they're still poor, obviously they lack initiative; they're just working the system, choosing to remain poor and taking welfare money from hard-working middle class people.  Why would we enable their bad choices by giving them more hand-outs?

This sounds harsh, and most of us don't go that far in our thinking, but believe me, when I am dumb enough to read the comments on online news articles about the DTES, I see far more scathing opinions about the poor people in my neighbourhood. 

I have begun to learn the real meaning of "choice" in the midst of the oppressive and degrading structural inequity that most people in my neighbourhood face.  Just this week I met a woman, who has likely been prostituted, in recovery for her addiction, using our hard-earned tax dollars.  She shared with me that she had been in twenty-four different foster homes over the course of her life.  Yes, she got an education... in fourteen different schools.  "Never really fit anywhere," she said.  No kidding.  The choices she has had to make and odds she has overcome just to get into recovery far outweigh any of my good life choices as a middle-class, stable-familied Masters-educated white girl.



So in light of this, who deserves our help? Who deserves our love? Who deserves our self-sacrificial giving?

In her book "Jesus Freak," Sara Miles tells a story about hosting a group of grade four kids at her church's food pantry program, and some of the questions they raised. They were concerned that some people who came to get food didn't really need it, or were cheating and taking too much. Like many adults, these kids didn't want anyone to take advantage of the church's generosity. Here's what Sara writes:

      "I talked with the kids about the idea of “taking advantage,” explaining that it was impossible to be taken advantage of as long as you were giving something away without conditions. “If it's a trade, than it's fair or unfair,” I said. “But if I'm going to give it to you anyway, not matter what you do, then you can't take advantage of me.”
     “How many of you have ever taken the best piece for yourself, or stolen something?” I asked, raising my own hand. Slowly, every hand went up.
     “How many of you have ever been generous and given something away?” Every hand went up.
     “Yeah,” I said, “You know, poor people cheat and steal and are really annoying. Just like rich people. Just like you. And poor people are generous and kind and help strangers. Just like rich people. Just like you.... In my church, we say that judgment belongs to God, not to humans. So that makes things a lot easier for us. We don't have to decide who deserves food.” (37)

I think Sarah Miles is on to something here. All of us do beautiful things and awful things, simply by virtue of being human. Yes, poor people in Canada cheat and steal. Poor people in Africa also cheat and steal, as I just confirmed in a conversation with a friend of mine who works in Darfur. Regardless of nationality, people who have been repeatedly abandoned and betrayed by others get used to cheating and stealing to survive. And yes, rich people cheat and steal, in ways that are often rewarded by society. All of us are sinners and letdowns, even the "noble" poor in the World Vision commercials. It's just that we're close enough to the poor in Canada to see their shadow sides. And they're close enough to make us feel very uncomfortable and guilty, and we can't just change the channel to push them out of our view.

Now, I do think we need to think carefully about the ways we try to help the poor, whether they're here or overseas, because our methods can often decrease their dignity and self-worth and increase their predisposition to want to cheat the system. Peter Maurin, a good friend of Dorothy Day's, said that we need to strive to make the kind of society in which it is easier for people to be good. This is a society in which we assume the best of one another, strive to see the image of God in one another, draw out each other's gifts and skills, love each other unconditionally over the long term, and uphold each other's dignity. In that society, no one will want to cheat the system, because they will belong; they will know they are needed, and they will have what they need.

This past Wednesday night at our worship service at Jacob's Well, a friend of mine did something that is really quite strange. She drew a cross on my forehead with ashes and told me that I was made of dust, and that one day I would die. She did the exact same thing to everyone in the circle, all of us, rich and poor... all of us bags of ashes and water, all of us sinners and sinned-against, all of us selfish screw-ups... all of us unable to be good on our own, unable even to sustain our own lives... all of us undeserving...

...all of us created in the image of God, the grateful recipients of unearned and undeserved grace, of each new day and each next breath...all of us empowered and sent to care for one another and to share with one another and to be healed and sanctified together. 

So, all of us - let's share what we have with everyone who needs it, in Africa, in Japan, in Canada, in the DTES, whether or not we think they deserve it.  And let's love each other so much that we want to be better people, in the knowledge that we'll never be good enough to deserve the love and grace God seems to want to keep lavishing on us.

Tales of an up-and-coming Fancy Dancer

(originally posted on Beth's personal blog)

Every Monday night since July, I have been trying out a new activity: First Nations traditional dance classes.

(Well, it hasn't been every Monday night... I took a bit of a break from dance after I stepped on a sea urchin while on vacation, but that's for another blog entry.) 


I will say this up front: I am the whitest regular attender of the drop-in class.  Last Monday, several new people joined us, so we did the customary go-around-the-circle-and-say-your-name thing, but we were also asked to share our tribal background.  There were Miqmaqs and Plains Crees, two Squamish girls, a Haida woman, a Gitxzan, and a few people from Tsawwassen nation.  When it was my turn, I said, "I'm Beth, and I am British/Irish/Swedish/Czech."

I am not only the whitest dancer, but also possibly the dancer with the least natural talent for dance.  Sure, I can move in time with a piece of music, but I have always lacked the confidence required to do it creatively and convincingly.  For much of my life, I have avoided school dances, and have made awkward small talk with other non-dancers during wedding receptions.


My whiteness and my lack of dance training combined to produce a fair amount of anxiety the first night I headed out toward the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre for dance class. As I walked, I rehearsed the reasons why I was going.

I need exercise.
The Friendship Centre is only a fifteen-minute walk from my house.  
The classes are free.

Those reasons were convincing (especially the last one, on a low-income pastor's budget), but they could apply to a lot of other potential activities.  They were not adequate to get me through the doors of the Friendship Centre.

I was invited to the class.  That was a better reason.  The teacher, who was fancy dancing at a National Aboriginal Day celebration put on by a local church, had invited the whole crowd to come to her class.  But I could still rationalize that the invitation wasn't specifically intended for a white non-dancer like me.

I tried to think of another reason.  I love to watch fancy dancing.  Fancy dancing drew me in from the first time I saw it, in Saskatoon, during my undergrad years.  I watched, dumbstruck, as the colorful ribbons of the dancers' shawls spun around them.  They seemed to spend more time in the air than on the ground, traveling by tiptoe, their feet stepping deftly, as though the grass under them were actually a bed of hot coals. Perhaps if I enjoyed watching it, I would also enjoy doing it.  Still, I had little faith I could reproduce such beautiful and free movement.

Thankfully, there was one more reason I had for learning to fancy dance, and this was the reason that pushed me over the edge: I believe I have a responsibility to protect and appreciate the cultures of my brothers and sisters, especially if those cultures have been denigrated, or threatened with assimilation and extinction. 


I co-pastor a predominantly low-income First Nations congregation in a neighbourhood that is home to one of Canada's largest off-reserve Aboriginal populations.  About a century ago, my people tried to take away the dances of their peoples; we called them evil and outlawed them in the name of Jesus.  We tried to rob them of many of the ways they worshiped their Creator and expressed their uniqueness.  We cut their hair, changed their names, and muted their languages.  It was only by their ingenuity and collective memory that they kept these cultural elements alive.  Today, some First Nations languages and practices are still very much in danger of extinction.

I have a responsibility to protect these cultures by virtue of being human, but even more so as a human who claims to follow Christ.  I believe that what my people did was sinful and unjust.  My Creator loves variety and values culture.  His plan for humanity is not for us to merge into a monoculture, but for all the kings and nations of the earth to march (or maybe dance!) into the holy city in our glorious diversity, bringing all our splendor (Rev. 21:24).

I did not think that learning to fancy dance would in any way undo the damage caused by my people.  I did, however, hope that it would take me a few steps closer to appreciating and understanding the beautiful culture I sought to protect in the name of Christ.  Besides, the slight discomfort and embarrassment I might feel as a white girl in dance class would, at most, be a small taste of the many marginalizing experiences most First Nations people face daily.

It turned out that my first dance class wasn't nearly as awkward as I expected.  Rather than explaining the steps, the teacher stood in front of me and demonstrated them over and over, which is a typically First Nations way of teaching.  She told me to keep trying them for the next hour of dancing.  I left exhausted but exhilarated.  It took me a full month to get a feel for the heartbeat of the drum, and many more months before I was able to combine the steps more creatively.  Now, I notice myself loosening up and relaxing.  I am even making a couple of friends. 

I am always ready to share my reasons for learning to fancy dance.  Yet to this day, not a single person at dance class has asked me why a pale-faced redhead would keep showing up.  Maybe in the future they will pop the question, but for now, they simply accept me as a fellow learner, laughing complaining with me during the warm-up abdominal exercises, and poking fun at me when I fail once again to anticipate the ending of a song.  It is a privilege to be so welcomed, and to work with them to preserve and promote something so beautiful.

Watch for me on the pow wow circuit years down the road.  I'll be the one blinding you with my white skin and my boss moves.

A video of one of my teachers fancy dancing.

8th Fire

Beth here.  Just wanted to draw your attention to a new show on CBC profiling the experiences and realities of First Nations people in Canada.  It's called "8th Fire."  I watched the first episode, and I found it quite visually engaging, educational, challenging, and balanced.  Highly recommended by me!

You can watch it on CBC on Thursdays at 9:00 pm, or you can watch it online whenever you want - just click on the photo below to find the links.

A Year in Review

2011 was evidently not a great year for blogging for us. Sorry about that. We have been busy, and we are still learning which makes it hard sometimes to make sense of what we are learning enough to talk about it. So thanks for your patience with us. We are trying to do better in this area.

Highlights of 2011:
We are celebrating almost one whole year of stable locations for our Sunday gatherings. We continue to meet outside in the warmer weather and consider this our "true home" in many ways. It is such a joy to worship in public space and watch how creative God can be in drawing people in. Mission Possible, a local mission group extended hospitality to us last February and using their space has been an extraordinary gift. We are able to accommodate a wide range of groupings and use of their industrial kitchen has added much to our life together. We have even been able to partner on occasion, including this past Christmas Eve (pic. of Christmas Eve band above).

This Easter on a cold rainy afternoon we celebrated our first baptism.

Our summer was dominated by two themes. First, Red Clover Farm where we had our first year, start to finish, of managing the entirety of the farm. The space continues to be a source of joy, connection, sharing and learning. We are considering how to best steward this gift in the coming year, perhaps looking to generate some income from the farm.

Last spring the children put together an interactive production of the Exodus story to top off our series on that book. This year as we began our preparations to tell a story from Daniel the kids said, "let's make it be 4D like our one last year, cause that was really cool." We did enjoy a dollar store stock of plague-like toys that we could throw at the audience at appropriate times. This year's fiery furnace might prove a little more challenging...unless I can get my neighbour who breathes fire to join us!

In a neighbourhood where time is largely punctuated by the rhythms of welfare distribution days it has been fun to have children and adults alike begin to comment, "hey, we did that last year!" as the rythm of the church year begins to permeate our lives.

Justice: The Final Frontier

If you have not read the previous two blog entries, please stop, go back, and do so, as these three posts are intended to be read together.

Now that you are back, we turn our thoughts toward justice. What are the just kingdom realities toward which we strive if so much of our current experiences of charity are inadequate and perhaps even harmful?


Often in these conversations I will hear someone throw out Jesus' quote, "the poor you will always have with you." This line is thrown out as though charity is really the best we can hope for anyway. But Jesus himself was quoting Deuteronomy, and the verse in its entire context reads, "There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land" (Deuteronomy 15:11). Funny, but we always leave off that later part about therefore care for those in your land. We also miss the quote from earlier in the chapter where it says, "However, there need be no poor people among you" (v.4).

If poverty was supposed to be eradicated in the midst of the people of God how was (how is) that supposed to happen? Spoiler alert, I will not solve this age old question in the following paragraphs. But, how can we keep pressing in to this question?

JUSTICE AS SYSTEMIC REFORM IN SCRIPTURE
The text in Deuteronomy that was quoted speaks to systemic reform. Moses was advocating for an overhaul of how people interacted with one another when there were inequities. First, there was to be a general posture of openhanded generosity as a posture of faith. Faith that there was enough. Faith that God was good and provides in abundance to be shared, not scarcity to be hoarded. From that place of open handed generosity there was then also to be a radical reckoning which was to even the playing field every seven years, at which point debts were cancelled and properties returned to original owners so that the equity with which things were portioned out originally could be the reference point for the whole community.

JUSTICE AS SYSTEMIC REFORM IN THE CHURCH
What might this look like for us today? This radical redistribution of resources is deeper and more thorough-going than our practices of charity, even if we think of charity in terms of redistribution of resources. What does this idea of transferring the means of wealth equitably look like within our churches and between our churches? What might it look like for the offering plate to be not simply a means of income generation for the programs and expenses of the church, but as a mechanism for the radical redistribution of wealth as it seemed to be in the days of the early church? What would it look like for churches, maybe together in a geographical area to commit to ensuring that there was no one who was homeless within the geographical neighbourhood? What would it look like for the church to be at the cutting edge of societal reform around poverty issues because we are motivated by a gospel imperative of love that seeks justice?

JUSTICE AS SYSTEMIC REFORM IN SOCIETY
Throughout Scripture there is a clarion call for justice that removes the yoke of oppression. Removing that yoke cannot be done with bandaids and I would argue that it can rarely be done in a generation. The kinds of yokes that oppress in our society today reach deep into the psyche of all of us and touch on our primary ways of interacting with the world. But creating more just systems can create ladders with which we can all move toward more generous and more equal ways of being in the world.

If you live in BC and Canada, let me point you in the direction of Seth Klein and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives for more information on all of these things. While for many of us who are middle to upper income earners or even working to upper class persons these may seem like ideological concepts that are very removed from your every day life, for the poor, who are often working class as well, this touches on daily life and creates the need for charity. Topics for us to get involved with from a justice perspective include:

The Living Wage: because work should lift you out of poverty, not keep you there
Tax Reform because in BC we have had a decade of eroding tax fairness where the richest 20% pay the lowest total tax rate, and middle-income ones pay a lower rate than poor and modest-income households
Welfare Policies: there is a significant need for reforms here. Some information can be found at the website for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives but a summary of the problems include: the fact that welfare in its current form discourages work by deducting dollar for dollar whatever you make from your welfare payments (particularly since welfare does not provide a livable amount month to month). A person on welfare cannot have any money in the bank month to month or else that amount is deducted from their cheque. There are time limits (as of 2004) as to how long you can stay on welfare (2 years out of every 5) while supports for finding work have been radically cut.

WHAT CAN YOU DO????
1. Educate yourself on problems that don't affect you on a day to day basis but that do affect your neighbours.
2. Advocate for change. Consider joining the living wage campaign or the raise the rates campaign.
3. Redistribute wealth by contributing money to an area of need and trust the people there to sort out how to use it. Give them time to be able to respond in a way that is most appropriate to their context.
4. Ask, who are the invisible poor in your neighbourhood and figure out a way that they can help you. Turn the power dynamics upside down, it was something Jesus was very fond of doing!

He has shown you, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you. Do justice. Love mercy. Walk in humility with your God.

Charity: the good, the bad and the ugly

Following on from the previous post I want to start by saying that I think Charity has gotten a bad name in some circles. I want to re-claim Charity as a term that should mean something good. My friend Jonathan Bird said, "we need to get back to the root of charity, which means love." Indeed, our idea of charity as a biblical concept is the kind of neighbour love that flows from being loved by God, not because we are good, or deserve it or earned it or even have a right to it, but because God loves. That is what God does and it is what we are to do when God lives in us.

That being said, let me move on to the bad name that charity has developed in some circles. In its current form charity (in the forms it takes to care for the poor) has come to mean an organization with charitable purposes who exist to "alleviate" poverty. They do this most commonly through professionalized workers who provide goods and services for needy individuals or families. Charitable organizations often spend a fair amount of time and energy trying to secure funds to do what they do, and sometimes will partner with government in delivering those goods and services through some sort of partnership or grant funding. The power dynamics often involve the professional determining what the needs of the individual are while the person in need has little say in the matter. This is for the sake of efficiency. The bad name comes from the power inequities, and the professionalization of service. Some would say, the need is so great, what else can you do? Charitable groups do important work and they are right, they have developed systems to deal with the overwhelming needs they are confronted with daily.

The ugly part comes in when we stop and think about the situation as a whole. This point was made well by the Carnegie Community Action Project last week during the CBC food drive. They wanted to raise the concern that Food Banks were set up to be a temporary measure, to ensure that people did not starve while a longer term more effective process was set up. It was meant to be a band-aid on a gaping wound that needed stitches, but instead we have taken for granted that we need to give more to the food bank rather than asking why so many people do not have adequate food in one of the most wealthy nations in the world. The wound is growing but we keep assuming more band-aids are all that is required. What makes this particularly ugly is that here in Canada (this is not true in many other countries) a charity is not allowed to spend more than 10% of its resources advocating or lobbying for a change of the system. In other words, charities, who are the best positioned to see the needs on the ground are allowed to put bandaids on the poor and the dying (alleviate poverty) but they are not allowed to work to eradicate poverty if that eradication involves any sort of criticism of government. Government, meanwhile, washes their hands of public responsibility for the entrenchment of poverty in this land by offering capricious funding to charitable groups who do their bidding until said group becomes to political, or falls out of favour.

What are we to do? Is charity lost?

I want to argue that we need to recover charity as loving our neighbours. And we need to push our sense of who our neighbour is, as Jesus encouraged us to do in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Often it is easier to consider the far away neighbour as opposed to the one who actually lives down the street from me who I really don't like very much.

So yes, we must recover charity, and practice loving our neighbours. Loving our neighbours includes coming as equals, listening, caring, sharing what I have and receiving in turn. But, I want to argue that charity is not the answer to poverty. That addressing poverty, which we must do because the poor are also our neighbours but poverty is a power that has trapped our neighbours. Addressing poverty will require engaging in justice. The prophet Micah said, "what the Lord requires of you is to seek justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God." We must put our hands, and our feet, our mouths and our hearts to the work of justice seeking in addition to loving mercy.

Charity and Justice: A view from here

I have had a lot of conversations in the last month or so about charity and justice. In the next few posts I would like to let you in on some of those conversations, and offer some of my thoughts and reflections. It is an important and complex conversation and I want to invite feedback and interaction. I want to also acknowledge that we are in the most charitable season of the year, and by raising questions I want to invite critical thought and reflection but do not mean to be-little activities that any readers here may be engaged in. Rather, I find myself in a unique social location and want to simply offer, as I said in the title, a view from here. My hope is that as we share our views, our perspectives from our unique places we might see together a little more clearly.

So, what does the view look like from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, now the third poorest postal code in Canada and certainly the site of most charitable activities in the Lower Mainland. Tonight, I can name at least 10 families in my community I know who are attending their 2nd Turkey-Dinner-Christmas-Party of the day and their 5th since Friday (today is Monday). Walking past the intersection of Main and Hastings there has not been a day since the first of December when I have not encountered an impromptu food line formed at the back of a car that pulls up, the trunk is popped and soup or sandwiches are handed out maybe with a scarf and toque as well. The kind people will serve until their pots are empty and then will hop back in their cars and head back to work, or home. There is an abundance of food around right now, but everywhere I know of that offers Safeway cards so you can go shop for your own food has been out since the 8th of December. Hundreds of Christmas baskets will be given out in the next week full of special treats, candy and gifts, but it will be really hard for lots of my friends to find the money to make any vegetables or meat for Christmas dinner with their families. And, come January, the turkey dinners will have come to an end, the sugar rush will have worn off and cupboards will be bare, still.

Does charity keep us from justice? This is a question I have heard posed a few times in the past little while. A friend of mine and resident of the neighbourhood asked, does giving to charity enable us to simply make a "better" consumer choice. I decide for example to buy a Christmas dinner for someone in need (through a $5 donation to UGM) rather than get that afternoon latte from Starbucks. But does that consumer choice then allow me to walk away feeling like I have done something good without changing or challenging the system that allows me to choose between these two options while my neighbour is only able to choose between whether to go stand in line for that dinner with her 5 hungry and rowdy kids (outside for at least 1 hour in order to get a seat) or to stay at home and feed them noodles and butter.

My friend likes to challenge people, for every act of charity you engage in this holiday season, would you commit as well to an ongoing act of justice that carries on beyond the season? Its a good challenge. Let's think more on this together soon.