The SoSA Perspective

Children and the Poor... What is the Church all about?

People join organizations for many different reasons. But generally, when you boil it all down, we join organizations because we want to do or be whatever the organization does or is. These are perilous times for the church. Not only is membership shrinking in the “main line” denominations, (which indicates that we’re not doing or being what people joined up to do or be), but the church (main line and otherwise) is clearly not doing and being what God intends in the first place. We are a living comedy of errors. Is it any wonder that the society we are supposed to be giving moral guidance and inspiration to is adrift and sinking?

You don’t have to be a Bible scholar. Just a cursory reading of the Old Testament will show you God is fundamentally and foremost on the side of the poor and marginalized people of this world. God has always had a peculiar idea in mind as to what kinds of people he wanted his people to be.

He didn’t rescue the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery because he especially likes Hebrews. He rescued them because they were slaves and he especially dislikes slavery, and every other evil thing that we humans do to degrade and take advantage of each other. He didn’t punish those same Hebrews because they disobeyed ritual laws or any other “religious” crimes. He punished them because they “ground the faces of the poor” and trusted in their own power and wealth to make them great.

When Jesus came he was born among the poor. That was not an accident. When he started his public ministry he quoted Isaiah, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” That was not an accident either.

Jesus preferred to associate with the “outcasts and sinners” of society. This wasn’t because he doesn’t love respectable folks. It was because he especially loves those that we respectable folks make into “outcasts and sinners”, you know, the kinds of people you’d be embarrassed to invite to your church this Sunday.

If you look seriously at the priorities of Jesus and his Father, and compare them with the priorities of most of our churches today, it is difficult to see why we insist on calling ourselves the church of Jesus Christ in the first place. It would be more honest, given our present priorities, to call us “the church of the status quo”, “the church of more for me”, “the church of “just get me to heaven, Lord”, or the church of “let’s all just be nice”. We could lay claim to all those names and more. But the church of Jesus? I don’t know.

If we want to be the church of Jesus, we simply have to start identifying with those people he identified with. We have to be among the poor and outcast, and have them among us, like he did. Not so much as a great benefactor to them, but as a friend who knows how to find the Father’s kingdom.

The church’s faithfulness to the example of Jesus will be measured by the presence of the poor and the children among us, and by our response to them. The bad news is that we are a long way from being faithful in this regard. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way.