Lesson #2- Poverty Is More Complex Than We Thought It Was

What does it mean to be poor? Why are people poor? Most people would say that to be poor means you lack material possessions. Others might say a lack of knowledge, or maybe even values. Some people might say that poverty is a result of spiritual, moral, or value deficits: bad choices, as a result of bad morals or values, lead to poverty.

If, like me, you take some time to read up on poverty, maybe even study it at school, you come across increasingly complex explanations. For instance some have suggested that poverty is being trapped in a web of various systems, such as cultural, religious, political, family, and economic systems. Others point to history as the cause of poverty. The Chalmers Center at Covenant emphasizes poverty as broken relationships between God, one's community, one's self, with the created world, and with people outside your community ("the other").

But even after all of the books I've read, all the conversations I've had, all the projects I've studied, I have routinely been shocked during my time in Kenya by just how complicated poverty really is! And in this post I don't want to argue for one or other understanding of poverty so much as to show how the causes and effects of poverty are complicated beyond our wildest imaginings.

What caused the poverty of our friend "Magdalene," and what does being poor mean for her? "Magdalene" grew up in a remote Kenyan village that survived through raising small amounts of food on a small piece of land. Because of a patriarchal cultural system, enforced by Kenyan law at the time, she could not inherit land as a woman, so when her mom no longer had money for school fees for her education, she married her off to an older man in her village who she hardly knew.

This husband immediately moved to Nairobi and left her back home. He would come home every Christmas; she got pregnant almost every year, until she had 8 children. Somewhere along the way she began brewing illegal beer to try to pay for her children's needs. Later, she decided to go move in with her husband. When she arrived in the Kibera slum, she found he had, like so many of the migrant workers here, started a new family. She chased away the new wife; her husband beat her, drank a lot, provided nothing for the family. Eventually he tried to kill her, and she ran away to another house with her children. In the new house, her landlord routinely raised the rent double what it had been; she could not keep him from doing so, because he might have the thugs kill her. Later on this same woman got a job with some white friends of ours. She did excellent work, and they trusted her for several years. One day they found out she had been stealing from them.

When her children get sick she goes to the hospital, but the staff are rude, and do not explain anything to her. She thinks they charge too much or want a bribe, but she can't understand because it is too technical for her. In church on Sundays, "Magdalene's" pastor preaches about giving every week, but never about sexual purity, because, as Magdalene says "he is the worst of all." He regularly calls her for big donations, because she works for white people. When the husband spoke to the pastor, the pastor told Magdalene that God was mad at her for leaving her husband, and that if she got back together with him, she could be a part of the leadership team. Even though she explained that her husband had tried to kill her and had never given anything to the family's income, the pastor said divorce was wrong so they had to get back together. Another time the pastor preached on how black people are cursed because they are descended from Ham, but white people are blessed because they have descended from Shem. This pastor is a part of a large church with generally well-educated preachers, but because this is a slum, the worst pastors, sometimes even pastors who have done bad things like embezzle money or sexually harass church members, are sent there.

What caused Magdalene's poverty? Bad decisions? Occasionally. She shouldn't have stolen from her employers, and if she loses her job this will increase her poverty. But bad decisions don't really explain most of it. Is it a lack of knowledge? Sometimes. If she understood medicine more she could get better care, or if she were more educated about the Bible she'd know that her pastor is a wolf in sheep's clothing and wouldn't believe his lies. But even still, would knowledge have solved all her problems? Not by half. Does a lack of material possessions cause her poverty? Again, the answer is sort of, but not really.

What does poverty mean for Magdalene? It means constant fear for her physical safety and the safety of her children. It means she is vulnerable to the Wild Wild West of a Kenyan slum, where gangs run the streets, people are kicked out of their homes, the police beat and rape and take bribes, and where the worst of all services, from electricity, to plumbing, to education, to health are all crammed into one place. It means that her children sometimes go hungry, that she sometimes feels forced to do things she knows are wrong, like stealing.

But more than all of this, being poor for Magdalene means having a perpetually marred identity. Being poor means that everyday she is taught in a thousand different ways that she is not an image bearer of God, that she is less valuable, less important than people who are not poor. Her religious system tells her lies that say she is cursed, and that if she gives money to a corrupt pastor God will give her health and wealth. Her political system tells her she is worthless by "pay-to-play" politics, where justice is bought and sold. Her cultural system tells her she is worth less than men, and should be subject to the whims of a violent husband, and also that she is worthless because she has to do menial labor. This marred identity, this feeling of shame and worthlessness, is at the back of many of the decisions that Magdalene does get to make: being told time and again that she has no value, she begins to believe it and eventually act like it.

Poverty is not mud walls and dirt floors. I have been on small farms with people who I believe live lives closer to the prophetic vision of everyone sitting under their own vine and fig tree than I do in my materialistic affluent life. I have seen people that we would think were "destitute" who are active leaders in their church, who provide for their family with the literal fruit of their labor. No, poverty is not mud walls, but broken identities, it is powerlessness, and entrapment. It is being oppressed, kicked around, constantly taught implicitly and explicitly that you are less. This ain't your Papa's view of poverty, but it's the one we've found here.

And all of this means that solutions to poverty that are one-sided don't work! If we think people are poor simply because they don't have stuff, and we give it to them, often we only increase their sense of worthlessness. We leave feeling like gods, and they leave feeling less than human. If we think the issue is just a job, so we provide a job, but don't address a political system that robs and steals, or an oppressive religious system that curses and embezzles, than we're just feeding the beast. If we address knowledge, or values, without addressing cultural systems that take all decisions about child birth out of the woman's hands, or that turn a blind eye to sexual harassment and adultery, we're sending people out to simply be more aware of how everyone treats them like nothing.

Take a look at the poor in your community and the "reasons they're poor" that you've accepted in your own mind. Take a look at the projects that you're involved in to try to help the poor, and ask yourself: Have we thought about the system? Is the culture, or the church, or the political system somehow contributing to their poverty in some way that we haven't seen? What is the implicit message of our charity? Are we giving people material things while reinforcing the lies they believe about themselves??

This has been a constant theme on this blog, because it has been a constant theme of our lives here. The system is real, if we have but eyes to see! The Bible teaches us that the powers are at work and that they corrupt every human institution! And our charities really do often reinforce lies the poor believe; we put a bandaid on a hand, and then chain feet to the floor.

I'm tempted to end on this fairly dismal note, because I think every Christian and every church needs to take another look at what we believe about poverty. But I won't leave it here for one reason: Jesus is the Risen King. The kingdom is coming. Aslan is on the move, and winter's bite is ended. And when Christ comes he makes his blessings known wherever the curse is found. The kingdom of God brings solutions bigger than Satan's snares. Sin's hidden complexity is over-matched by the kingdom's all-encompassing healing and redemption. And as we draw near to Christ, as we join in the Biblical story as the story of our lives, as we learn to look with His eyes at the poor as image bearers and the systems as corrupt and unjust, we will begin to live out of this kingdom and find ways to really engage with the poor in life-giving ways. And as a reminder of this, we've included a whole bunch of really joyful pictures from celebrations we had with members of our farmers groups this past week. So let's all ask Christ to guide us into true understanding and merciful and just living.

Peace,
Michael

*Most of my understanding of these models comes from Bryant Myer's life-changing but very technical book Walking With The Poor. For a lighter, also life-changing read, try When Helping Hurts, by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett.