The Church of the Poor is a lifetime vision of a single man with a Mission : " To eradicate Poverty and build a basis on Social Justice for all by meeting the needs of the whole person – body and spirit ".. He believes that true vision of Christian charity is one that embraces the whole human person, physical and spiritual. He reiterates that what prophet Isaiah says, “When we spend ourselves on behalf of the poor, our healing comes and our light begins to shine.” This is what we’re made for: We’re made to live for something bigger than ourselves; we’re made to give ourselves for others. When Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, "Give to whoever asks from you," it’s in the context of His teaching on enemy love. Jesus is saying that the way the world works, the poor become our enemies, but we’re invited into relationship so that we can discover a new community. charity is always condescending to the poor, a handout never feels good, nobody wants to be in that position, but telling the truth about the divisions and gaps between us and doing what we can to love one another across those divides is taking steps toward becoming the family of God that Jesus says we already are.
After painstaking research and development, he embarked upon this noble venture to see that Social justice reaches the most deserving. Having worked for leading Multinational NGOs and development Agencies, he has the rich expertise of working at the front end andtackling the most challenging decisions involving Development andAid in todays World. He strongly believes that Christ lives and is actively present in the poor and needy people.Lets once again ponder over the story of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man created this gated life, this gated neighborhood, kept the world out and locked himself in. And what he finds is that he not only locked the poor out of his life, but he’s locked himself into a life that’s incredibly narcissistic and robs him of love and community. It's also not just a separation between himself and Lazarus, but it becomes a separation between himself and God. He’s certainly a religious man, he knows the prophets, he calls out to Father Abraham and yet God says, "This person suffered just outside your gate and you received everything in this world that you needed." And of course the story ends with the flipping of everything to where the rich man is begging the beggar for a drop of water.
It’s a hard parable, but the rich man ended up there not just because he’s rich but because he didn’t care and he didn’t love and he didn’t connect with his neighbor. That’s the invitation that we all have. It means that we’ve got to bust through the gates or the picket fences or the walls that we build up between nations and we’ve got to find the alien and the immigrant, the stranger, the hurting, the homeless and learn their names. And incidentally, Lazarus is the only person named in the parables of Jesus and it means "the one God rescues" or "the one God hurts." We have to be the folks that hear those cries and humanize those people who’ve just been locked outside.
Poverty is a concept that refers to "pronounced deprivation in well being."(1) In simple terms, to be poor is to be hungry, homeless, sick, illiterate, voiceless, powerless and generally unprotected from adverse and potentially oppressive and unjust social realities. Poverty is a global problem of huge proportions with explosive social consequences for peace and stability. According to the World Bank, of the world's 6 billion people, 2.8 billion live on less than $2 a day, and 1.2 billion on less than $1 a day(2). Generally, wealth and poverty are asymmetrical social realities that reflect unjust distribution of material resources, knowledge and power in local and worldwide scale. Our cheerful compassion and giving must be grounded upon belief that “in nothing do we draw so close to God as in doing good to man." Jesus Christ in his teaching ministry had juxtaposed, as it can be found in Matthew 22:39 and Mark 12:31, the demand of loving God with all one's heart (Deut. 6:5) with the command to love one's neighbor as oneself (Lev. 19:18). By placing these two commands in immediate juxtaposition, Jesus asks us to understand each in light of the other. This is a consistent trend in the gospels and even in St. Paul who writes to Galatians: "Through love be servants of one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, 'you shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Gal 5:13-14). The ways we love our neighbor reveal the authenticity of our faith in God, in the most concrete terms.He wants to remind the rich that they must recognize the true identity of the poor and acknowledge their special dignity and role in Christian community. By this we know love that he laid his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and in truth (1 John 3:16-18). In the book of Proverbs we find the remarkable assertion, "He who is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will repay him to his deeds" (19:17). The people of God, in Ecclesiastes, are expected to share their possessions with the poor through almsgiving. God rewards and blesses those who practice almsgiving (17:22; 7:32). It provides the best security for life (40:24); it endures forever (40:17), for it is an act of worship to God: "He who gives alms offers thank-offering" (35:2). Faith demands an active love towards the poor and the needy (James 2:15-17). The underlying assumption for this active concern for those who are suffering is the belief that all people created by God constitute an inextricable unity and salvation depends on whether we "love and show humanity" to the suffering brethren. For we are all one in the Lord, rich and poor, bond or free, sound or sick; and one is the Head of all, He from Whom are all things, namely Christ. And what our members, are to each other, this each one of us is to the other, and to all… We should fix in our minds the thought that the salvation of our bodies and souls depend on this: that we should love and show humanity to the these (the suffering poor).
Why don't we think about poverty, welfare, and the best way to help the poor?Let us promote the attempts by various celebrities such as Bono to relieve poverty, and like Live Aid or the One Campaign. Churches and other religious groups must effectively combat world poverty, this is not something only governments can tackle.It seems a genuine role can be played by religious aid bodies. Instead of giving away handouts, we must have programs that offer loans to individuals and small businesses in poor countries. We desperately need experts in micro credit and micro financing, and prove a good illustration of the maxim that it is better to teach a man to fish than simply to give him a fish.Jordan Ballor of the Acton Institute in the US argues that Christians should reconsider how much they rely on governments to fight poverty. Indeed, he suggests that Christians should not be so reliant on governments for doing what churches have always historically done. Says Ballor,“One of the most common refrains from Christian leaders calling various governments to action - whether those of Canada, the U.S., or other member states of the United Nations - is that governments are the only entities capable of providing the level of material assistance that is needed. In the words of a speaker to a denominational assembly, ‘Civil society is never enough.’ The message is that churches can never hope to match sums like the $40 billion the G8 has proposed to cut debt among some African nations.”But is this the case? Are churches so poor? “This attitude simply does not give Christians enough credit, both for what they have done and what they might do if challenged. In the U.S. alone in 2004, private individuals and corporations gave a record $249 billion to charity, with religious organizations as the single largest recipient group at $88 billion.”This is more than double the debt-relief offered by the G8, and this is reached even though Christians as a group do not give nearly at a level in accord with the biblical principle of the tithe. The Barna Group reports that only 6% of American Christians gave 10 percent of their income to churches or para church organizations in 2004. the possibilities are endless if Christian leaders spent more time admonishing the members of their flock to meet their biblical responsibilities.And believers should prefer faith-based initiatives over secular government programs for several reasons. First, one can ask how effective government poverty relief measures are, especially in terms of foreign aid. As Lord Peter Bauer liked to remark, most foreign aid programs consist of poor people in rich countries giving money to rich leaders in poor countries.Indeed, biblical aid work must take the whole person into account: “So why are Christians so eager to endorse what is at best a half-measure? Jesus showed us the relative priority of the spiritual over the physical when he asked, ‘What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?’ (Mark 6:36 NIV).”“Some kinds of Christian charity have been making this error for decades. The National Council of Churches (NCC) ignores the fact that acts of Christian mercy must always be done with a view toward the spiritual welfare of the recipient, as it continually engages in relief efforts while explicitly condemning ‘proselytizing.’ But what the NCC calls proselytizing, other Christians call evangelism. Is not the “cup of water” to be given in Jesus’ name? (Mark 9:41).
Think about it!
