Author: Al
Posted: 2007-05-27 16:38:06
|
The Bishop's Fool's Errand
With annual conference coming up, I am curious to know what will be said about the bishop's initiative to end hunger in our communities. From casual observation over this last year I assume that the plan has been an almost complete failure. I make this assumption for a number of reasons. First among these reasons is that none of us actually know anyone who is hungry.
“None of us” is probably a hyperbole, but it is not a completely unreasonable phrase. Consider the scripture cited by Bishop Hoshibata:
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do
not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm
and eat your fill," and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. (James 2: 15-17)
That's great scripture. Really it is. The problem with using it in this context is two fold. First, I have never seen anyone roaming around my streets naked, or even in overly worn out clothing. Second, all of the poor people I know (including myself) are quite fat. You see, that is one of the often overlooked things about our country that makes us great. Even our poor people are fat.
There are always going to be outliers to any generalization. Though I do not know them, there must be at least a handful of hungry people within my community. It is well and good that they should be taken care of, and I do not wish for my words here to be twisted or misconstrued to say that I think otherwise. What I wish to challenge is the notion that mobilizing an entire conference will do anything to fix the problem.
To begin with, the problem is poorly defined. From the bishop's message about this initiative:
Statistics demonstrate that despite the abundance of produce and edible goods, we live alongside many who do not have adequate nutrition.
Here we have a violation of one of the basic rules of persuasion. You cannot be esoteric with statistics. If you are going to say the word “statistics”, then you must cite them, or at very least give a few actual numbers. “Many” is not a number. Bishop Hoshibata commits this blunder twice in his message. At best, this gives the impression that we are dealing with ugly polemics. I will refrain from putting to paper what this implies at the worst.
“Many” is subjective. Apparently, to bishop Hoshibata, “many” is a great deal fewer than it is to the average lay person. Hunger is a tiny part of the major problems plaguing our communities. I have a host of supporting evidence for this claim. chief among them is the fact that I have never seen or heard tale of an empty church food pantry. I am inclined to think that such a thing does not exist, because if it did, with this great initiative to end hunger going on, you would think that we would have heard about the need immediately.
Why then, are there hungry people in our communities, and full food pantries in our churches? The answer betrays the reason that an organization so large as a conference cannot solve this problem. It is just not enough for the food to be there. No amount of money or human power can or will ever solve this problem entirely.
Even with everything done perfectly, this is still a fool's errand. Scripture tells us in a couple places that we will always have the poor with us. I will go out on a limb and say that we will also always have the subset of the poor who are hungry as well. There is, of course, hope. We can help some of the people, some of the time. We are also blessed to be in a country where being poor is not a condemnation to always be poor. Fortunes are made and lost every day.
But that is neither here nor there. The purpose of this article is to show that it is a great sin to set this task before us in this way. It demoralizes us with the thought that we must be so utterly powerless to have such massive resources set to such a small problem. This is further made bitter by the apathy brought on with the knowledge that we are destined to fail. Our doubts are multiplied with the nagging sensation that this is just spiritual busy work.
There remains now, two questions. First, what should this initiative looked like in order to have been effective? And second, what can the conference focus on instead?
The answer to the first question is simple. We should do what the apostles did. Call out a special sub-group to tend to the bodily needs of those around us. You will find that this is largely what was going on before the initiative started. Nevertheless, we are Methodists, and by golly we love bureaucracy. Create a hunger czar, or some other such fancy title. By and large, churches know the needs of their communities, and they also know when those needs are not being met. Coordinate! That should be our strength. We have all of the necessary systems in place to be effective against problems like this provided that we give an appropriately proportioned response.
Now, for the far more interesting problem. What could our conference focus on as a whole? How about we focus on something that is really a problem. Our communities are full of real problems. If we stick with the secular theme put forth by the hunger initiative, how about a drug initiative. Drug use is destroying our small towns in this conference. Statistics show some 32,000 people addicted to illicit drugs in Idaho1 and 90,000 in Oregon2.
An added bonus to tackling this problem is that there are certain to be a number of drug users whose addictions are causing their hunger. Two birds, one stone. More to the point, this is a challenge befitting of a large organization with many resources. It might even be particularly tailored to an organization like the church. Our government has failed to solve this problem because it is a cold and unfeeling thing. The church has a chance to make a difference here because it should never be either of those two things.
Our food pantries were already full when the initiative against hunger was given. Yet our communities are full to the brim with drugs and outside of our largest cities nothing awaits the addict except a cold and terrifying jail cell.
Still, even this challenge, as grandiose and beautiful as it is, does not quite fit our purpose as a church. I have a novel idea, and I would be shocked to discover that it had been on the table at any committee meeting last year at the annual conference. How about we go out into our communities and try to make disciples for Christ? I know what you are thinking. I'm crazy. We are a Christian nation. How could we possibly make disciples out of such a group of people?
While that might have had a ring of sarcasm, I do mean to say that making disciples of our nation will be an enormously difficult task. The problem with America being a “Christian” nation was best put forth by Wesley in sermon 116 from his selected sermons:
But why is it that so little advantage is derived from it [Christianity] to the Christian world? Are Christians any better than other men? Are they better than Mahometans or Heathens? To say the truth, it is well if they are not worse; worse than either Mahometans or Heathens. In many respects they are abundantly worse; but then they are not properly Christians. The generality of these, though they hear the Christian name, do not know what Christianity is.
Many of the things that Wesley warned against in that sermon are still dangers today. We, as a nation, have turned our virtues into vices. We grew rich because we did right. We stayed rich because we did wrong. Now materialism has polluted our spiritual health. Thus, the challenge that sits before the Church in America is to minister to a country where the vast majority of people are selfish materialists, and secure in the knowledge that they are “Christian.”
The bishop's message spoke of shame. The real shame is the startling number of people in our own ranks with no idea of what it means to be a Christian. They have no idea of church history. They have no idea of what doctrines we profess, or what they mean. You know that I speak the truth in this matter. I have never known a preacher who did not complain about the terrible lack of basic spiritual knowledge among their congregations.
If then, this is such an obvious and systemic problem, why are we not addressing it? This is another sad case of worshiping the idol of Social Justice. Whatever twisted form that idol takes among our leadership is the god that we are all led toward. Our faith is not a means to the end of social justice. I can understand it when the Atheists make that mistake and criticize us for our track record on the issue, but when our own church leadership makes the same mistake I am dumbfounded.
I am sure that I will be told that programs like these are initiated out of a Christ centric desire. For those of you who think that perhaps I am confused about the bishop's motives, I have definitive proof that you are wrong. Consider the From the Bishop column in the May/June Oregon-Idaho United Methodist magazine. It would be easy for me to focus on his whining about organic foods and whole grain bread, but that would be a cheap shot, and this issue is too important to take a cheap shot. Instead, let us focus on the overriding message and how it relates to the real world. The bishop tried to live on the average food stamp budget of $21 a week.
This is the most horrifyingly polemic piece of tripe I have ever set my eyes upon. First, and foremost, no one lives on that average alone. It is an average because more money is given to those with less. If the state provides only $21 in food stamps to someone it is because that person has some other means, whatever they may be.
The experiment is designed to evoke the idea that everyone on food stamps must be living off of $21 a week. That is a pure lie, and propagating it is shameful. If hunger really was a problem in our communities, then such despicable tactics would not be necessary to garner support for the cause.
That brings me to my final pondering. Hunger is nowhere near the biggest, or most dangerous problems in our communities. Why then, are we being led to fight an imagined epidemic? I honestly cannot find a reason. If we are too weak hearted to fight the systemic ecclesiastical problems among ourselves and our neighbors, then why don't we at least try to fix a major secular problem? Why are we fighting this phantom? Are we that impotent? Is our faith so small? That might be the case with our leadership, but it is not the case with the rest of us.
We are ignorant. We are ill informed. We are reckless and easily distracted, But by God, if you give us a real challenge and real leadership, we will thrive. Give us more polemics and busy work, and you can sit back and watch your congregations continue to wither and die.
References
1)http://www.usnodrugs.com/statistics.htm?state=Idaho&cat=illicit
2)http://www.usnodrugs.com/statistics.htm?state=Oregon&cat=illicit |
|
