Coping With Poverty
My life has fallen into a few stages.
As a child, I lived in Box Hill when it was village. I then became pastor to the slums of inner Melbourne for eight years. I was then a country parson and a teacher at a one teacher bush school out at Jackson Creek in Western Victoria and then for 13 years, I was a suburban minister in one of Australia’s largest suburban ministries.
And then, for more than 27 years I’ve been Superintendent in Sydney of Wesley Mission, Australia’s largest church ministry.
I’ve told you stories of people in each of these places.
Tonight I want you to come with me into the heart of the city.
In 1970, my wife and I had four small children and were desperately poor. My wife was fully occupied in caring for them and myself. I had a job as a minister of a church and we were paid eighty-four dollars per week. We had just purchased our first home after an immense struggle to save the deposit. It was fibro and weatherboard, but it was ours!
The building society repayments, legal fees and an all out effort to avoid a second mortgage, meant we had very little to live on. Our clothes were good—my wife sewed for all of us, and a friend in a store gave us all the returned goods that were faulty, and Beverley repaired them.
The bread shop gave us all the leftovers at the end of the day and we delivered them to families in need, a number of elderly people in our care, and to our own dinner table.
Our children had wonderful presents at Christmas time. Wonderful because we made each one with love! We could not afford to buy them, but we made presents for each other. Some of those handcrafted toys made by a loving mother and father are still in the homes of our children, and the big dolls’ house, farm and cowboy fort are now used by our grandchildren.
Ask our children what their finest possessions were and they will talk of the brightly painted billy cart, fire engine, hand-dressed doll in her cradle and mouse house.
Our possessions were few and hard worn. It took years to pay off our piano and then our stereogram. We were poor, yet rich, for we had each other. We had our home and we had everything that love made possible.
Our family life then was so different to the poor I meet today. For a start, most today are on their own, battling without the help of someone who cares. Without help they never have a hope of getting decent accommodation, let alone their own house. We had a house and we knew we were getting somewhere. The poor people I meet today are living in caravans, paying $260 per week in rent, in derelict buildings and in a succession of temporary premises.
They would be glad of the day-old bread we collected. My children had big, colourful, handcrafted toys that have lasted down over the years. The children I see today have toys, but the batteries are missing.
Their mum is always being evicted. She is a decent woman, but just can’t make do or get ahead. The children are living just above the minimum survival level. Sickness is always prevalent.
The numbers of poor families coming to us for emergency help and daily sustenance at Wesley Mission continues to increase. The vouchers to help poor families pay their electricity bills are snapped up within the first few months of every year. Cash reserves to help people buy food are always low. Our pastoral department are giving out hampers of food daily.
This is a new kind of poverty. Thirty years ago we managed and we never shed a tear for what we did not have. But today is different. It is hard not to shed a tear for the young mothers of this current generation who know a more desperate poverty than we ever did.
One thing alone helps us: it is the support, prayers and gifts form many friends which we use to help those who need it most. Your practical care changes the future for so many. One night I experienced both the theory and the face of poverty. The theory came from a friend from the United States of America who was visiting me.
Ron Sider is a Professor of Theology and Culture at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. I spoke with him on a recent trip to Australia on an issue that faces Christian theologians of today. I have his exact words as I recorded them for our magazine “Impact!”
“The question of justice for the poor has to the one of the central issues,” he revealed, “Then the environment and the family. If we don’t do something to restore the integrity of the family, our societies are going to collapse. If we take seriously the Biblical teaching that God has a very special concern for the poor, then we ought to spend less on ourselves and share more with others. But it’s not enough just to do personal sorts of things. It is not enough just to even change the church. I don’t really think we need a lot more glass cathedrals in an age of hunger, for instance. But it does seem to me that we need to change the larger structures of society. We need to ask why people are poor.”
Professor Sider is a world authority on poverty, it’s effects upon communities and the way Christians can help eliminate poverty.
He continued: “Dom Helda Camara, the former Catholic Archbishop of North East Brazil, said “When I give food to the poor they call me a saint, when I ask why people are poor, they call me a Communist.” We need to ask about the structures that produced poverty, and change those structures.
“Now some people get most queasy and uneasy about this. They have no problem giving food baskets, no problem adjusting to community development where we dig some wells and help people in their own way, but when we begin to suggest there might be a link between poverty and our affluence, they begin to be uncomfortable.”
Ron Sider has been described as an evangelical social activist. He explains this descriptor as. “Evangelical means that I would like to let every part of my thinking and acting be shaped by Jesus Christ. It means that Jesus Christ is the most wonderful thing that can happen to any person, and so I want to encourage everyone to come into a living relationship with him.
“Social activist means, I think, that if one confesses in Jesus Christ, that means that He’s Lord of all life. So He ought to be Lord of my politics and my economics as well as my personal life. It won’t simply do to have grand theories. There are some folk who think that after they have theologised properly they have changed the world. It is not true. We need to apply our theories and get involved in the nitty gritty. It is very important to me that not only do I teach theology, but that I am also involved in a poor congregation in Philadelphia in an all black section of the city. I am down there slugging it out eight hours or so a week, trying to figure out how to run a community centre where we do tutoring and job employment training.
“I could not be more satisfied simply doing theology. Ivory tower theologising, apart from where the rubber meets the road, seems to me fairly useless. Through our church programs, we interweave Biblical values, and we always ready to say, “part of the solution to your problem is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” Professor Sider’s approach is exactly that of myself and Wesley Mission. We not only support benevolence but attack the political, economic and social causes.
Most churches accept the need to tell people about their need for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, but are quite resistant to talk of social, political and economic change. Ron Sider believes that many churches have “privatised” religious faith, moving into challenging personal ethics of family.
He said, “People who say we should stick to evangelism and not about the meaning of Christian faith for business ethics and for politics, are succumbing to modernisation and to the privatisation that the modern world has imposed on us.
“It is very clear from the Scriptures that the God of the Bible is concerned with justice, with peace and Christian claim is that Jesus is Lord of all life. So the privatisation that some conservative Christians want to engage in is not orthodoxy, it’s the influence of the modern world. I would like to see churches move out beyond themselves and begin to change the world through evangelism, through word and deed.
“I think Jesus made people very comfortable. He challenged the status quo at every point. He challenged the economic establishment. They must have been terrified with the way He said that you need to make loans even if there is no hope of ever being repaid. They must have been terrified of the way He challenged the men of His time. Jesus crashed through social barriers. He talked publicly with women, He discussed theology with them and He treated them as equals”.
Ron summaries his theology as this “At the core of my theology is that God of the universe, the creator of the galaxies, became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, lived among us, experienced the pain and agony of human life, showed us how to live, died finally on the cross to take care of the problem of sin and provide forgiveness, rose on the third day to show us how good the created order is and He promises that the victory over all the evil in the world that He has already begun, and is going to be completed at His return. And he calls you and me now to invite people to join Him in that crusade, to accept the forgiveness He offers and the power He offers to live a new life and then to get on with His task of transforming our world.”
After talking with Professor Sider, I had to go out to visit some of my staff who were working with street kids. There I saw the kind of poverty we had been talking about.
It was just after ten o’clock on a weeknight in the heart of the city. A few office workers are making their way home after working back late. The cinema audiences are still in their world of make-believe. The orange sodium-vapor streetlights of George Street cast a warm glow over Town Hall Square, and unless you really looked, it would be easy to miss the small groups of teenagers, settling in for the night. Those teenagers were the face of poverty who put flesh on the theology Professor Sider and I had been discussing.
Our workers at StreetSmart and our Liverpool Street Welfare Centre know most of them well. Some are friendly and talk openly. Others accept food and clothing, but never enter into conversation. It is difficult to get to know them because they have learnt to distrust adults from an early age. Often the best way to get them a talk about themselves and their feelings is to approach them with a television camera. Then they complete with each other to get camera to tell their story. We joined a crew from SBS Television taping a documentary on homeless teenagers. The week before I had taken a Channel Seven news team to talk with them, Martin Johnson was leading these media teams.
Brian had recently arrived from Melbourne where he was sacked from his job as a security guard for severely bashing a teenager. Although he had only been on the streets for the eight weeks, he had already become part of the street-kid scene. He was older than the rest of the youth about him and had become something of a street leader.
He said, “We just want to come and go as we like, that’s the way us street-kids want to live. We sleep on park benches, in houses, squats, wherever we can find a bed. Sometimes we even sleep here, in Town Hall Square. In Melbourne I had everything I needed, but I got fired, lost my wife, son and daughter, so I came to Sydney. I met Mandy and I reckon I will settle down with her. Maybe one day I will get off the streets, but all the moment, I enjoy being one of the street-kids. You know you have got friends, you all stick by one another.”
Asking people like Brian and Mandy if they are happy always produces a positive response. When you consider the conditions they live under—no home, job and regular meals—you realise that whatever they ran away from must have been much worse.
Brian said, “I am happier here than I would be living with my mum. We all look out for each other. We are just one big family. If I have got a problem, it is the same problem the rest of them have.”
Although they have only known each other for a short time, Mandy is expecting Brain’s baby. Brian says, “I feel really happy. I am going to make a family of my own, just me and Mandy. We’re going to get married, we’ll still have our friends down here, and we’ll still be part of the street. Our wedding’s going to be a street-kid wedding.”
“As soon as Mandy has the baby, we’ll hopefully be in a flat, but we’ll come down here at night and sit with our son or daughter. Even though we’ll have our own place, we’ll still be part of the family of street-kids.”
After shelter and a place to sleep, money is the other major problem for those who live on the street. None have regular jobs and are forced to rely on begging, handouts and crime—stealing from shop keepers, snatching hands bags from elderly ladies or standing over young kids and taking their mobile phones, sneakers and cash.
Brian said, “We ask people on the streets for money. Some nights we end up with three or four hundred dollars between the lot of us. Mostly we spend it on drink and food. When we all get our dole cheques, we meet up here and take turns to buy a heap of hamburgers and chips, and we all get a feed.”
For some in the group, life on the street is far better than being at home.
Brian said, “People think that we get thrown out because we’ve done the wrong thing, but for a lot of us kids it’s because our parents can’t handle us. They want us to play cricket and football and be lawyers and doctors, but we want to do our own thing.”
“When I did something wrong, my parents hounded me and bashed me and that’s what a lot of people don’t like, being hounded.”
Although most of those on the street are wary of any adult that appears to be part of the society that, in their mind, is trying to put them down, they do respect those that genuinely try to help them. David has grudging respect for one such person. He said, “I used to drink a lot, but there’s this lady who tries to help us. In some ways I ‘m angry with her because she tells me the truth about myself and in other ways I love her because she’s like mum to me.”
“She’s there for me when I really need her. She helps us out of her own heart. She’s a Christian lady with a lot of problems of her own, but she still helps, despite being sick herself. She doesn’t eat much because she feeds us.”
Although those we spoke with said they were happy, deeper questioning revealed that many resorted to drugs, both soft and hard, to get away from “the real world.”
David says, “Sometimes we rob and steal from people, but we do that to feed ourselves. If you steal a car radio, that’s fifty dollars, which is enough for a taste of heroin. Heroin takes you out of it, away from the real world.” I have quoted you their exact words, so you are not replying upon some theory of some social worker, but you are listening to the street-kids themselves.
Working with young people like Brian, Marny and David is a long and difficult process. It takes time to get their confidence and then many more moths to make them understand that we can help them put their lives back together. Please pray for the work of StreetSmart as each night we open our doors to those in need. We praise God for those whom we have been able to help, but without your help, we cannot continue. Your practical support is greatly appreciated. Professor Sider tells us we are doing exactly what Jesus taught. The kids tell us what their needs really are, and your prayers, support and encouragement enable our staff to make the difference.
The city of Sydney would grow to be one of the world’s great cities and Wesley Mission would grow to be one of the world’s great churches and I was privileged to spend each day in the heart of both.
