Economic chaos and personal responsibility
By Jon Rector
In Tuesday’s Times Free Press appeared a story that told how President Obama and his treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, want to assign new regulatory powers to the Federal Reserve System “to guard against the types of risks that could bring down the entire system.”
This sort of language about the “entire system” collapsing has been so pervasive since the national financial meltdown began in September that we scarcely seem to notice it. So great has the financial decimation been in Chattanooga and around the country that cataclysmic language and fresh exercises of “emergency” powers behind them seem ho-hum.
Almost daily we read how national chieftains and financial wizards propose solutions that do nothing to fundamentally alter the system they have created and which is now in the process of collapse, with zombie banks doddering about, a federal deficit of more than $1.8 trillion and imposition of regulations in the past year that one study estimated cost Americans more than $1.17 trillion. This from a set of Washington barons fit only to defend the country and deliver the mail. But that job’s too small. They want to add departments and devise new “facilities” and “tools” to regulate the American economy and increase their surveillance for the benefit of us yokels.
“A stronger framework,” the Times Free Press story said.
“Increased oversight.”
“A regulatory overhaul.”
I.e., more departments.
More centralization.
With these solutions the people of Chattanooga and the rest of the country can regain the $1.3 trillion in assets lost in the last quarter and become more confident in the system, or so they’d have us believe.
“Like all financial crises, the current crisis is a crisis of confidence and trust,” Geithner was quoted as saying. “Reassuring the American people that our financial system will be better controlled is critical to our economic recovery.”
“Better controlled.” Right.
Confidence in princes
The Bible warns us about putting confidence in princes. God does not delight in the strength of the horse; he takes no pleasure in the legs of a man (Ps. 147:10). Mordecai, when destruction loomed for the Israelites in Babylon at the behest of the wicked Haman, assured Esther that if she did not risk her life to plead for her people before the King, “deliverance will arise *** from another place” (Esther 4:13). Esther screwed up her courage, threw herself into the breach, trusting to God and his innumerable means to bring a salvation and save his people.
If we cannot trust the “stronger frameworks” and other ministries of Obama, Geithner and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to save us, where do we turn for solutions?
To the Word of God, which is all about antithesis. It’s all about separating the black and the white, rescuing them from the gray, a divine revelation of violent opposites. In the Bible there’s no support for blurring lines between public and private.
The Bible that opens to us the will and mind of God pushes the concrete vs. the abstract. God heralds the personal vs. the impersonal. The human vs. the corporate. The self-government of a free people vs. total government by strangers and by others.
The Bible would create a free society governed by the laws of God vs. the top-down pyramidlike society of the modern superstate governed by federal law and funded by easy credit and the enslavement of your grandchildren (or so the critics warn). It’s about taking personal responsibility vs. casting it upon others, i.e., it’s paying debts and absorbing risk personally rather than offloading our obligations onto taxpayers or agencies of government. It’s about self-control vs. endless consumption and an endless wash of promissory notes. It’s about homes and families vs. institutional life, whether nursing home, prison or rescue mission.
The Bible invites not a pyramid, but a decentralized social order. If you extend this concept, it goes far afield: Local economies vs. national economies. Small business vs. monopolistic cartels such as Fannie Mae. Gold and silver vs. unbacked paper money and inflation. Actual payment vs. promises to pay. This last is all our bankrupt overlords can offer to forestall a collapse, a papering over of disaster with new layers of promises, churned out in ever greater numbers as were Zimbabwe dollars before the country’s recent devastation under Comrade Mugabe.
Personal responsibility
In sum, the Bible promotes a personal reality vs. an impersonal one. The reality of the world we live in is under the superintendency of a personal, sovereign God who lets no hair fall from your head without personally knowing about it.
The thrilling question of what sort of life we should lead is explored in the faithful teaching of the Christian church. The simplicity of Christianity is something that startles many, especially newcomers to the faith. Look how elemental are its rites. There is the bread and the wine of the Lord’s supper, representing the body and blood of the Lord Jesus. There is the plain water in Baptism. There is the simple preaching of the Word unto life for listeners of faithful exposition.
No military parades. No government takeovers. No wars of conquest. No sword. No big media.
The Union Gospel Mission in Chattanooga, of which I am director and only paid staffer, has an interest in interaction between the world informed by the Word of God and that conjured by rebellious and proud men.
Homeless men, shirtless bankers
Our ministry gives charity food and lodging to men of two categories. There are the overnighters, who must be in my 5 p.m., eat dinner, endure a worship service led by a volunteer minister of the gospel, and be out of the building by 6 a.m. Then there are homeless men who enroll in a Bible study course that lasts six months, in which time we ask God to work salvation on their souls and rejuvenation of their wills and character. Some go on to find jobs and honorably sustain themselves.
We are a nonprofit organization separate from any particular church, yet the servant of all of them. We are funded by gifts, have no debt and don’t receive any benefit from the coercive offices of civil government. The troubled men we serve and our interactions with them echo the national calamity that is impoverishing us all. Without our service of mercy, these men live beneath underpasses, scrounge for food in Dumpsters or pass their days dozing in threadbare front seats of barely serviceable cars.
The 20 to 60 men we deal with on any given day face the struggle for solvency, the temptation of intoxicants, the calculation of conniving to get freebies, the willingness to wear two faces (looks of piety in prayertime but profane utterances outside while smoking) are issues I deal with everyday. Like the bankers, my tough customers are waiting for a bailout. They want other people to handle their problems. Many of them would prefer the charity they receive to be impersonal, so they’d be under no duty to render thanks. They want to be cleaned up after by other people. Though many are penniless, they are tempted by pride and laziness and an incapacity to see beyond the next free meal or the next pulse of electrons on their federal food stamp debit cards.
Christ’s universal claims
My answer to these often unkempt men at the bottom of society is the one that brought about the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s: A personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, established by conviction of sin and acceptance by faith in his sweet, enervating grace. Faith in the person and work of Jesus, who alone has the power to save the most decrepit sinner and the most abandoned loser — faith in and obedience to Him is how life can once again be breathed into individual lives and the life of our nation.
That is the message our volunteer preachers impress upon these men every night at the worship service. If Mr. Geithner and our federal barons could sit in our humble worship hall they would realize that they don’t have the answers and that our nation is under judgment and cannot be rescued by them, and that they should quit while they are ahead, shut down the whole of the District of Columbia and go back to their hometowns, get some much-needed sleep and enjoy their neglected families. The message of repentance and redemption by God is no less relevant to our homeless men than to these national leaders in their $1,200 linens.
One of the big problems I have faced as director of this Chattanooga ministry is the lack of manpower and organization. God has blessed us with many wonderful donors and support from churches, but God has constrained our 501(c)3 organization to better get our attention to his will. Just as he has brought about an economic meltdown to get our attention, God is using a unique circumstance to get us to look further in ways to serve Him. Now that I am at wit’s end, I am better able to see a more sustainable model for operation our group.
One of my goals is to find a better way of determining who are worthy receivers of charity among the bedraggled souls who walk through our front door. Our rules are simple and strictly enforced, but they go only so far. Unlike the free services of the welfare state, I really can’t be faithful to God and give out charity anonymously and impersonally. Like Jesus himself, the operation of reformation is personal, face to face, and the recipients of charity must be accountable for the receipt and use of it.
Historical wisdom for charity
An author who has written about the necessity of true charity is Marvin Olasky, whose book “Tragedy of American Compassion” was recently summarized by an article he wrote in World Magazine. In it he looks at examples of American history to see what lessons might be applied to helping the homeless and poor today.
Christians want to be generous, Olasky says, and that’s as it should be. But we can learn from our predecessors who emphasized that generosity is only the first step. If we act without discernment, our generosity may actually be selfishness that gives ourselves a warm glow but hurts others.
We can learn from the oldest charity still existing in the United States, the Scots’ Charitable Society of Boston, founded in 1657. The Society from its start resolved to “open the bowells of our compassion” but to make sure that “no prophane or diselut person, or openly scandalous shall have any part or portione herein.” They viewed poor people not as standing at the bottom of a ladder but halfway up, capable of ascending to independence and even wealth if they saw themselves as created in God’s image and were willing to live and work accordingly, but likely to descend into abject dependence and despair if they started to see themselves as animals.
Boston pastor Cotton Mather three centuries ago asked his church members to be charitable but also careful not to “abuse your charity by misapplying it.” A half-century later prominent pastor Charles Chauncey instructed leaders of the Society for Encouraging Industry and Employing the Poor to be careful in “the Distribution of Charity” so they would not “dispense it promiscuously” and “bestow upon those the Bread of Charity, who might earn and eat their own Bread, if they did not shamefully idle away their Time.”
We tend to think of generosity in a linear way as the opposite of selfishness, but there’s actually a spectrum: Generosity is in the middle, the selfishness of not giving at one end, and the selfishness of giving that warms the giver’s heart but hurts the recipient, on the other. Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25 emphasizes that “as much as you did to the least of these, you did to Me.” That cuts both ways: A person who offers help is helping Jesus, but a person who gives money that goes for drugs is shooting heroin into Jesus’ veins.
Two centuries ago Americans did not subsidize others in self-destruction. Some 23 Boston charity societies declared in 1835 that recipients should believe it “disgraceful to depend upon alms-giving, as long as a capacity of self-support is retained . . . [To] give to one who begs . . . or in any way to supersede the necessity of industry, of forethought, and of proper self-restraint and self-denial, is at once to do wrong, and to encourage the receivers of our alms to wrong doing.” The groups declared that “Christian alms-giving” means that relief should be given only after a “personal examination of each case,” and “not in money, but in the necessaries required in the case.” (World Magazine, March 14, 2009, Vol. 23, No. 5. World is on the Web at http://www.Worldmag.com.)
My trials as a minister to the homeless
Isn’t this just a great article? It really encouraged me and gave me a sense of perspective on the work God has called me to. The lessons Olasky describes will help our ministry continue to glorify God and to serve Him.
But there is a minor obstacle for Union Gospel Mission, as you may have heard in the news.
It looks as though we will continue to learn to have bowels of compassion for the homeless by being made homeless ourselves for a third time. God in his providence has so arranged secondary causes such that Union Gospel Mission will be losing its home Saturday (June 20). For some time it has been a guest of the Salvation Army on McCallie Avenue. But the Army has plans for the space we’ve occupied.
My hope has been to raise enough money to relocate in a former food wholesaler warehouse, but structural problems put that location out of reach for now. Another prospective location, a former funeral home, would need major remodeling and would be too small for us to launch any kind of “wood yard” or Goodwill-type business that characterized every Christian charity in the 19th century.
I don’t want you to think that the homelessness of our 59-year-old Union Gospel Mission is anything you should feel personally responsible to try to avert. The jarring dispersal of our stores and assets into the street is not something you can stop. It is being ordained by God for a very significant purpose, the end result of which I am unable today to perceive. It will teach me more things I need to know about having no place to lay my head. Like the empathy bellies school counselors invite teen girls to wear to warn them against the perils of illegitimate pregnancy, God is strapping to my shoulders a 30-pound administrative — even existential — crisis that he expects me to bear cheerfully and matter of factly, for his glory. Girls and their teachers in class may laugh at the hobbling exercise, but it makes a serious point. Our being bounced into the street has its humorous aspects, I’ll admit. But it is making a serious point and creating its own opportunities.
Can homeless men create capital?
I would ask for your prayer support for the vision I have outlined of how Union Gospel Mission can be more effective in the future. If you are as excited as I am about our finding a permanent place big enough to handle the ideas outlined here, then ask God to show me what to do next. I don’t need just a bigger permanent place for our ministry. I need administrative help and a business overseer who can develop the value-creating efforts that will encourage our men and help us determine whom to help so as not to waste the money donated to us.
If you are as encouraged as I am by rediscovering the forgotten rules of charity, consider supporting us financially, too.
Our Web site is http://www.theuniongospelmission.org/index.htm
You can send mail to me at: P.O. Box 983 Chattanooga, TN 37401
My phone is 423-752-4998.
God is loving and merciful to his people, and in the crisis of the day he is showing us the way. We should be thankful for all he has done for us, for his salvation and his providential care of each of us. Despite crisis, we should be excited about what God is bringing to bear.
JON RECTOR is director of Union Gospel Mission.