wealth

This post may be a bit long, but I have some concepts to bang out, so please bear with me. I've been thinking a lot lately about poverty and about wealth. Particularly how they relate to the dreams in my heart and the dreams in the hearts of my friends and people in my community. There is so much that I would like to accomplish, and so much that people around me would like to see happen, and it seems to me the biggest obstacle is lack of resources.

I'm not talking about buying downtown lofts or pretty cars (though I wouldn't mind if I could afford those things, nor do I think them evil), I'm talking about funding that would allow us to lease or buy downtown buildings for homeless drop-in centers with laundry and showers. Or the ability to pay a livable wage to my Pastors or my friend Renee who directs LivingStonesPDX (aka the Portland International House of Prayer), and maybe hire them some assistants while we're at it. I'd love to see housing for people getting out of the street life that is nicer than the state-run programs that put them back in the neighborhoods these people have just come out of and where all the relationships that helped keep them in their old lifestyle are still around them because that's where all the "affordable" housing is. I would love to see funding to teach people life skills, job skills and parenting skills. The things for which we never seem to have enough funds are the very things God tells His people to do - care for the poor, needy, sick, orphaned, widowed, rejected, elderly and lonely. And that's what I've been thinking about.

I've often thought about the monastic communities in the British Isles. So many of their villages and towns started with monasteries. Not the kind we see in movies like Name of The Rose, but carefully created establishments built to care for the physical and spiritual needs of the community through daily rhythms of work, prayer, meditation, study, teaching and even art and music. These communities were not merely self-sufficient, they were wealthy. The people that they helped and housed became part of the rhythm of the lifestyle of the monastery and contributed to the community as they could, but the monastic community had to have the resources to care for everyone even in the worst of times. When famine, sickness, war or other catastrophes came they had to have enough resources to help not just their normal community of people needing their time, attention, clothing, care and food, but the community had to be able to provide for the huge influx of need that comes when life as we know it is interrupted or destroyed. That takes some serious resources. That takes wealth. Not just gold and silver, but livestock, farmland, creative minds and the skilled workmen and women to make the creativity profitable. This isn't wealth that is about having and getting, it's about renewing, helping and protecting.

If we look at what happened after Henry VIII abolished Catholicism and destroyed the monastic communities, we see that it was within the very next generation that the needs of the poor, orphaned, widowed and sick were so great that Elizabeth I (Henry's daughter) established the first of the poor laws in England (this one was known as the Elizabethan Poor Law, for you nerdy types like me that like to read about this stuff), which eventually led to things like the workhouses and poorhouses that people like Dickens wrote about. Not to over-simplify. I know that not every monastic community was free of greed or corruption or control, but we see a general principal here that when the church can't or won't do what God has called us to, something else (usually government) will try to fill the vacuum but will not be able to do it without causing more problems than are solved. I could go on about this, but I'll back off the soapbox for a bit and finish my thoughts about wealth and poverty.

As I've been thinking about the wealth of those old communities I have been hearing things that I may not have paid attention to if I had not been mulling this over. Recently I was listening to a lady by the name of Christine Sine and her husband Tom talk about their community, and general concepts of poverty, wealth and commercialism in relation to God's design for wholeness in communities. She was talking about generational poverty being one of the most difficult things to break through in people's minds. She pointed out that the way God outlined it for His people Israel, if they followed the laws regarding Jubilee they would never see generational poverty. Here is how This absolutely blew me away. Here is a condensed (by me) Wikipedia explanation of Jubilee:

The Jubilee (Hebrew Yovel יובל) year, is the year at the end of a seven cycles of Sabbatical years, and according to Biblical regulations had a special impact on the ownership and management of land, in the territory of the kingdoms of Israel and of Judah.

During Shmita (Hebrew: שמיטה, literally "release", also called the Sabbatical Year. It is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel), the land is left to lay fallow and all agricultural activity—including plowing, planting, pruning and harvesting—is forbidden by Torah law. Other cultivation techniques—such as watering, fertilizing, weeding, spraying, trimming and mowing—may be performed as a preventative measure only, not to improve the growth of trees or plants. The Book of Leviticus promises bountiful harvests to those who observe the shmita and makes observance a test of religious faith

The biblical requirement is that the Jubilee year was to be treated like a Sabbatical year, with the land lying fallow, but also required the compulsory return of all property to its original owners or their heirs, except the houses of laymen within walled cities, in addition to the manumission of all Israelite indentured servants.

So imagine growing up in a culture where anyone that is obliged to go into service to someone to repay a debt, or anyone that has to sell their land because they fell on hard times, or their parents died or whatever, would regain their freedom within seven years, and be assured that their children would be able to regain the family farm in about a generation. Imagine having it ingrained in you that everything you have really belongs to God anyway, and we're just caretakers of the land and each other. How would you treat your indentured servant if you knew he would be free again in five or six years?

Two thoughts came out of these musings. The first is that there is a concept of wealth and self sufficiency that is distorted or missing from the body of Christ, specifically in regard to the purpose of wealth being ultimately for community transformation and healing and extending the purposes of God to communities beyond our own. To be perfectly honest, I've never like the idea of missionaries or ministries having to raise support or asking for donations. It bothers me that people have to struggle to find sponsorship for the things God put in their hearts to do. How much more could we do if we could use the time and energy it takes to raise support for actually doing the work we are called to do? Not that God isn't asking some people to ask and others to give. Who am I to say how God can or can't operate. But I think there are other ways that involve ideas and options that provide residual income and wealth so that the people that God has called into a ministry outside the traditional workforce will actually have the resources to do it and do it well. I don't know what that means, but I think we need to start asking God to show us how it would look. We need him to give us strategies to become wealthy in community resources of manpower, creativity, networking, relationships, facilities and finances.

My second thought is that there is a concept of Jubilee that is a spiritual law (not law like legalism, law like a principal with consequences - like Newton's third law of motion "For every action there is an equal or opposite reaction"). I think there is something conceptual about Jubilee that is beyond the cultural confines of Old Testament Israel. There is the principal of something there that has the strength to break the power of generational and situational poverty, even in our modern world. God created the possibility that no matter how much a family messes things up, breaks down, looses it all or is effected by death or hard times, there is always hope and always forgiveness and restoration. It's the story of His heart, that no matter what we choose it will not negate the fact that He has given us an eternal heritage that we simply choose to embrace. I feel strongly that this is a concept that has been a cloud or vapor for so long, but God wants to give us strategies to take it from something conceptual like vapor and make it something usable like water, and to be able to take that 'water' to impoverished communities, urban or otherwise, and break through the generational stranglehold of poverty with hope, restoration and a healthy concept of the purpose of wealth.

So I'm throwing my musings out there in the hopes that others will read this, mull it over themselves and maybe God will spark some dialogue. Maybe this will dovetail into some idea or concept God is already speaking. I don't know, but I think there's something huge here that we need to explore, and if you find you have strong thoughts (or even not-so-strong thoughts) about any or all of what I've posted I would love to hear them.