2nd
Mission or ministry with people who are poor or vulnerable often assumes that “our” task is to meet “their” needs. Whether their need is for the good news of Christ or for bread and a place to sleep, we tend to think that we have the resources and they have the needs. A focus on friendship rearranges our assumptions. What if the resources they have also meet our needs? What if Jesus is already present in ways that will minister to us? What if in sharing life together as friends we all move closer to Jesus’ heart?
- Christopher Heuertz and Christine Pohl, Friendship at the Margins
In a limited sense, this is a concept that many people manage to take the first step on. I’ve heard things like “service is for your own soul” or “I think I got more out of that short-term mission than they did”. While both statements may be true, they don’t really challenge the lopsided power dynamic that can be brought into service situations with the poor. The assumption is still that it is our service that makes the difference, our actions that drive the experience. The question that I think needs to be asked, if we are to be each other’s neighbor and build mutually edifying friendships in Christ, is “Am I allowing myself to learn from and be served on their terms?”
Of course, if we ask this question in our own little bubble then we won’t be doing much better. Our friends who are poor are the ones who can answer the question, if we place ourselves into the vulnerable relationships that allow them to start meeting our needs.
There’s another concept that’s important to add here. In the course of recognizing God’s focus on the poor and our own need to enter into relationship with them, we run the risk of our language reflecting the very walls we are trying to break down. As Pohl and Heuertz state:
the very emphasis on the importance of “the poor” can reinforce conventional categories of otherness. It is easy to slip into one more version of “us and them,” the very pattern we are trying to break down. Serveral things can help us avoid this tendency: remembering our own vulnerability, dependence and need for community, being truthful, and practicing confession and forgiveness.
- Christopher Heuertz and Christine Pohl, Friendship at the Margins
Living in simplicity and reducing the discrepancies in our possessions, maintaining a loose grip on those possessions and time that we do have, and a deepening of the friendships we are talking about can also help to reduce that “otherness” that we are trying to eliminate in our heads.
Still, none of this can make us “the same” as the poor people in our lives. Heuertz and Pohl note that we will always have the benefit of the education and social connections we grew up with. Most of us will always have a greater access to money and other resources than the poor will ever have, even if we get wealth out of our own hands for the moment. Through our friends, family, citizenship, and the circumstances of our upbringing, we have a safety net they will never have. But that’s part of the reason we need these friendships, that we can see an aspect of life we don’t have to face ourselves. We must learn from those for whom trust in God takes on dimensions that are difficult for us to experience ourselves. Through the mutual edification that can take place in real friendships, we can bring together the strengths of different parts of the body in order to realize a more complete expression of the Body of Christ. Pohl and Heuertz emphasize that the differences are “only part of the story, because the ways God works in and through us are much more connected to tender hearts and open hands than to personal assets and skills. Our completeness is found in Christ and community where distinctions in status or resources mean much less.”
Am I learning from our friends who live in poverty? Do I have the humility and willingness to submit that will allow that to happen? Am I developing my friendships in such a way that empowers them to give me as much as I want to give them? Until I can answer these questions in the affirmative, neither of us will get all that God desires for us in these relationships.
