Owning Poverty: A Transformational Spiritual Journey
This course takes a Christian spiritual formation approach to the exploration of the crushing human poverty experienced in our world today. A theology of poverty requires a posture and epistemology of poverty of spirit. Until poverty is taken into ourselves, it is not a truth we can really know, although we might acknowledge it as an undisputed fact or recall statistics of injustice in our world. As poverty is allowed to engage us internally, our mode of engagement with the poor shifts from distant empircism and observation, to identification and incarnational compassion. As we engage hands, heads, and hearts in this course, our desire is that participants will come to better understand poverty (spiritual and physical poverty, their own poverty and others) and experience God’s heart and blessing for the poor. We want students to internalize biblical truths to facilitate Kingdom transformation in themselves and the world.
How to help you own poverty starts by getting you to open your wallet and enrich the seminary.
Cost for the class:
1 audit hour $294
1 credit hour $515
2 credit hours $1030
Guess who owns poverty now?
At the seminary I went to, they taught me how God favors the poor and oppressed, so they made sure that after I graduated I was both ;). Thankfully I am moving past that attitude.
Regent is a generally solid outfit. That said, I see nothing in the prospectus pointing to what is the well-known greatest single cause of poverty in the last 150 years or so — socialism.
Go back 50 years to two British colonies. Ghana was considered the model for a wonderful post-colonial future. It was prosperous, rich in resources (both agricultural and mineral), and it had a burgeoning middle class, nearly all of whom had finished high school, and many having graduated from university.
At the same time, there was another colony, relegated to a swampy lagoon and a few islands. Few alive at the time foresaw what happened. Hong Kong chose free enterprise and a broadly libertarian approach to personal life. Ghana opted for a post-colonial socialism depressingly echoed in our own time by the son of a Kenyan marxist.
Who’s mired in poverty today? Forced to choose, where would you rather live?
The fact that this quickly dissolved into a political discussion probably highlights the need for this type of course in seminary. The point is not the politics of poverty — it’s the fact that even Christians tend to keep themselves at a “safe distance” from the poor and see their duty to the poor being done if they help out at a soup kitchen once a week or write out a check.
Many certainly wouldn’t invite poor people to their homes or socialize with them on a regular basis. One of the hardest things about being poor isn’t the lack of material goods — it’s the social isolation and how even many Christians seem to believe that the poor did something to deserve their status. The “Prosperity Gospel” has certainly helped that along.
The reason why this devolved into a political discussion is that politics, particularly liberal politics, to a large part determine how large the poverty problem is.
In addition to what #3 wrote about governing structure, you can add out-of-wedlock births and and lack of work ethic. An out-of-wedlock birth is a solid predictor of future poverty status, both for mother and child/children. Failure to get up and seek work and go to work because a check comes in the mail is also a high predictor for life-long poverty. And guess where the check comes from?
So where does the acceptance of out-of-wedlock births and the acceptance of not working to earn one’s way in life come from? Liberal politics.
So, it is fine and grand to attend a seminar to learn about poverty, but that is of little use if you do not learn about the sources of poverty. It is noble to go work in soup kitchens and to advocate for more money for soup kitchens, and unwed mother’s programs, and the like. But it is misleading to propose that nothing can be done about the sources of poverty when in fact the opposite is the truth.
The point, #5, is that when you insist on reducing people to examples of political policies/ideologies — and only that — you are straying far from Christ’s example. Unless you have never, ever made mistakes, you have been given guidance and second chances (and third, and fourth, and fifth …) because people cared.
Our Lord didn’t ask questions when He healed people, and then he spent time with them, teaching and guiding them. Bitter political diatribes about certain groups of people do nothing to change lives and do indeed make people feel hopeless and dependent on the government.
We have a program here run by the Church of Christ called Faith Works that pays little attention to the “sources of poverty” but works wonders in providing counseling, job training, and even affordable housing for the less fortunate to help them on the road to independence.
I don’t think you fully understand how difficult it is to emerge from one big mistake or one unfortunate life event in this country. A poor credit score can keep one from a job, an apartment, utility services, you name it. You complain about liberal policies but don’t seem to have a problem with the conservative, Big-Business-favoring policies that make it very difficult for the poor to regain their footing.
We need more Christian leaders and programs like Faith Works that focus solely on helping the poor overcome the inherent pitfalls that thwart their efforts to work and improve their situations.
There have been unwed mothers since the beginning of humanity. Unplanned pregnancy happens — it always has done. Other civilizations stoned the women to death or shunned them but even those extreme measures didn’t eradicate that “source of poverty,” did it? It just removed the individuals.
[i]I don’t think you fully understand how difficult it is to emerge from one big mistake or one unfortunate life event in this country[/i]
Since you know nothing about my life, I feel fully qualified in this case in saying you have no idea what you are talking about.
The discussion reminds me of a very interesting article from a couple of years ago. [url=http://http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece]Africa needs God[/url]
We do have something better than marxism to offer the poor.
If folks are real about addressing this issue of poverty from a fresh, Christian base, check out:
http://www.seeksocialjustice.com/