Poverty is fundamentally relational says David Williams
What might a theology of caring for the poor look like?
The bible’s terms for the poor (widow, orphan and alien) are all relational terms which describe someone who has lost relationships and as a result have lost connection with the land.
David and his wife Rachel started serving as missionaries in Nairobi, Kenya in 1999. David now serves as principal of the Australian Church Missionary Society Training College St Andrew’s Hall, where Australian missionaries are trained for six months, before heading out to the field.
David has just given a provocative paper at the Anglican Aid conference at Sydney’s Moore Theological College and has agreed to come in and discuss it.
The issue for David is not just academic, with his first significant engagement with poverty, starting when working in the slums of Nairobi 20-plus years ago.
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Poverty is fundamentally relational says David Williams
What might a theology of caring for the poor look like?
The bible’s terms for the poor (widow, orphan and alien) are all relational terms which describe someone who has lost relationships and as a result have lost connection with the land.
David and his wife Rachel started serving as missionaries in Nairobi, Kenya in 1999. David now serves as principal of the Australian Church Missionary Society Training College St Andrew’s Hall, where Australian missionaries are trained for six months, before heading out to the field.
David has just given a provocative paper at the Anglican Aid conference at Sydney’s Moore Theological College and has agreed to come in and discuss it.
The issue for David is not just academic, with his first significant engagement with poverty, starting when working in the slums of Nairobi 20-plus years ago.
--
Become a regular financial supporter of The Pastor's Heart via Patreon.
It is the pastor's heart and Dominic Steele and why church planting is the Bible's answer to poverty, with David Williams. David says, in the Bible's view, poverty is fundamentally relational. When you think about the Bible's terms for the poor, the widow, the orphan and the alien, they're all relational terms describing somebody who has lost relationships. But what might a theology of caring for the poor look like? David and his wife Rachel started serving as missionaries in Nairobi and Kenya back in 1999. More recently, he's been principal of the Australian Church Missionary Society Training College, st Andrews Hall in Melbourne, where Australian missionaries are trained for six months or so before heading out to the field, and has just given a provocative paper at the recent Anglican Aid Conference at Sydney's Moore Theological College Under that heading why church planting is the Bible's answer to poverty. He's agreed to come and talk about it, david, if we could start with your pastor's heart, because for you this issue is not academic, not just academic. Your engagement in poverty goes right back to the slums of Kenya 20 years ago.
Speaker 2:That's right. I was working in a theological college in Nairobi, carlisle College, and we were asked to train some Anglican pastors whose parishes were either in or overlapping informal settlements in Nairobi. And out of that very early engagement we realised that the informal settlements in Nairobi are home to probably 50% of the population and actually they're full of churches not many mainline Protestant denomination churches, but lots of informal churches and pastored by people with little or no theological training. And so from that early engagement we started thinking about how we might do leadership training and theological education for pastors and church leaders from informal settlement churches.
Speaker 1:So describe informal settlement to me.
Speaker 2:So we landed up planting a classroom of our college into Kibira slum. So Kibira is very densely crowded, housing very usually either mud floor, occasionally cement floor, mud and stick walls, tin roofs and I was there, all single story. No high rise accommodation, no mains sewerage, no mains water, so people are buying their water from standpipes in the street. No rubbish collection and homes would have some electricity, but usually that wasn't a legal electrical supply and in each home you would have typically anywhere between 6 to 14 people living in one or two rooms. So very, very densely populated People's homes inside were usually spotlessly clean, but as soon as you went out onto the street there's a lot of rubbish, just a lot of people around, and the poverty and deprivation in the informal settlements was very, very significant.
Speaker 1:And you've got informal churches and a problem with the prosperity gospel.
Speaker 2:Yes. So for many of those churches what they knew, what they heard from TV ministries, was prosperity theology. And most of the prosperity theology that I heard in the informal settlements was what I would call well-intentioned but misguided. So I don't think it was deliberately trying to be deceptive or fleece people of money. But if you like, it was reading the Bible very flat. You know open the blessing, cursing passages in Deuteronomy and going well, dominic, you want to be blessed.
Speaker 2:Do this this is what it says in Deuteronomy. We believe the Bible, so biblical theology then became very important as part of a theological college response into that situation.
Speaker 1:And you went in there, into this slum, informal settlement area, and you decided to try and work through local churches, not through an NGO or even through the development department of a denominational structure. That's quite a significant decision. How did that come about?
Speaker 2:Well, I spent a long time trying to work out why I and my colleagues had gone down that route, because I think we had this theological sense that we wanted to work through local churches. But at least for me at that point I haven't perhaps really thought it through. In lots of ways it would have been much easier to have started an NGO, but actually informal settlements, in Nairobi at least, are full of churches and so if you can work through those churches, you've got multiple small communities scattered right throughout the slum. One of the slums in Nairobi, when I was there, had more churches than toilets. It's a shocking statistic.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you're at that point, and I think we were also, having had a presence in the informal settlements, perhaps a little bit disaffected from what very large NGOs sometimes not always, but what they sometimes did. We in our little area, we saw a big NGO come in and just start a pharmacy and offered free pharmaceutical care to the community. They put out out of business all the local pharmacies, they all shut down and then, after I think, about a year, this big NGOs funding ran out, so they just closed it down and moved on, and so for a year it was fantastic. People were getting free pharmaceutical care, but 18 months in they were worse off than they had been at the start and I think I found that disheartening. And working through local churches seemed to be a response to some of the problems that we saw being created.
Speaker 1:You went through quite a journey then, theologically trying to work out what the right response was to poverty. Maybe you could take us through some of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I had that experience in Kenya and was doing a lot of thinking about what it looks like to help local churches to engage with the poverty in their church family and then in the community in which they were working and serving and witnessing for the Lord Jesus. Then I came to Australia and started teaching at St Andrews Hall, started engaging with theological themes here, and then that led me to want to try and think through more carefully a biblical theology of care for the poor, because I felt like I didn't see that and I knew I didn't have all the answers. I needed a brain's trust to help me. So I asked Mark Thompson if I could pick the brains of the faculty at More College and then I studied for some postgraduate research through Fuller Seminary that led to academic paper on all of this. So what that enabled me to do was just to think through where theologically you locate care for the poor and particularly asking that question from within the Sydney Anglican tradition.
Speaker 1:So what's the answer?
Speaker 2:Well, I think the answer is complicated. Nearly everyone I spoke to at More College initially answered that question. So when I said, where do you locate care for the poor theologically, nearly everyone I spoke to answered that question by saying it's part of our godliness as our response to the command to love our neighbours as ourselves. So, as a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, part of the outworking of my godliness is to care for the poor, and the parable of the Good Samaritan makes it clear that those I'm responsible for caring for might be my most serious enemy. So that's a wonderful thing, I think.
Speaker 2:My question then, following on from that, is to then explore a little bit about whether there's a corporate component to caring for the poor, and I think that both in the Old Testament and the New Testament, there's a sense clearly in which care for the poor is located not just as an individual responsibility but also as a corporate responsibility. Where do you get that? So, in the Old Testament, I think one of the things that the Covenant document is doing is asking Israel, as the people of God, and in particular, communities of people within Israel towns or villages or whatever to organise themselves around the principles of the Covenant. And as they do that, as they organise and live out the Covenant, what they're doing is relationally reincorporating the poor who are, like you said earlier, the widow, the orphan and the alien.
Speaker 1:So just a little digression, give me the little relational poor, unpack that for me for a moment.
Speaker 2:In the way that the Old Testament talks about poverty, the words that are used reference a number of things. So they certainly reference material lack and hunger and weakness, but they also reference things like vulnerability, oppression, injustice. So the cluster of words that are used for the poor in the Old Testament include a range of things from weakness and hunger through to injustice and oppression. But then the widow, the orphan and the alien are used as a kind of catch-all, a symbol of who the poor are, and all of those people are relationally disconnected. The widows lost her husband, the orphans lost her parents, the alien has lost her community.
Speaker 2:And I think if you follow that through in, for example, the book of Proverbs or you could do the same exercise in the Psalms you see that poverty is multifaceted and includes lots of relational components to it. So one of the Proverbs talks about the rich having many friends, but the poor kind of being on their own. That's the lottery winners' testimony, isn't it? I never knew I had so many friends when I won the lottery. But when you have nothing, people abandon you and walk away from you. And I think that sense in the Old Testament, that poverty is a relational category, is also where modern development thinking has landed, that poverty is relational and community-based, and all modern secular engagements with poverty alleviation would Talking about development, not so much about emergency aid but long-term development, would all be using community-based development strategies and trying to engage with the community. So I think Old Testament Israel got there thousands of years earlier.
Speaker 1:I mean that is fascinating actually that the, if you like, the biblical message on this is quite in sync with modern, contemporary thinking about how to care for the poor.
Speaker 2:I think it is, and I think what you see in the Covenant for example, the laws of gleaning the whole community has to not harvest to the edge of their wheat fields or not go through their olive groves more than once. The whole community has to do that, and then that allows the marginalised to come into those fields, and that wouldn't work if only one person did it.
Speaker 1:The whole community has to work together.
Speaker 2:And what you see then in the book of Ruth. I mean, ruth is doing lots of things, but one of the things that Ruth is doing is showing you how the Covenant works out for a widow and an alien, or widows and an alien. And you get the Deuteronomy Covenant being worked out in practice as gleaning and the Kinsman-Redeemer laws reincorporate Ruth and Naomi into the community of the people of Bethlehem. So at the beginning of End of Chapter One they're marginalised. At the end of Chapter Four Naomi is sitting at the centre of the community with everyone gathered around her. So it's a beautiful move from exclusion to inclusion through the story of the book New Testament.
Speaker 2:So in the New Testament I think you see the early church starting to struggle to work out what it means now in an urban setting, not a land-based kind of farming community in Jerusalem or in Corinth or Macedonia.
Speaker 2:And they're starting to work out what does it mean for us now, as the people of God, to take responsibility for the poor? And I think the widows and orphans, but particularly widows, feature a number of times. Right at the beginning of Acts, the early church is trying to work out how do we care for the widows in our community. And again you see very clearly in Acts and also in pastoral epistles that that's a corporate thing. The church, corporately, as a local gathering, is taking responsibility to care for the widows. So, first line of responsibility care for your own family In one team of you five. But what about the widows who don't have family? Well, the church now feels a responsibility as a gathering to care for those who are part of the family. And then I think you know Galatians. They have a sense of responsibility not just to the church family but to any that the Lord kind of brings into their sphere of influence Care for the poor, especially those in the household of God.
Speaker 1:And that's going to play out as an individual level and a corporate level.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I think the challenge in this space for us in Australia, or in the UK particularly, is that the value of a government safety net in our countries is quite strong. So in Australia we have this wonderful thing called Centrelink. You know you've got to persist to get help from central, but if you do persist there is help. There there is a safety net.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, often I find in my engagement with people when they come to ask for help as a local pastor, it's often well helping them relationally and helping them navigate the social security network that actually is there and is quite good but impossible to navigate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's a beautiful way of practically loving people, but for most church families, in most contexts around the world, the church is operating in a place where there isn't much of a governance safety net or any kind of.
Speaker 1:You made the observation the other day. Even the United States has much lower safety net provisions than the UK or Australia.
Speaker 2:Well, that's my understanding and as I observe that I look at big conservative evangelical churches in the States and they often have very extensive ministries, both practically to people within the congregation but then also out into the wider community.
Speaker 1:And so a better developed practical expression of what they're doing, but potentially also a better theologically thought out expression as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. I think that the Bible makes it clear that if you follow the Lord Jesus Christ, you care for the poor, because that reflects the heart of God, and that if you are a gathering of those kinds of people, you will want, out of love, to care practically for those who are in your church family and in your wider community.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you made the observation in your presentation the other day that it would be lazy application to jump straight from the application to Israel and apply that to Australia.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think we need to be careful with our biblical theology. Israel, as a nation, cared for the poor. To jump from Israel as a nation to Australia as a nation is a misstep, isn't it? We need to go from the people of God in the Old Testament to the people of God in the New Testament. I'd be delighted for Australia, as a nation, to care for the poor. I think that would be a good and a wonderful thing, but we can't abrogate responsibility of caring for the poor to the government. As local churches, we do have a responsibility to think about the material, practical needs of those who God has entrusted to us, and that might mean very, very different things in different contexts. In the slums of Nairobi, it might be around hunger and malnutrition. In my suburb in Melbourne, it might be around loneliness and divorce and isolation and all sorts of other kinds of social needs.
Speaker 1:What does it mean to say the gospel is good news to the poor.
Speaker 2:So if we think about the nature of poverty as fundamentally flowing out of broken and damaged relationships, if poverty at its core is a relational thing, that is a consequence of a broken relationship with God, a broken relationship with other people and a broken relationship with God's world, Then actually the message of the gospel, the proclamation of the gospel message itself, is the very thing that brings healing and reconciliation to those broken relationships. So when Jesus comes in Luke 4 and says that he's quoting Isaiah, he's come to proclaim good news to the poor, I think we sometimes have a slightly lazy application of that and think well, the gospel is good news for the poor because that means that nice people will come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and then those nice people might go and help care for the poor. That I don't think is what the Lord Jesus is saying. I think he's saying that the very act of proclaiming the gospel and then people believing in Jesus and following him is healing the fundamental brokenness that lies at the root cause of poverty.
Speaker 1:And at that point you're right on the, if you like, the fulcrum of the title of your presentation of why church planting is the solution to poverty.
Speaker 2:So I think church planting as a solution to poverty was really a provocative, just trying to get people thinking. Obviously, I think it's more complicated than that. But yes, I think that we need to hold on to the confidence that the gospel message itself people coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and then being gathered into confessing communities that in and of itself will start to transform the poverty of the poor, if God's people are doing their job right.
Speaker 1:How have you seen that happen in practice?
Speaker 2:Well, we had the great privilege of seeing informal settlement pastors in Nairobi come into training at our college, start to rethink their theology. For many of them that meant reassessing their prior commitment to some prosperity messaging. But then you know, if you're going to let go of prosperity theology you need another message for the poor in your church. And essentially what that looked like for informal settlement pastors was to start working with their church community to help them to care for each other. So I got a beautiful letter from one of the first students in that program who was in really the poorest informal settlement in Nairobi.
Speaker 2:I had visited him. His church was completely destitute and he'd started a very small savings program with members of his church and he was mentored by a CMS Australia missionary called Joe Radkovic for a number of years. Joe and I then lost touch with him for a couple of years and he wrote to us a little while later and said that what had started off as this tiny little savings program with just a few people had now expanded to the point where they had something like 40 or $50,000 in circulation. They'd put I think it was something like 10 children through high school. They had six church member families, children. In university, they had a collective of widows who were supporting and caring for each other and that he had then taken this message that he'd learned at our college and had engaged with, he said, 2,500 pastors across six countries in East Africa.
Speaker 1:Now, what a remarkable story which has got to be better than starting a free chemist shop in a slum? Well, I think so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so and I praise God for that. I mean, that has all happened through some training, but really that pastor has just taken his own initiative, put into practice the principles that he learned. He's by far the best person to work out what it means to follow the Lord Jesus Christ in Corrigos and praise God, he's done an amazing job at it.
Speaker 1:Now, what about the issue of campaigning for social justice versus hands-on caring or preaching Christ? And you referenced a paper that Broughton Knox wrote on this topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So Broughton Knox, former principal at Moore College, wrote a paper a long time ago in which he was arguing that the reason that Christians should care for the poor is because of compassion, not because of justice, and that paper has often been quoted or used as if to say that Broughton Knox didn't believe in social justice and that therefore he didn't think that Christians had a responsibility to care for the poor, which is extremely unfair because the point of the paper was Christians should care for the poor out of love.
Speaker 2:So he was arguing that Christians should care for the poor. So it's unfair. Just on the basis of the paper, I think and I've never met Broughton Knox, but reading his biography and talking to those who knew him, I've heard that he had a remarkable ministry personally of caring for poor people who came to his house. So the charge that Knox didn't think that Christians should care for the poor is unfair and clearly not accurate. But I think what he was saying was really similar to what I was hearing from more college faculty members. Caring for the poor flows out of our godliness as an obedience to the love command, so compassion in his article, and then we need to work out what it means to express that not simply as individuals, but also to express it as local gatherings, keeping that corporate component that I think both Old and New Testament point us to.
Speaker 1:How's all this thinking changed your practice?
Speaker 2:Well, it certainly changed my practice as a theological educator and as someone who's seeking to equip long-term gospel workers. What I'm wanting to do for our CMS missionaries is encourage them to think through carefully and in depth what the Bible says. Poverty is what caring for the poor in biblical perspective might look like.
Speaker 1:Because lots of them, when they go to the field, they're going to confront it immediately.
Speaker 2:Yes, a vast majority of our gospel workers would be serving in contexts of either absolute or relative poverty and often that starting to live in a poverty context is one of the biggest causes of culture shock and ongoing cultural stress. And so thinking through really clearly what our responsibilities are, what God's word says into this, I think is important, and certainly for many of our gospel workers this can feel overwhelming. It's easy to get sucked into kind of white saviour syndrome and to think that we have a responsibility to fix all the problems in the world. But I can't fix world poverty and I don't believe that world poverty will be fixed until the Lord Jesus comes back Now. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be caring for the poor and working to proclaim the Lord Jesus to the ends of the earth and, as I've said, I think that will make a difference to the poverty of the poor.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. I mean, there's lots, lots, lots more to talk about, but we're out of time. Thanks so much for coming and sharing this with us this morning.
Speaker 2:It's been a great joy to be able to chat. Thank you, dominic.
Speaker 1:David Williams has been my guest, david, the principal of St Andrews Theological College, st Andrews Hall in Melbourne, and they, of course, are engaged in training up the missionaries for the Church Missionary Society Australia to go out and serve all around the world. You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday.