Author’s Note: Overnight, the House of Representatives cleared a key hurdle to passing Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The president’s key legislative agenda appears to be heading to his desk to sign. The bill, according to all independent budget analyses and even most of those who support it, will result in millions of people in the United States losing access to healthcare and food assistance programs.

In this moment, I am reminded of what I have heard most of my life from evangelicals who say that “it is the church’s job, not the government’s, to take care of the poor.” Regardless of the lack of biblical merits to that claim, it overlooks the practical impossibility of churches effectively shouldering the burden for the nation’s most vulnerable.

I wrote about this in a feature story for the September-October 2024 issue of Nurturing Faith Journal, which is now Good Faith Magazine. Below are excerpts from that article. 

Understanding the roots of poverty 

(The first excerpt follows my description of “person-centered language,” a practice that avoids identifying people by their circumstances. For example, it is better to say someone is “a person experiencing poverty” rather than to say they are “poor.” Personhood is central to what my colleague Starlette Thomas calls “somebodiness.” Circumstances aren’t.)

Person-centered language also allows us to look beyond the condition of poverty and toward the causes of poverty. An oft-used parable highlights the need to address the factors that cause so many people to fall into states of poverty. In the parable, two people are fishing in a river when they see a woman struggling with the current. After they swim out and bring her safely to the shore, they notice a man coming downstream, also struggling. They brought him to shore and noticed several more coming toward them. After a few hours of saving people from drowning, exhausted, one of them says, “Maybe we should go upstream to see why all these people are falling into the water.” 

Getting to the bottom of why people experience poverty is not a new concept. Some church and community food pantries and benevolence ministries don’t concern themselves with it, believing their call is to serve people regardless of what put them in their current situation. This direct service approach is needed for the same reason that emergency rooms will always be needed. Regardless of what we do about whatever is happening upstream, someone will always fall into the water. 

However, many of these ministries decide to, in addition to helping people with their immediate needs, run upstream to find out what is happening. The challenge is that there are often two drastically different interpretations of “what is going on.” 

Some determine that people usually experience poverty because of things they have done or because of a quality or skill they lack. Others interpret the root causes of poverty as being primarily due to social and economic systems that work against people trying to establish economic security. 

The first group, those who believe people experience poverty because of something they have done or lack, are likely to create ministries that help educate and train folks in skills that would help pull them to a higher economic status. This may include courses in personal finance, budgeting, and how to cook meals in such a way that stretches their dollars as far as possible. 

The second group, those who blame poverty on systems, are more likely to advocate for government leaders to create legislation that makes it easier for people to pull themselves out of poverty. They may press for a higher minimum wage, greater access to healthcare, or an expansion of benefits such as nutrition and childcare programs. 

So, which group is right? In a way, both. There are certainly some who find themselves in need because of poor financial choices they have made or because they were never taught how to manage their money. At the same time, no Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover program can pull someone out of poverty in a world that doesn’t require employers to pay living wages and where a single, unexpected illness can put you in debt for the rest of your life. 

Both groups can learn a lot from each other. I have often found that the “poverty is a choice or a defect” folks are sometimes more likely than the “poverty is a result of systems” people to form transformative personal relationships with those who experience poverty. (This makes sense, as the first group has a more individualistic view of just about everything.) However, the second group is often more likely to push for proven strategies that will actually lift people out of poverty. They understand that poverty is usually generational and, despite a dwindling number of “American Dream” stories, people born in wealth are likely to die in wealth, and those born in poverty are likely to die in poverty. 

The first group has created a sort of “charity industrial complex” that chips away at the problem of poverty but does little to solve it. This failure is often due to a lack of understanding (or unwillingness to see) the power of scale. 

Scale

There is a new category of feel-good stories that you have likely seen on the news periodically over the past few years. It is about churches, often large ones, that purchase and forgive the medical debts owed by families in their community. These campaigns can be transformative in people’s lives, pulling them out of poverty and setting them on a better financial footing. They sometimes culminate in “debt-burning” ceremonies, where millions of medical bills are forgiven in a single swoop. 

But these churches never spend millions of dollars to forgive these debts. Instead, they work with third-party organizations that bundle multiple debt portfolios into one product and then sell it at a drastically reduced rate, often less than a penny on the dollar. In one recent story from North Carolina, $15,000 was able to pay off over $330 million in medical bills. Debt-collection agencies save enough on administrative and labor costs to make these deals a win-win situation for everyone involved. 

Churches that do this have found a way to positively leverage the power of scale to pull people out of harrowing situations. 

Feeding America, the country’s largest network of food banks, also understands the power of scale. Although food banks have small “food drive” programs, where donors purchase food and bring it to an on-site facility, most purchase food in bulk from large suppliers to save on cost. They also receive food from America’s farmers that government programs have subsidized. This allows them to serve millions of families yearly for less money than a small food pantry can operate on. Again, like the forgiveness of medical debts, the ability to scale up a program is an effective tool to fight poverty. 

But if one church can forgive millions in medical debts for just a few thousand dollars, how much could our efforts be compounded if two churches put their resources together? Or, if a relatively large donor base is responsible for feeding millions of people in an emergency, what could a larger donor base do? The principle behind “economies of scale” is that there are cost advantages to efficiency. Cost decreases as scale increases. 

Remember the people from above who believe the roots of poverty are found in unjust political and economic systems? This is why they are more likely to look to government programs to solve the problem of poverty. It isn’t because there is anything inherently virtuous about the federal government. Rather, it is because the federal government is the largest entity among us that can leverage scale enough to transform the systems that keep people in poverty. And isn’t there wisdom in using the largest tool available to us to fulfill our biblical mandate of caring for those on the margins? 

To be sure, there are good reasons to distrust the government in caring for those experiencing poverty. Sometimes, the regulations designed to operate these programs with integrity can have unintended consequences, such as reversing the “efficiency leverage” that economies of scale provide. 

But I often wonder if our distrust of these programs has less to do with those inefficiencies, which can be remedied through legislation, and more with our collective Christian egos. 

Simply put, if we used the economies of scale to give everyone easy access to food, what would we do with our church food pantries? If the reality of “medical debt” didn’t exist because everyone had access to free or low-cost healthcare, what would become of our “debt relief” parties? And if we finally addressed the racial and systemic inequalities that have ensnared generations of people in cycles of poverty, whose electric bills could we pay other than our own?

No one knows when the phrase “Great Commission” was coined, though the earliest references didn’t appear until sometime in the 17th century. I’ve recently begun to wonder why Jesus’ call to “go and make disciples” in Matthew 28 was labeled “The Great Commission” and not his call in Matthew 25 to feed those who are hungry and take care of the poor. Though certainly important, the “go and make disciples” call appears in far fewer pages of scripture than the “take care of those who are poor” call.

Maybe it isn’t an accident that the term “Great Commission” was first connected to evangelism (changing what people believe) during a time of Christian hegemony and imperialism. Maybe our own time, when our influence is waning, but we still retain access to many of the levers of power, could be the time we finally realize our true call is to serve Jesus, who comes to us in the guise of those who are hungry and experiencing poverty.