The Church and the Poor
After I came to a personal faith, I began attending a conservative evangelical church. They made it clear that they were trying to be a biblical church, even more specifically, a New Testament church.
I was eager to learn as much as I could. I wanted to learn the biblical way of doing everything.
I remember a number of times the topic of caring for the poor came up. There seemed to be some hesitation about this activity. At best, it was seen as irrelevant as all that mattered was “getting people saved,” at worst it was seen as a slippery slope toward liberalism.
Finally, it was reluctantly agreed that it was permissible to care for the poor, but only as a means of evangelism. It could be used as a “hook” to get people’s attention and then explain the gospel.
But is that the biblical way?
In the New International Version, the word “poor” is mentioned 135 times in the Old Testament and 41 times in the New Testament. As I read the Gospels, I see Jesus putting an extreme emphasis on helping the poor. It could be argued that Jesus talked more about caring for the poor than he did about personal faith.
Churches, like the one I first began to attend, put much emphasis on tithes and offerings. What I never heard was how the giving of money is described in the New Testament. Almost every discussion of financial giving in New Testament is in reference to giving to the poor.
If we set aside evangelical traditions for a moment and just read the Bible on its own terms, we would see that the expectation is that much of the work of the church is to be caring for the poor. Not just as a tactic for evangelism but because it is the right thing to do and it is what God wants us to do.
I will conclude with these words from the Apostle Paul as he assures his readers that he is preaching the same gospel as the other Apostles:
All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along. (Galatians 2:10)
