The Church and Social Welfare

My name’s Rocky,” the good-looking young man began, and with only a little encouragement he went on to tell his story to the chaplain of the church social agency. He was broke. He had recently lost a job because his weak leg and back, injured in the Korean War, rendered him unable to work eight hours a day. He was behind in his room rent. His mother would not help any more. He had not seen his wife in several months. Drinking had been a problem but was not responsible this time. “I’m at the end of my rope,” he concluded. “I didn’t know where to turn, and then somebody told me of you.” The chaplain waited, then asked, “Rocky, what do you think I can do for you?” The answer came slowly but with some assurance: “I think what I need most is just somebody to be a friend.”

The answer surprised the chaplain. These men usually ask for money, for a job, for carfare or a meal ticket, or sometimes, quite frankly, for the price of a drink. They move from one crisis to another, seeking money to keep going nowhere. They seldom recognize their need as moral, spiritual, or social. Rocky’s diagnosis was different: “I think what I need most is just somebody to be a friend.”

All too often social agencies and workers make the same mistakes in diagnosis as their clients. This may result in part from the obviousness of material need. Physical hunger is easier to diagnose than moral weakness. Lack of money is easier to discern than spiritual poverty. Errors may also come from the greater ease in satisfying material as compared to spiritual needs. We follow the line of least resistance. It is much simpler to give a man like Rocky a meal ticket and a week’s room rent than to try to satisfy his deep longing for “just somebody to be a friend.” But when we choose to satisfy the immediate and obvious need, we are not moving toward a solution of the real problem. We are “passing the buck” to someone else—and there is much “buck-passing” in the social welfare world of our time.

Are not hospitals, prisons, and homes for the aged and chronically ill obligated to treat more than outward symptoms? Ought not social agencies of all kinds to be concerned with more than the material needs of clients? Should not all institutions and agencies be aware, at least, of the whole person and all his needs as they serve those who come to them for help? And, in the end, should we not have a greater concern for the moral and spiritual than for the material and physical welfare of our people?

The Lure Of Circumstances

I am sometimes disturbed by the idealistic use of such a slogan as “War on Poverty.” For one thing, it is reminiscent of slogans of another political party—“A chicken in every pot” and “Two cars in every garage”—used boastfully before the Great Depression of the 1930s. Such slogans were based on social diagnoses just as superficial as mistaken individual diagnoses. In social work, too, we are easily beguiled by the latest hope or plan or technique for improving the material welfare of people. Ten years ago we hoped to achieve Utopia through better housing; today we discover that our glittering new housing projects are beset by the same social ills as were the slums before them. Here also we succumb to the temptation to take the easiest way out. People are not changed by changing their physical circumstances. And it is people, not circumstances, that should concern us most. It is Rocky and his need for “a friend,” not his poverty and hunger, that deserve our most careful attention.

Elimination of poverty is no more an adequate goal for society than is material comfort a satisfying ambition for a man. Such a goal “would be sufficient,” as Albert Einstein once said, “only for a herd of cattle.” America has made more material progress than any other nation in history. President Johnson tells us we have reached a peak of prosperity unmatched in our past, and that this nation is producing goods and services at the fabulous rate of $600 billion a year, $100 billion higher than the rate only three years ago. Our capacity to harness and control nature has never before been achieved. But are we better off than others were? Are we even as well off as our Pilgrim ancestors who faced a threatening and stubborn wilderness, who gained a bare subsistence from the rocky soil of New England, and who gave thanks to Almighty God for their mere survival after a severe winter?

There is considerable evidence that strength of character morally and spiritually is as often found among the poor as among the rich; that it can, in fact, grow under either condition. The great leaders of America have come from humble as well, as from privileged homes. Indeed, he whom we recognize as our greatest president came from the humblest of beginnings. Our Lord himself was born into the simplest of homes, as were most of his disciples and many of the prophets of Israel. The nation Israel, to which we owe so great a portion of our spiritual heritage, was a small, weak, and relatively poor people.

Nor can we Christians forget that the One we call “Lord” had some convictions that did not suggest a war on poverty. “Blessed are you poor,” he said, “for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20b, RSV).

It is not my intention to glorify poverty. Prolonged and painful deprivation is hardly conducive to a good life. But surely those who are called to minister to people in trouble should be reminded occasionally of the venerable truth first recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy (8:3) and later made a foundation stone of Jesus’ ministry: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4). All of us, troubled or not, have a deep need for someone “just to be a friend.”

If this is true for secular agencies, how much more is it true for religious ones? Our great purpose is to lead men and women to the Great Friend, the Good Shepherd, the God who is righteousness and love, judgment and mercy, demand and support, Guide, Companion, and Saviour. Someone recently expressed this relation of man to God in psychiatric terms when he spoke of God as “the companioning Super-ego.” The phrase speaks of God in two principal aspects of his relation to us: friendliness and moral expectation. This God is revealed to us in his Son, Jesus Christ.

Preacher In The Red

OR, SO HE THOUGHT

The local funeral director is very systematic in providing a car to bring ministers to the funeral parlors, and on the morning of the funeral he calls to see whether the minister desires this service or is driving his own car.

The funeral director also informs the police of the city and adjacent suburbs of the time that a funeral procession will be passing through so that a police escort can be provided.

The office memo was not really as ominous as it sounded: “Rev. Hostetter coming by himself. All police have been notified.”—The Rev. B. DAVID HOSTETTER, minister, Church of Saint John and Saint Stephen, Saint John, New Brunswick.

He Came Preaching

The centrality of Christ is the conviction most surely held by all Christians. To proclaim Christ to the world—and to bring the world to him—is the chief business of the Church, whether it confronts the world as a parish, a diocese, or a social agency. And this tire wise founders of the New York Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society (now the Episcopal Mission Society in the Diocese of New York) saw clearly. Their chief purpose was not to feed, clothe, or house the poor, but to preach to them the Gospel. They stated this intention clearly, not only in the charter they sought and were given by an act of the State Legislature in 1833, but in the motto they chose: “To the poor the Gospel is preached!” In this they were following their Lord. The Evangelist Mark tells us that “Jesus came … preaching the gospel of God” (Mark 1:14).

There is an event in the life of Jesus that speaks eloquently of the mission of the Church. Following a triumphant day of successful healing, Jesus spent the night, not in contented sleep, but in prayer in “a lonely place.” When his disciples found him the next morning, they were eager to return to the exciting ministry of miracles. “Everyone is searching for you,” they said. To which he replied, “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also; for that is why I came out” (Mark 1:35–38).

The Gospel that the Church preaches is Jesus Christ. “The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord”—we sing it often enough; we had better mean it. There are too many in the Church who flit from one new secular fad to another. One year it is labor legislation, the next better housing. Then they jump on the bandwagon of urban planning. And now it seems to be community organization. What will it be in 1965? No doubt each of these movements has something to say to the Church; but Christians have a prior and a higher commitment. Let not the Church relinquish for a mess of secular pottage the birthright given by her Lord and Master: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15).

In a recent article the Rev. John Heuss, rector of Trinity Church in New York, put it well. Speaking of the millions of people in the slums and urban-renewal projects of America’s cities, he said:

They need Christ and His Church. They need Christian teaching and Christian love. They need understanding and acceptance. They need the sacraments and they need counselling. They need dedicated [clergy] … and trained lay workers. And they need them in a flood of people dedicated to Christ and His Church working together, not in lonely isolation but in team ministries.

At St. Barnabas House in New York City, the command of the Lord to bring the Gospel to the needy is being fulfilled. Originally a ministry to both women and children, this work is now almost exclusively with children. Here are met inner, spiritual needs of the 200 children who call it home for at least a portion of the year. Here are children, often physically undernourished and ill-cared-for, always spiritually bruised. Though sometimes their stay is brief, the endeavor is to make it a time of healing. For those who stay longer, sometimes two years or even more, there is the special privilege and responsibility of bringing them an experience of loving care and wise professional guidance.

I think of these children gathered in the chapel on Christmas morning—young, eager, responsive. They so need the assurance that God is with them and that he so loved us that he sent his only Son Immanuel to save us, to teach us how to live, and to show us how much he loves us. I see them later in the service as they come quietly and confidently to the altar. And then I see a winsome young man who 2,000 years ago “took a child, and put him in the midst of them; and taking him in in his arms … said to them, ‘Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me.”

On returning from a tour of Europe immediately following World War II, Eddie Cantor told how in Paris he visited a home in the suburbs. “It was once,” he said, “a Rothschild home, and now it’s a place for D.P. children waiting for shipment. I brought along chocolates and gave them to the children. Then I came to a little, tired, pathetic blond girl whose face looked like the face of a hundred years. I asked her, ‘And what can I do for you?’ She said, ‘Love me!’ ” How like Rocky’s answer to the chaplain’s question: “I think what I need most is just somebody to be a friend.”

So often our most effective proclamation of the Gospel is like Jesus’ act of taking a little child in his arms. Our ministry to the bruised spirits of boys and girls, men and women, is essentially a communication to them that they are loved—loved by us, yes; but more important, loved by God in Jesus Christ. The Church and her social agencies are called to show forth to the world, by words and deeds, that the God who was in Christ is the God who is merciful, just, and loving. And in a time when the state is increasingly taking over the responsibility of providing for the physical needs of its deprived citizens, the Church and its agencies are more-free than ever before to pursue this, its major mission. Such a ministry to the souls of men is ultimately the only solution to our vast problems of poverty, racial turmoil, crime and delinquency, alcohol and narcotics addiction, and divorce and family breakdown.

Ralph Bonacker is director of the Episcopal Mission Society in the Diocese of New York. He is a graduate of Park College (A.B.) and Yale Divinity School (B.D.). He has served as rector of the Church of St. John the Evangelist (San Francisco) and as director of the Episcopal Community Service of San Diego, California.

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