What is Poverty?

Some of you, if you’ve been getting my emails, have been hearing my thoughts on the question of “why is there poverty?” I feel like I’ve gotten some answers this summer, but, as questions do, mostly it has led to more questions. One of those questions is just “what is poverty?” If we’re going to talk about ‘why’ I guess it’s probably important to even know what we’re talking about. I bring all this up simply because I think one of the most profound changes in my thinking this summer (amongst many) has been my understanding of what poverty really is.

Before I came my concept of poverty was about material things. Being poor is not having enough money. It’s not having a job, or food to feed your children, or a house, or clothing. It manifests itself in hunger, malnutrition, lack of education, disease, etc.

Almost from the very beginning this definition began to be challenged. My first week, I lived with Nana Magda and her family. No flush toilet, in fact ‘running water’ is just a tank with a pipe. I didn’t ask, but they may be squatters and it’s possible they are getting their electricity from “jumpers”, just splicing into other peoples lines. There’s no way their house would survive a strong snow storm. None of them were hungry, but there wasn’t a whole lot of money around. Both Nana Magda and Tatay Delphin work hard to keep their children fed and going to school. I’m sure they make less money in a year than almost any family in Pennsylvania.

And yet, they aren’t poor. I mean, they don’t have a lot of things, but they are happy. And they love each other and care for each other and are responsible parents and loving children. They know that God loves them and provides for their needs. They know God made them and has a purpose for them and gave them gifts and values them. They are part of a church and are growing in their faith. Of course, they aren’t perfect, but I look at them compared to many families in America with 4 cars and 4 TVs and big houses and full of anger or jealousy or depression or addiction or abuse. Nana Magda’s family is about 100 times poorer and 100 times more filled with joy and life.

So when I started reading Bryant Myer’s Walking with the Poor his framework for understanding poverty as a spiritual condition made a lot of sense to me. While not denying that poverty is also material, it basically points to the roots of it as being spiritual. As the cause of poverty (the ‘why’ question) reaches back to sin messing up the world, so too does the definition of poverty have to do with sin. Sin messes up our relationships. And for the poor, sin really damages their relationship with themselves as well as with others. Many poor people think they are worthless. They think God has forgotten them, cursed them, or doesn’t exist. In some worldviews they believe they deserve their poverty because of past actions or because of their caste. They believe they have little or no skills or knowledge, no way to change their situation, and no value.

And why should they not believe this? All over the world, it is the message given to them, mostly by the non-poor. Being poor comes from laziness, you are poor, thus you are lazy and, by extension, no good. Even in America, what message do we think it sends to children in inner-city schools with no working bathrooms, not enough books, or 50 kids in one classroom? Clearly if we thought the children were worth something, they would be worth giving a decent education. We do not show them that they are valued. So they believe that they are worthless.

The non-poor are not exempt from these lies though. Instead of believing we are worthless, our position tempts us to believe that we are worthy. That it is our doing, our skills, our goodness, our self that has led us to our positions of comfort and power. Or that we deserve what we have because we earned it. We tend to believe we know what is right and that we can help the poor, as they are helpless; what Myers calls our “God-complex” where we take God’s rightful role in a poor community.

All this to say, I don’t really understand it, yet. But poverty is a lot deeper than just being hungry. And just having money doesn’t save us from being poor in other ways (emotionally, relationally, spiritually). All of us have had our identities marred, we do not know who we are or what we are here to do. All are beggars at the foot of God's door.