Recently at a neighborhood meeting I was talking to everyone on a very philosophical level about how we want to be doing community development. When I finished I asked for people's thoughts. Mary, a middle aged African American lady responded with, “I think we need to do a car wash.” My first reaction was to want to say, “That’s not what we are talking about here. We aren’t talking about specific small projects but the theoretical ideas behind how we want to be organizing neighbors.”
But then I began to realize that thinking philosophically, strategic planning, and goal setting around an issue are foreign to Mary. This just isn’t the way that she thinks. Coming from the middle class it is easy to fall into viewing this kind of attitude and way of thinking negatively. We like to believe that this lack of vision and drive are what continues to keep the poor in their place and that if only they would begin to be organized and implement some strategic planning in their life they would begin to see some upward mobility. But my hunch is that we are not completely right in our thinking.
For decades middle class Christians have been quick to define what success looks like in the lives of the poor. We are quick to think that if only they would look more like us then they would begin to have their life on track. Maybe we need to start more fundamentally by rethinking what poverty is. What if we thought of poverty not as simply a lack of material resources but instead as a lack of Shalom. Shalom is a Hebrew word used throughout the Old Testament to mean peace, wholeness, and everything being the way that it was intended to be. When we redefine poverty as a lack of Shalom we begin to realize that there is extreme poverty in both the material rich and material poor. When poverty is defined this way then our definitions of success and transformation change completely. We are then able in the case of Mary to recognize that some of her simplistic thinking is healthy and has the ability correct some of my faulty goal driven thinking. Her ways of thinking begin to slow me down to not only be focused on projects, networking, and results but instead to sit, listen, and be present to my neighbors and friends. It seems that only when we recognize our mutual brokenness can we begin together to dream what restoration might look like in both our lives.
