Christ Among the Classes: The Rich, the Poor, and the Mission of the Church (American Society of Missiology, 64, Band 64) - Softcover

Tizon, Al

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1626985189 ISBN 13: 9781626985186

Verlag: Orbis Books (USA), 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Addresses contemporary socioeconomic concerns from a biblical and mission-based perspective. Offers a tool (a social justice inventory) for evaluating ourselves in light of a biblical theology of wealth and poverty.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Al Tizon holds a PhD in missiology from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA. He is affiliate professor of missional and global leadership at North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, and lead pastor of Grace Fellowship Community Church in San Francisco, where he and his wife reside. He has been engaged in community development, church leadership, advocacy, and urban ministry both in the Philippines and the United States. His books include Whole & Reconciled: Gospel, Church, and Mission in a Fractured World.

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RELIGION / Christian Ministry / Missions

RELIGION / Biblical Studies / General

RELIGION / Christianity / General

CHRIST AMONG THE CLASSES

The Rich, the Poor, and the Mission of the Church

Al Tizon

American Society of Missiology Series #64

ISBN 978-1-62698-518-6

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Cover design: Ponie Sheehan

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Introduction

What Is Classism?

Eight-year old Jocelyn and I sat on a rickety, wooden bench on the edge of the squatter community that she called home. It was Christmas season in the Philippines, so Manila buzzed with festivities, shopping, gift-giving, and special masses. Carols about snow, roasting chestnuts, and other un-Filipino holiday cheer filled the air. But in Jocelyn’s community, life essentially remained the same. She asked me about Christmas in the United States this time of year.1 I told her it was much like here in the Philippines, to which she retorted, “You mean like over there at Megamall, don’t you?” Megamall, a gargantuan shopping center located not too far from Jocelyn’s squatter community, imposed itself as largely as its name implied.

Her perceptiveness caught me off guard. She sensed acutely the difference between the experience of Christmas for those who could afford to shop at Megamall and those who could not. And furthermore, her comment revealed what she thought of the USA, namely, that everyone there enjoyed Christmas, since in her mind the USA was Megamall writ large.

“You know, not everyone is rich over there,” I said. “And for us, Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus, so all Christians get to enjoy Christmas wherever they live.” I thought, like a good missionary, that I had successfully changed the direction of the discussion to the true meaning of Christmas.

But she was determined to mine the depths of socioeconomic inequality with me. She said sweetly but sharply, “You mean rich Christians can enjoy Christmas, don’t you? Kuya Al, malinaw na malinaw naman—para sa mayayaman ang Pasko [It’s very clear, older brother Al, Christmas is for the rich].” Has this eight-yearold been reading Marx or what? I wondered.

She had a point. I knew theologically that Jesus came to preach the gospel to the poor; that is what motivated me to return to my homeland of the Philippines in the first place, to live and serve among people like Jocelyn and her family. And yet she concluded from what she saw during Christmas every year of her young life that Jesus came for the rich, Christian or not. My Christmas theology may have been orthodox, but she saw what she saw. In her view, which I could not contest, Christmas was indeed for the rich to celebrate and enjoy. I put my arm around her as I cursed under my breath both the commercialism of Christmas and the cruelty of socioeconomic injustice.

Jocelyn’s words have rung in my ears ever since, as they have served as a prophetic reminder of the reality of a class chasm that defines human existence; of the harsh fact that Jocelyn’s family is but one of hundreds of millions of families around the world that find themselves on the wrong side of classism, not just during Christmastime, but all the time.

Classism

Miguel De La Torre describes sexism, racism, and classism as “the three prongs of Satan’s pitchfork.”2 In the pursuit of justice as part of its mission, the church strives to champion the causes of women, ethnically marginalized peoples, and the poor, which are often intertwined and interrelated. Three injustices, one pitchfork. In the complexity of these oppressions the engaged church would do well to take on the whole pitchfork.

From my own experience, however—and I say this fully cognizant of the risk of violating the one-pitchfork principle—the prong of classism has posed deeper complications, indicating the great power of economics to determine much, if not all, of the other aspects of our lives, from personal attitudes to state policies. I see the pitchfork penetrating unevenly into the flesh of the world, with the prong of classism more deeply embedded in the belly of the world and therefore more hidden from sight. We ignore it because we cannot see it, but all the while it is causing massive, internal damage to the world. In the making of the United States, for example, the motivators of greed and power resulted in the slave trade as well as the genocide of hundreds of indigenous populations. Classism needed racism to build the empire. The same can be said of many empire-building efforts throughout time.

More to the point of this book, unchecked classism also does great damage to the church’s witness in the world. This book aims to speak primarily to nonpoor Christians, nonpoor churches, and nonpoor organizations that sincerely desire to love their neighbor as themselves, especially those who are poor. It is directed toward those who desire to love, serve, and live like Jesus, who both taught and demonstrated how to live faithfully among the poor and the nonpoor. It aims to speak to me and other nonpoor people like me. As a follower of Jesus in the context of middle-class North America, as one who lives in a nonpoor community and worships at a nonpoor church, I long to know how to live and practice mission consistently with the conviction that Jesus “came to proclaim good news to the poor” (Lk 4:18). Those who have picked up this book probably long for the same. For this to happen, classism must be named, confessed, and eradicated.

What Is It?

What is classism, and why must the church confront it? Like sexism and racism, classism distorts perceptions about a group of people, and as such, it justifies the neglect, ill treatment, and oppression of that group. In the same way that the church loses its missional credibility when it complies with or participates in sexism or racism, so too with classism. Our complicity in it contradicts and therefore undermines the ministry of the gospel in the world.

As with racism, sexism, and other injustices, we first intuit the meaning of classism. We feel its evil and empathize with those on the wrong end of it. Our gut knows what it is, as does our heart. And to the extent that our minds also grasp it, the more poised we are to subvert it more fully and precisely. I consulted other works that attempted to define classism, and they surely helped. But definitions of racism actually proved more helpful, which speaks to the inseparable connection between racism and classism.3

Racism can be defined as prejudice based on differences in physical characteristics. But it is more than personal bias; it is collective prejudice formed into a system of inequality that is undergirded by embedded cultural narratives (that is, popular beliefs, unchallenged assumptions, or stereotypes) regarding darker skinned people and then instituted by the powers that be at the expense of those people. Classism mirrors this description with just a few word replacements: Classism is collective prejudice formed into a system of inequality based on socioeconomic stratification; it too is undergirded by embedded cultural narratives concerning the poor, and then instituted by the powers that be at the expense of the poor.

Who Are the Poor?

The above definition begs the question, who are the poor? The best studies have appropriately defined poverty holistically, that is, not just in economic terms but with the full human person in view. The poor suffer levels of deprivation physically, personally, sociopolitically, economically, psychoemotionally, morally, spiritually, and any combination thereof. In that sense the economically rich can be spiritually poor, the economically poor can be spiritually rich, and so on. I do not disagree with this approach to wealth and poverty; in fact, in most cases I would gravitate toward what Bryant Myers has championed in Walking with the Poor as a family-of-definitions approach, which states that a set of interrelated definitions is needed because no single definition can possibly cover the complexity of poverty.4

However, in some cases the broader understanding of poverty becomes a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Orbis Books (USA)
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1626985189
• ISBN 13: 9781626985186
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 201
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Logos Europe; contact@logoseurope.eu; ; 9 Rue Nicolas Possin; La Rochelle; 17000; Frankreich