Never the Same Again
FACE TO FACE WITH POVERTY

 

Reference: Grigg, V. (2004).Never the same again: Face to face with poverty. Companion to the Poor. Authentic Media, GA, USA

 

THE PEOPLE OF TATALON had good reason to wonder why a white New Zealander would move into Aling Nena's home. Many of my friends were also wondering why I had left a ministry among Manila's middle class to live with the poor. But the decision to move to the slum was not made on a whim. It was one-step in a journey of carrying the cross. In this cross is meaning, reality and destiny. Only in this cross are there ultimate answers to the deep questions that are the wellspring of human life and experience.

 

I first learned of the impact of that cross as a ten-year­old. While hunting for books in the uppermost garret of Dunedin, New Zealand's oak-panelled public library and I discovered a treasure trove of biographies of famous Christians. One was to set the direction of my life, it was the story of a sickly, bespectacled man - Toyohiko Kagawa of Japan. ¹
 

As a student, Kagawa realized that if the slum people of neighboring Shinkawa were to be saved, he must move there and preach the gospel. The poor would never accept something offered by the wealthy and respectable, who came from across the river, dispensed their charitable gospel and then returned home. A church planted in the slums must be tended day and night.
 

On Christmas Day 1909, Kagawa, twenty-one years old, frustrated after efforts to persuade his superiors of the needs of the poor, packed his belongings into a little hand-cart, crossed the bridge, and walked into the slums of Shinkawa to serve his Lord. For the next fourteen years and eight months he lived there, teaching, preaching the gospel and ministering to the poor.
 

He became a strategic figure in the development of the labour unions of Japan, brought widespread reforms to stem the flow of poor to the cities, was a key man in the reconstruction of Tokyo after it was devastated by the 1923 earthquake, helped fashion a law that abolished slums, and was a leader in the reconstruction of Japan after World War II.

 

In all these activities, he constantly proclaimed the cross. He inspired nationwide evangelistic campaigns, preached to the country's political leaders and to the Emperor himself, and established many churches and Bible schools among the poor. Thousands entered the kingdom through his life.
 

It was a truth I learned as a child, an unquestioned assumption learned from Kagawa - living among the poor is the only possible way to plant the Christian faith among them.
 

Kagawa chose the rugged, rough-hewn cross of his pauper Master. He chose the suffering of the cross. With the wisdom gained from a good education, he could have been rich. But the poverty he chose shows his true wisdom.
 

We, too, must reach the poor. The cross is our method, the cross is our message, the cross is our life.

 

Kagawa once wrote:

In the blood-drops dripping
Along the sorrowful road to the Via Dolorosa
Will be written the story of man's regeneration.
Tracing the blood-stained and staggering footprints
Let me go forward!
This day also must my blood flow, following
In that blood-stained pattem^.2

 

Rugged cross or jewelled replica?
 

After training and preparation, I was sent from New Zealand to Manila as a missionary. During my first year in Manila, I lived with a missionary and his family, serving and learning from him, and assisting in his ministry of teaching discipleship in a Bible school. I taught two classes of 60 students, I recruited nine of these students to join me, under the leadership of an experienced missionary, in establishing a predominantly middle-class church.³
 

Theologians and church-growth specialists would say that we were on the forefront of missions, the cutting edge of the great commission, the thick of the battle to establish new beachheads for the gospel.
 

But my life was unfulfilled. The philosopher within me, found no answers to the search for meaning; the artist found no fulfillment in the search for perfection and ultimate truth; the leader had not found the center of destiny and purpose towards which to lead others. All three voices told me I still was far from the place of God's call.
 

I became relatively proficient at passing on skills and programs, reproducing laborers who could pass on skills and programs to other believers, was this, the discipleship of Jesus? My students came from poor families. For many, Bible College became the stepping stone to economic security as a paid "professional" pastor. My own wealth, and our deliberate focus on a middle-class target group, precluded me from passing on the disciplines of the Beatitudes: poverty of spirit, meekness, peacemaking (bringing justice with love) - qualities at the heart of discipleship.
 

The cross I was carrying and handing on was only a half-size one. I realized my life must portray a dramatically different picture of ministry if I wanted to lead these men and women into the way of the cross. Discipleship had to be taught in the context of a Jesus-style ministry to the poor - in the context of rejecting pride and Status-seeking, power, and economic security.

 

A thief in the slums
 

Cross-centered discipleship came into sharp focus the week I visited the home of one of my students. He lived in the slums of a pineapple factory in Mindanao, the large southern island of the Philippines.
 

We traveled by jeepney. Four people sat in the front seat, seven sat along the sides and another four hung pre­cariously along the back in various ways - all laughing and talking in unknown dialects. A load of vegetables sat on my feet and chickens squawked under the seat.
 

We stopped at a military outpost. A soldier cautiously inspected each passenger. then climbed aboard the front seat to provide protection from rebels. bandits, or guerillas. Villagers stared at us from small Nipa huts huddled along the road.
 

Finally, we arrived at Lario's home on a pineapple plantation stretching for mile after mile on land confiscated or bought from hundreds of peasant farmers.

 

For the first time, I saw the effects of Western consumerism in the Two-Thirds World. Accumulated profits are taken to America, juggled between three different companies. Meanwhile, 7000 workers, many of them former owners of the land on which they now work, live on a pitiful wage in one square mile of squatter homes. The transnational company argues that at least these workers have some income. They deliberately keep this below subsis­tence level in order to circumvent union troubles. We Westerners eat the canned pineapple produced, with little thought for the social and economic process behind it.

 

Lario's house consisted of bamboo posts and pieces of wood he had scrounged from the dump and elsewhere. As I stooped through the door. The first thing I did was put my foot through the floorboards.

They called in all their utang (the debts of old friends) to feed me and gave me their blanket, a mosquito net, and a sleeping mat.

 

Lario's mother and father both work. During my visit, his father was ill with a skin disease on his legs. Their income could not provide enough money for medicine.
 

The toilet had blown over in a typhoon, so Lario and I began to dig a deep hole. The neighbors came to see this Americano. They had never seen a white person work with his hands before.

 

"Hey, Joe, what are you doing?" I had learned that Filipinos call white men "Joe" because of the many American soldiers who had lived there over the lasted century. "I'm digging a toilet," I answered. "Why don't you come over this evening? We will preach the gospel and explain why."

 

In the afternoon, I talked with Lario's mother. As she ironed with a charcoal iron, she told the story of their poverty, of the personal tragedy that had caused it and the oppression that had perpetuated it. Tears fell. She told of how the Lord had sustained her. How in him alone was her comfort.

As evening came, smoke from the wood fire wafted through the house, driving away the mosquitoes. Estella, Lario's twelve-year-old sister, picked up a home-made wooden guitar and began to sing of the Lord who under­stands the pain and sorrow of his children. Who is building a mansion "just over the hilltop."

 

"Mahirap," she said to me sadly at the end of her song. "Life is so hard, so poor." In the light of the kerosene lamp, we ate our rice and fish for supper. Then we placed a lantern outside and set up some bamboo for seats. It was Easter Friday, and I began to speak about the cross.

The lantern cast its eerie light on the tattered clothes of the men sitting on the bamboo seats we had made. It was quiet. One could sense the listening ears of neighbors in the surrounding houses as they sat in their windows. They listened to the story of those nails that shattered his wrists. the jolting of that wooden post as they dropped it into the ground. The blood flowing from his crown of thorns. I spoke of the thief beside Jesus who cried. "Jesus remember me." and of Jesus' reply, "This day you will be with me in paradise." Samson, a big denim-clad youth sitting at the front, began to weep quietly. He, too, had been a thief. He repented, and the Spirit of God entered his life.

 

In the midst of this twentieth-century scene surrounded by the poor, in the presence of the Spirit of God, declaring the cross - I was aware that I was standing in the central stream of history. Two thousand years earlier, with a similar pair of dusty sandals on his feet, my Lord had declared his destiny with these words: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor" (Luke 4:18).

 

Here also the pauper apostles of history had stood through the centuries. Here was meaning, destiny and truth, enough to satisfy the deepest searching of the human heart.
 

The proclamation of the cross stands at the center of all meaning. In it justice and truth, mercy and compassion meet. But it is framed by suffering, poverty and the pain of humanity. It is framed by the poor.
 

The dignity, the human quality of the leadership of Jesus, had captivated me as a child and brought me into his kingdom. Like the disciples who had walked before me throughout history, God had overwhelmed me with his love.

 

Once we know him, we continue to seek him, "counting everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord." Where can Jesus be found and known today? To find him, we must go where he is. Did he not say, "Where I am, there shall my servant be also"?

 

Such a search invariably leads us into the heart of poverty. For Jesus always goes to the point of deepest need. Where there is suffering, he will be there binding wounds. His compassion eternally drives him to human need. Where there is injustice, he is there. His justice demands it. He does not dwell on the edge of the issues. He is involved, always doing battle with the fiercest of the forces of evil and powers of darkness. That night, in a squatter settlement on a pineapple plantation, my heart found rest. There could be no turning back from God's call. I must preach the gospel to the poor.

 

In a heap of ruins
 

After the week with Lario and his family, I returned to Manila, asking myself, "Where would Jesus be involved if he were in Manila?"

 

One day, I climbed to the top of a one-hundred-foot-high mountainous pile of rotting, decaying food and rubbish. I looked at the shacks of 10,000 of Manila's poorest and at their emaciated figures scavenging paper, bottles and cans to resell them to middle-men who would then recycle them.

 

The people had work - they were happy in that. I watched as little children, older women, and comparatively healthy workers picked their way through the pile. They carried their goods in sacks on their shoulders back to their homes, where the goods were sorted, and classified.

I walked through the squatter community. The smell was indescribable. Sickness was rife. The houses were constructed from old sacks, metal and other old garbage. Children reached out their hands in laughter to touch me, but pulled back when they saw my tears. As I wept, my heart cried out in anger, "Lord, how long can you permit the degradation and destruction of your people? Why don't you do something?"

Suddenly, I knew his answer: "I have done something. Two thousand years ago, I stepped into poverty in the person of my Son. I have dwelt there ever since in the person of my sons and daughters. Today I am calling for other sons and daughters to enter into the poverty of the poor in order to bring my kingdom to them."

 

Jesus would dwell today wherever there is need. Here, in the slums of Manila, the Prince would become one of the paupers:
 

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he be­came poor that by his poverty we might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9).

 

Here, among the poorest of the poor, he would preach, heal and bring justice. Job described these poor:

 

Yet does not one in a heap of ruins stretch out his hand, And in disaster, cry for help? Did I not weep for him whose day was hard? Was not my soul grieved for the poor? (Job 30:24-25)

 

It would be in a "heap of ruins" such as this smoldering rubbish heap, a modern-day urban Gehenna, that Jesus himself would minister.

 

Four hundred communities

 

In 1978, the National Housing Authority of the Philippines identified 415 squatter communities in Metro-Manila. Of these, they identified 253 as communities that could be upgraded on site. In the remaining 162 communities, the demolition and relocation of unwanted squatter settlements by truckloads of armed men would proceed.
 

Yet Jesus would have ministered to these very people. Surely we too must live among them, bringing them the tangible blessing of his kingdom. His compassion compels. The cross compels. The search for meaning and reality compels. We must call men to that task and place the cross where the battle is hardest fought. The Church must not only be planted; it must be planted where the gospel has never been known. where but among the poor of these cities is a harder place to plant the church? Our ideals, however, are constantly limited by the realities of our humanity and its incipient sinfulness, both personal and collective. Identification with or among the poor cannot be accomplished in a day, a week, or even a month. A missionary must always limit his own idealism.

 

I needed to move in this new direction harmoniously with the body of co-workers in which God had placed me. I needed to build a ministry to the poor on the solid foundation of Scripture. My idea of disciplemaking had to be refined. The attainment of my calling to Manila's poor would take time.

 

NOTES

1. Comments on Kagawa are taken from Cyril J. Davey, Kagawa of Japan, Epworth Press, 1960.
2. Toyohiko Kagawa, "The Cross of the Whole Christ," in Meditations on the Cross, SCM, 1936, p 16.
3. For a study of this church-planting venture see Cary Perdue, "The Case of the Kamu Bible Chrislian Fellowship," Asia Pulse, Evangelical Missions Information Service, Box 794, Wheaton, Illinois 60187, July 1982, Vol. 15, No. 3.