LOUISVILLE – Robert Lupton, a community organizer working in urban ministry in Atlanta, has learned from his mistakes. One of his key learnings: “Everyone in this community has something of value to contribute. Instead of viewing folks as poor folks, we had to start viewing them as gifted people with potential and capacity waiting to be developed.”
More than 40 years ago, just back from Vietnam and restless with his budding career in business, Lupton began working in ministry in inner-city Atlanta, founding FCS Urban Ministries. The author of “Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It),” Lupton was a keynote speaker for the World Mission Pre-Conference the morning of Aug. 1 – a jumpstart for the 2013 Big Tent conference, which runs from Aug. 1- 3.
In those early years, Lupton realized that to work effectively with struggling families, he needed to become part of their environment in order to understand it. Even though his family was midway through building his wife’s “dream house” in the suburbs, he convinced her to move their family, with two young children, to into a tough city neighborhood.
There, he saw the impact of a ministry project through which suburban churchgoers “adopted” city families to provide their children with Christmas gifts. When the well-meaning suburbanites delivered the gifts, “if there was a dad in the household, he just disappeared,” Lupton said. “He was out the back door.”
The gifts served as tangible testament to the parents’ inability to provide. “The moms would endure that,” for the sake of their children, Lupton said. The fathers could not. “It was as if their impotence was being exposed in front of their wives and children. It was killing them.”
At the community clothes closet, Lupton watched as those providing the clothes tried to impose rules to make sure people didn’t take too much. “It turned into an adversarial relationship almost overnight.”
At the food pantry, he saw frustrations and inequities. “When you have a dozen canned hams donated and there are 50 people in line, what do you do?” Lupton said.
So, gradually, he began listening to the people from the community, and making changes to the work based on what he heard. He asked the donors for the Christmas “adopt a family” program to bring those gifts, unwrapped, to a store the ministry set up. Parents could buy the donated toys, at affordable prices, and then give their children Christmas gifts that they had personally selected and purchased. The parents felt accomplished, not embarrassed.
Lupton’s group decided to narrow their ministry in Atlanta to just one or two neighborhoods, in order to build deeper relationships. They shut down the clothes closet and used a business plan developed by community residents (who said things such as “Put it on a bus line” and “Set prices below that of the Salvation Army store”) to set up a clothing store selling donated items. The residents predicted that the store would provide jobs and generate enough income to become self-sufficient – and they were right. Local people worked in the store, earned money, and built friendships with the customers. The dynamic changed to one of valuing the customers (if a patron bought a lot of clothing, that was a good thing), rather than trying to control how many shirts a recipient could take.
Instead of a food pantry, the ministry established a food co-op. Members paid $3 a week, and using those funds the co-op could buy food from the local food bank at a sharply discounted rate. As word spread that co-op members were getting much more food for their $3 than if they spent that same amount at the grocery, more people joined.
The co-op members began taking leadership – developing a credit and loan payback system for those who couldn’t afford $3 every week. They began to share recipes and to cook their favorite dishes for one another. A few women shared their secret dream: they wanted to start a restaurant. It took two years of hard work and support, but they did it – opening “Tummy and Soul” across from the Atlanta Braves stadium.
Lupton also told of what he’s learned from the mistakes of short-term mission trips so many U.S. congregations take to other countries. Among them:
– With a project, the community is always the first investor. That’s what determines “Is this a priority?”
– Sometimes crises do demand emergency intervention. When an earthquake hits, people need lifesaving food, water, shelter and medical treatment. But addressing chronic needs with crisis intervention deprives people of dignity and erodes self-sufficiency.
– Don’t do for others what they can do for themselves. Seek ways to empower people by hiring, lending and investing.
– Put aside your own agenda. Learn to listen, for both the spoken and the unspoken message.
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