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Putting it into action |
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IN THE movie, The Apostle, the little church works to build the Christian community using a very different kind of door–knock. It’s a knock–and–run kind of door–knock, where the church does good to needy people. The members nominate neighbours in need. The church packs hampers for each family, and they go dooor–to–door. They put the hamper on the verandah, knock on the door, and run. The owners open the door, and there is a gift. Just grace — no strings attached. Some guess who did it, others don’t. The church doesn’t care so much if people know. It’s just a chance to do good. Another apostle, James, writes, JAS 2:14 What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? 15 Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. If we want to show the truth of the gospel we demonstrate it by deeds. Anything else is nothing but a damnable good idea. I mean that: it is a damnable good idea, because that idea deserves severe condemnation. It does no good for anyone, not even ourselves. Not everyone can work out the theory of a political situation, or understand the latest about global warming. But we can all do good. When people ask me about my history. I tell them I was a Town Planner. And I was. Masters Degree in Town and Country Planning, Certificate of Qualification as a Town and Country Planner under the Local Government Act, Senior Development Control Planner at Bankstown City Council. I still value Town Planning. I see the good it can do — even though I knew that half the things I planned would be subverted by politicians and the other half wouldn’t happen in my lifetime. I could still enjoy the rest. Many Town Planners have a passion to create community. It is just that planning can’t achieve that. You can create the conditions, but you only get community if you get involved on the ground with the people and help them interact and learn to trust one another.
People criticise Town Planners. They accuse us of making a mess. And there have been massive mistakes — like the Radburn housing in Minto. The houses back onto streets and front onto parkland. No one owns the park, so the louts and junkies take over. But we owe a lot to Town Planning. Would you like the bad old days back when your neighbour could run a knackery and no one could object? Town Planning isn’t new. Many people think it only sprang up after World War II, when people were rebuilding bombed cities. Did you know that the ancient port of Athens, the suburb known as Piraeus, was a planned town? It was planned around 450BC, around the time of Daniel in the Bible. Did you know that Adelaide was planned in the 1840s? People have planned cities for an awfully long time. Of course, some cities just happened. Sydney went where the cart tracks were. It’s not a bad principle, because carts generally take the easiest route anyway. But it has meant that a lot of Sydney’s history has been about fixing what was already there. But what does this have to do with Christian social action? Being a Town Planner under all this fuzz, I thought of Town Planning as an example of how Christians followed Jesus. The Bible says he went about doing good. Have you ever seen Bournville Cocoa? Cadbury’s makes it. Or think about Sunlight soap and Lux flakes, made by Unilever, the Lever family company from Liverpool in England. The Cadburys and the Levers were radical English Christians. In England, Cadbury means more than chocolate. They led the campaign against child labour. The Cadburys were active Quakers. The Levers were Evangelicals, known for their concern for workers. Both families believed that their role was not just to make money for shareholders, but to do good in the world in the name of Jesus. That’s pretty different from today’s businesses! Here is where the Town Planning came in. Until the mid 18th Century, the English economy was based on farming. People owned farms, worked on farms or supplied the needs of people on farms. There was a little industry, but not much. Then there was a massive change. Steam was harnessed to power tools and machines. The canal systems were developed to get goods quickly into the major cities. New machines were invented for the cloth industry. People moved to cities for work and wealth. The farms didn’t support as many people as they had. Cities grew dirty, filled with disease and distress. In the cities they still didn’t earn very much, but where else could they go? So the cities were places of overcrowding, poverty, malnutrition and sickness. Many wealthy people blamed the poor for their state. “If they kept their houses clean, if they didn’t drink so much, if they wore clean clothes, they would have nothing to complain about,” they said. “It is their fault they are like they are.” No help, only accusations. Sadly, it was particularly the Calvinistic Christians who thought that way — Anglicans and Congregationalists and even some Baptists. They said, “If people are poor, that is how God ordained it. They get what they deserve, and we get what we deserve, because God has elected us, and it is how he blesses us.” That’s heresy, but it was how many thought. It was that superficiality that I spoke about last week, only dressed up in Sunday best clothes. The Cadburys didn’t only care about children forced to work 9 or 10 hours a day in mines and factories. They cared about all working people. They saw the potential of Town Planning to create a more humane environment for people to live in. “Why should they live in slums? Why should they have dirt and disease, when the rest of us have fine houses and clean conditions?” The Cadbury family asked themselves repeatedly. So they built a town for their workers — and other people — to live in. They called it Bournville. It was a village on the Bourn River. The Lever family, with their soap and cleaning products, had similar ideas to the Cadburys. They built Port Sunlight, a place for people to live. They were doing what Jesus told us to do: MT 25:34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, `Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ 37 “Then the righteous will answer him, `Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ 40 “The King will reply, `I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ These workers’ towns set a pattern. They mixed people from different backgrounds. They were built on a principle of bringing people together, not separating them. I read a secular study of the whole movement to build new towns for working people. The author, who did not claim any Christian faith, made the point that much of the older approach to Town Planning aimed to separate people, so as to keep the workers in their place. But these towns built by Christians had a community–building aim. And many Town Planners today are still influenced by that aim. Let’s be truthful. Not everything about these new towns was good. The bigger houses still went to the richer people. There was some idea that putting the fairly rich and the poor together would show the poor people how to live, and make them better–behaved. And there were just some basic mistakes because they were doing something new, and, when you do something new, you will make some mistakes and learn later what wasn’t such a good idea. But they tried, and that’s the main thing. We have talked a lot recently about being agents of change. We have talked about speaking out and doing something about the world we live in. We must do that. But we must also act in practical ways. You heard what James says, 15 Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? Too often, we Christians wish people well, but do nothing to change things. We avoid getting involved. We are afraid that it will be hard to get free, that people will depend on us. So we shy away. I shy away. You shy away. Don’t we lack faith that God can preserve us and help us with the people we meet? I am not saying, “Be foolish.” Didn’t Jesus say, Be as wise as snakes and as gentle as doves? Some of you remember a young man who came here at one time who threatened people who didn’t do as he demanded. Once he exposed himself to a woman here, too. There were many times that I had to exclude him for a fortnight or a month. There were several times when I had to call the police. He had many problems, and you just could not afford not to set boundaries. Maybe you saw me facing him down from time to time. You might not have known it, but I was scared stiff when I did that. He was younger, fitter and heavier than I was, and a lot more — vastly more — aggressive. I just had to stand there very quietly and calmly and be totally insistent that I would not agree to letting him do what he wanted to do. We don’t want to be rescuers, doing for others what they could and should do for themselves. But we do want to facilitate; we want to make possible what they can’t do for themselves. And that was the attitude of the Cadburys, the Levers, and several others who were not attached to big companies, but still found ways of pursuing a Christian dream of relieving suffering and providing for people’s basic needs. We have faith, and that is good — but what value is our faith if it does not lead to concrete acts of care for those in need? It is a meaningless dream! I am not going to tell us all what we should each do in our own areas of concern. That is something for us to work out as a group. But just remember that one of the biggest periods of growth for this church, in the 1920s and 1930s, was when our church had the most active welfare commitment to local people. In fact, this little Baptist Church in Marrickville became so well known that the Communist Tribune Newspaper sent its deputy editor to investigate and pull out the dirt on what we were really doing. Instead, he saw that our work with the unemployed and suffering people was very real. He was converted, became a member, and served as a deacon. At the time, nearly all the deacons had been converted through this church’s ministry. What we were doing was perfectly right. ‘...whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ Doing is important. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise. The Cadburys and Levers left a legacy of Christian doing which still speaks today. I will tell you some needs that we could be thinking about in our 120th year of Baptist Witness in Marrickville. Bruce raised this one about 12 months ago, but resources were lacking. We’d thought about it before as well, and it doesn’t seem to be going away soon. That is the need for housing for people who need more than a mental health boarding house offers, but are not entirely ready to live independently. We’ve met a number of people like that. I don’t know if something that specialised would attract funding, but I do know that there is a serious lack in the area of housing for people with disabilities, especially in the mental health area.
I have long thought about the need to help “breakdown–proof” school kids. You couldn’t prevent every problem, but you could help them know the symptoms and know where to get help. But many people suffer mental illnesses because of stresses that they just don’t know how to deal with. This would be ideal territory for some church to work in. The Ted Noffs Foundation has done something similar mainly in the area of drugs. Think what we evangelicals could offer!
We don’t have the resources at present, but let’s never give up the idea of a really effective Drop In Centre. We were the first in Marrickville to set up one focussed on the needs of people with mental illnesses, but you need the right people — and the numbers — to do it.
Or we could do something immediately about the boatload of refugees which was picked up the other day — the Government is threatening to send them back to Sri Lanka and Indonesia: who knows what will happen to them there? It’s one thing to assess people carefully; it is another to prejudge their case and put them at risk. What can we do?
We are small, but we are not dead. We can do it, if we have the faith to do it. I knew a little bloke who was a Pizza cook. One weekend he had ovens delivered to his new shop, but only onto the footpath, and he had to drag them in himself. I said, “You could have phoned me to help!” He replied, “I managed, but thanks for the offer. One thing you should remember: we little blokes try harder!”
We might be little blokes when you look at the mega churches, or even the ordinary–sized churches. But God has a calling for us — a calling to move the entire world, even if only by a small distance. It starts with doing good. We can do it, because we can always try harder!
Let’s do it! AMEN |
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© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.) |
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