Jesus’ ministry strategy leaves me un-nerved. I’m preaching through Luke’s gospel - barely a week goes by where Jesus isn’t challenging religious people over their love of money and neglect of the poor. I live in a wealthy parish of a wealthy diocese. How do we care for the poor, the widows and the oppressed?

The awful truth is that the poor don’t get much of a look in. How do I know this? The draft church budget tells me so. The small line item to some kind of ‘mercy ministries’ is the best measure of value we give this ministry

Why is that?

• the right priority of trying to reach the local parish can blind us to needs beyond the parish boundaries
• we can assume these good works are ‘outsourced’ by the church to Anglicare
• fear of doing only token things or being seen as Lady Bountiful - ‘look how good we are towards those poor people’ - we fail to see the potential for working in gospel communities across class/income lines
• we don’t really believe it is a gospel obligation to love people and do good to those who are in need
• we put our energy and resources into ‘strategic’ people and places - leaving the poor to fend for themselves or wait for some ‘trickle down’ from our strategic work.
• we don’t know poor people and feel uncomfortable around them & would rather send a cheque to alleviate our middle class guilt
• we’ve forgotten our Evangelical history
• we don’t see others making it a priority and we just accept the culture around us
• we are too trusting of the government to provide

I’m afraid it is one of those weeks where I’m identifying a problem rather than offering a solution.

Do others think this is a problem? What are some of the ways forward? Who is doing good thinking in this area?