Voluntary Poverty

Some years ago (well 48 years ago when aged 19 and a Christian youth worker in Secondary Schools)  I met an inspiring and challenging Guyanan Christian called Morris Stuart. he travelled through the country visiting our Secondary Schools. He was the first black person I had the opportunity to get to know and he really did have an impact. At first sight he really did turn heads and evoke curiosity. He was educated in England and spoke with what might be called an "Oxford Accent." And he was an incredible communicator with a sharp mind.    

Morris related so respectfully and easily with non-Christians that his visit fundamentally changed the inward looking culture of the Christian groups in the schools. .Instead of meeting them behind closed doors in a classroom, he would ask the group to meet him instead out in the playground where he would engage with whoever gathered around with humour, humility, and respect.

One of his passions was the terrible inequity between rich and poor in the world. He would speak about "Voluntary Poverty" by which he meant that, as wealthy Christians who have choice we need to use that choice to go in the opposite direction from our culture, to live more and more simply, and to give way power to those who are powerless, to truly follow our Lord Jesus Christ.

A few years later I met another challenging Christian, a Southern Indian called P T Chandapilla. "Chanda" as he was affectionately called quoted St Paul who wrote these words to the Christians in ancient Corinth: 

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

Paul, a Jewish Pharisee, is doing something quite astonishing. From the beginning Christians have been inclined to "spiritualise" nature and the normal stuff of human life so as to avoid facing up to human realities  Here Paul does the opposite. He takes a Christian religious belief about Jesus (that, before he was the man Jesus, he was a divine being who had lived with and was part of the community we call God.) and argued that this being gave away all that power and privilege to become a "poor" human being so that we could become ":rich" and part of God's family. 

Paul then uses this to shame the wealthy Corinthian Christians into giving sacrificially to the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem who were suffering severe poverty at that time. In part Paul is trying to heal a rift between Jewish and Gentile Christianity.

How might this also heal some ethnic and cultural rifts in our own age? In the words of Pink Floyd in my favourite album "Dark Side of the Moon" "With,  without, don't you  know that's what the fighting's all about." 

Voluntary poverty is a fundamentally different life pathway which, instead of aiming towards accumulating power and wealth, aims toward shedding both of these things and progressing towards the goal of .complete detachment from wealth and power.

Do we do so because these things are evil. No, not at all, it is the attachment to wealth and power that is evil, that perpetuates so much human suffering, and destroys human joy. It is an addiction. Addictions grow out of looking for something in the wrong place but finding there just enough of the real thing we yearn for that we keep looking in the wrong place until we can no longer let it go. Neither wealth nor power are evil in themselves. Evil is that which diminishes or takes away life. Attachment to wealth and power leads us to put the eradication of poverty and hunger into the "too hard basket" when actually the only thing hard about it is relinquishing our addiction to wealth and power. so we are free to give in away.  



                     .