To our supporters:  

I want you to come visit us for a few days.  I want you to have the experience of walking the streets and going from house to house with us, so that you can engage, love, and learn from the future leaders of Christ’s church – the urban poor in our city.  But there is something I desire more than a visit from you.  No, not your money.  My prayer is that all of Jesus’ followers will become way-of-life-missionaries wherever we are.  Indeed, some of you already are living this kind of life.  You were our inspiration for giving up our old way of life, and ‘church as we knew it’ to be here today. 

On a related note, here is a must-read for our suburban supporters: 

Is anyone else noticing the suburbanization of poverty?  Check out a thoughtful post on this topic by Bob Lupton, author of Theirs Is The Kingdom (Harper and Row, 1989), and president of FCS Ministries, a community development organization serving urban poor neighborhoods in Atlanta.  In March 2008 Lupton wrote about how the poor are migrating to the suburbs. Here is an excerpt:  

“It was the first meeting of this kind I have had – four pastors, a county commissioner, three community leaders, all suburbanites. They had invited me to breakfast at their favorite local watering hole, for me a full hour drive north from the city during morning commuter time. Their issue, the one they felt I might assist them with, was the appearance of “my people” in their suburban community. In the past, suburban church folk – those with a social conscience – have commuted into the city to serve the poor. They have partnered with our urban ministry to build houses, tutor kids, donate used clothes. They journeyed into the city because that’s where the poor were concentrated. All that is now changing. There are still plenty of needy neighborhoods in the city, to be sure. But poverty is gradually, relentlessly suburbanizing. The poor are gravitating to the periphery of the city where more affordable housing can be found – like 40-year-old rental complexes, yesterday’s class “A” apartments that now show signs of aging. The “disadvantaged,” once confined to urban ghettos created by the out-migrating affluent, are now “out-migrating” themselves. And suburban pastors along with their parishioners are not quite sure what to do with their new neighbors.”

To read more of Lupton’s post, go to http://www.fcsministries.org/up/ and click on his March 2008 archive of “Urban Perspectives.” The archive is entitled Suburbanization of Poverty.

And while I’m on this topic, here is another helpful link just posted on May 20.  It is the reason I’m posting these thoughts today: “Looking for the poor in the Suburbs: Ten ways to engage mission in the suburbs” by David Fitch.  

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This week a poor mom who is 8 months pregnant is unable to eat because her teeth ache so badly.  So she goes to a dentist, whose solution is to pull out two of her teeth.  This is the second time in her pregnancy that she has had sore teeth pulled out.  “Better to do it now,” the mom explains to me, “I may not have coverage in the future.” 

Yesterday I’m sitting across the table eating lunch with a poor young dad in his early twenties.  “How long have you stopped smoking?” I ask him.  “Ever since my tooth started to hurt,” he says, “It started to crumble in my mouth and I had the worst headaches.”  “What did the dentist say?” I naively ask.  “I can’t afford a dentist, so I pulled it out myself with tweezers.”  He opens his mouth to show me his handiwork.  Pretty good job, I remark.  He says he feels much better now.

Categories: stories
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