One of the strongest ‘values’ our society has had over the generations is that we should look after the poor.  This has deep roots in Christianity.  For example, when the Apostle Paul met the other apostles for the first time, they affirmed everything he was doing, but only asked “that we should continue to remember the poor.”[1] In the Old Testament, too, helping the poor is frequently said to be a key part of what the good person should do; thus, “good will come to him who is generous and lends freely… he has scattered abroad his gifts to the poor”[2] Jesus tells a graphic story about what will happen to those who ignore the plight of the poor[3] - and these references are not occasional ones, but represent an ethic that runs through the Bible as a whole.  And this, or course, was in massive contrast to practices of the society of the time that these words were said and recorded.  They were meant to be a challenge.

And they are a challenge still.  In spite of our likely agreement with the sentiment that one should help the poor, we are wide open to that same challenge in terms of the way we live.

One of our main weaknesses in this respect is that we have shoved responsibility onto the state.  Not that the state shouldn’t be active – only that its activity shouldn’t ever have taken away our personal responsibility to do something – directly.  Our own role is pivotal, for four reasons:

• First, our close personal contact with people often allows us to see a need that an amorphous institution might not identify, or be able to deal with.
• Second, we can do it with love, whereas an institution can only do it with rules.  It is the love that gladdens the heart.
• Third, love motivates us, so that we want to say ‘thank you’ by doing our best.  State help often does the opposite.
• Fourth, helping people makes the helpers feel great, producing a win-win situation.  We rarely feel as good as when we have voluntarily helped someone.

Contrast this with trying to get what you can from an impersonal bureaucracy.  Sure, the safety net is vital, but the experience all too often casts us down rather than lifting us up.

Furthermore, our materialistic culture, where we get status from what we have, puts a double burden on the poor.  Not only do they lack the goods they see others enjoying, they are made to feel that they lack status, or worth, too.  This, if you like, is adding insult to injury.  And it is important to realize how different this was 50 years ago.  “We were poor, but we were happy” is a catch-phrase that evokes a different era, where people actually took pride in how well they could manage on a little.  There was community in being poor.  Today, there is often isolation, which is almost worse than the poverty itself.

Finally, poverty today frequently saps the work ethic, because the lack of work-history makes you unattractive to employers and the rules of state benefits mean you often lose as much as you gain from taking up even part-time work.  So there is a ghetto mentality that creeps in, gradually making the unemployed unemployable, and allowing a pall of depression to settle on those who once fended for themselves.  To be the child of parents in such a situation is then to be deprived of role models in the world of work, and to extinguish hope.

In our individualistic world, where community is at such a low ebb, the existence of poverty is an opportunity.  If financial need, loss of status, growing isolation, and lack of hope are the principal problems, then the restoration of community can be the answer.

Surely, this can be the spur to the formation or mobilization of community groups of all kinds.  The need, to seek out those in the community who are isolated and disadvantaged and ‘bring them in’ to genuine community, is obvious.  What creative ways could be found too do this?   Just befriending people, for one, as well as drawing the lonely and disadvantaged into community or interest groups of one kind or another.  People can often use their own initiative to help someone locate relevant work, or encourage and help them to start their own enterprise (be it window-cleaning, gardening, decorating or whatever).  Here we could see writ large the ethos that “we should all serve the needs of others” and “people are more important than things”, turned into relevant and action and made the foundation of local and community life.

And the spin off is not just that individuals would more often be helped by individuals, but also that the potential helpers would be drawn together, themselves brought into community (rather than the ‘splendid isolation’ of the self-sufficient), and themselves given fellowship, purpose and a refocusing of their lives onto the needs of others.

Now, if that isn’t win-win, then what is?

What this needs at the local level is the emergence of potential leaders, who will take an initiative and draw others into it.  It also needs a culture, at the national level, that stimulates and applauds such initiative – that features it in magazine articles, dramas and soap operas, and that stops presenting competitive advancement as the only goal in life.  “What can you do today for someone less fortunate than yourself?

Putting concern for the poor and the marginalized at the centre of our national aspirations would lead to a changed Britain almost faster than anything else.

Why not make that our aim, in 21^st century Britain?  What’s to stop us.