Who can afford to save the poor?

                                                                                                                                                                                                          … asks Wayne Rumsby

First of all by poor I mean under-resourced. Truly all of us experience moments of poverty in our lives. However, for most people I know poverty is only momentary, because they are able to bring other resources to bare.

Most times these other resources are friends who willingly step into the gap in order to save us. The poor I’m referring to are people who have nobody behind them with outstretched arms, willing to catch them as the fall. In some cases, they are like the prodigal son who have wasted their resources. Sadly, many of the poor are part of a generational experience, and there seems to be no place to return to. 

Downtown Toronto maybe one of the few places on the planet that has not suffered the recent recession. Everywhere you look there are new shiny towers reaching for the sky. Every piece of land is being developed and re-developed. The prices of these condos makes you wonder how this will work out, one thing is for sure, there won’t be room for those who make $20k or less. 

The city has recently undertaken a project that they call the Revitalization of Regent Park housing project, which itself was pitched as a revitalization project just after the second world war. It will be beautiful, truly revitalized, but perhaps not for those who live there now. It has been marketed as a mixed housing project but the reality is that very few people who live there now will be able to survive the process and benefit from the changes. Overall the city will be revitalized, but the under-resourced, the poor will simply be swept aside. 

Eleven years ago my wife and I bought a house in South Riverdale in response to God’s calling to move closer to those who live on or near the street. Over the past decade all of this progress has driven the value of our home upwards. This is good news for us, but it’s not such good news for those who can’t scratch together a down payment of $50,000 or more. The raw truth is that the kind of money that street pastors can attract is never enough to impress the lenders. We’ve recently taken steps to reduce our footprint and our budget by sharing our home with another family. They are also involved in urban ministry. They don’t own a home, and the prospect of being able to own one is remote, so we will share our resources and try to make this work. 

The question remains, who can afford to reach the city’s most under-resourced who live on or near the street? They can’t afford to live here and we can barely afford to either. Furthermore, we can’t afford the space and materials to support these folks whose poverty often includes being chronically under-productive.

The return on investment isn’t very attractive. We can lead them to Jesus but then what? We, the Church, need to ask ourselves, how much should we spend on saving a soul? Sometimes we can do it pretty economically by inviting people to a big stadium and simply delivering the gospel. If that works, it represents one end of the spectrum, at the other end are those who have been raped and beaten and left for dead.

The costs for saving them are truly staggering, Jesus knew that.

   

 

Writer: Wayne Rumsby is at least a fourth generation follower of Jesus Christ. In his late 30’s Wayne responded to an invitation to visit an inner city mission in the heart of Toronto. At the time he was working as a graphic designer. It wasn’t long before he left his job in the fast paced ad business, in the glass towers, to become a full time missionary on the streets and in the alleys. The focus of his mission was to help the marginalized discover God through meaningful work. For most of the past decade Wayne was helping people discover who God had created them to be, by teaching them to make beautiful furniture in a woodworking shop. Today Wayne and his wife Linda are working with the team at 614 Regent Park with the very same vision, helping people discover who God has created them to be, and more.  

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