Moral Leverage and Church Giving

Recent reports about the Ethiopian famine and relief efforts in this Marxist African country are tending to assess the situation more in terms of misdirected government agricultural policies than in terms of natural catastrophe. One such report appeared in the February 15, 1985, Des Moines Register, entitled “Famine Blamed on Government, not Lack of Rain.” Others now argue that we’re seeing not only a failure to engineer irrigation and water conservation measures, but also the deliberate use of donated goods for political purposes, to neutralize opposition within Ethiopian provinces to the Marxist regime.

The Politics of Famine

These reports generate a host of questions about the church’s witness to and responsibility for the victims of famine–as–a–political–tool.

On the one hand, given the opportunity to contribute to an offering for Marxist–encouraged organizations like the African National Committee which seeks the overthrow of the South African government, most of us would likely let the plate go by. For several reasons: negatively, we don’t like to use Sunday worship to supply people with bullets and guerilla fatigues, and we are not at all sure that the demon cast out by Marxist–inspired insurrection won’t return in sevenfold strength to occupy the land; positively, we’d like to employ benevolence offerings given in Sunday worship for extending the claim s of Christ’s mercy revealed in His gospel and sustaining His suffering church.

But on the other hand, what must we do when the plate comes by for Ethiopia?

I mean, knowing what we know-that our relief–directed dollars are likely to be changed by government officials into rations, not for a starving village, but for a hungry army what must we do? Knowing that, based on past performance, our funds will likely be forged not into tools for irrigation, but into tanks to ride in parade formation celebrating the “salvation” that has come through Marxism? Are we to keep on giving, knowing that we’d not be funding revolution

W.C.C. style, but probably abetting it, evangelical style?

The church’s position appears to be one of moral impotence: the victims are real , the famine is real, the political redirection of relief is real; and we can’t, by our giving, change those realities. What the church needs is moral leverage, a position from which moral pressure can be applied to the situation.

The church is confronted with an irony here. Assert that the proper response is to work at securing the church’s preaching of the gospel in Ethiopia, and you’ll be told: but that doesn’t do anything to change the situation. And so we are told, by mass media sensitizing campaigns, by bulletin covers and diaconal projects, to give. But, really now, what does that do to change the situation?

Is the church, then, impotent to “help?”

Deed Subservient to the Word

It appears that we need here a perspective on the church’s business in the world, on the power of preaching, a perspective that doesn’t choose between missions and benevolence, between a sermon and a bowl of soup, or between Word and deed. The church’s conscience can be neither salved nor satisfied by simply giving–with-no–questions–asked; we must seek an understanding of the deed serving the Word. Whether diaconal service channels our giving to the local community or the global community, the giver with his gift must meet the recipient (the “victim”) under the Word of the gospel. Giving the cup of cold water “in the name of Christ” has nothing to do with baptized humanitarianism, and everything to do with pressing the claims of Christ’s mercy revealed in the gospel. Diaconal work in this way serves the Word.

This meeting under the Word of the gospel is far different from the encounter under the “word” of Marx proposed by liberation theology. That fusion of gift and “victim” fuels the fires of class struggle; liberation theology presses claims, to be sure, the claims of the proletariat. But these claims are pressed by a moral leverage fashioned out of the economic, social and political ends of man himself.

Any moral leverage the church may possess resides in the Word that brought her into being. But nowadays the great stumbling block is this: that leverage can be applied only where the church proclaims that Word and obedience is rendered to the God whose Word it is. The church stumbles into a prone position when she imagines that by simply “giving to the needy” she can “help” them or improve their situation. The illusion of somehow helping by forwarding donations while trying at the same time to “get in” with the gospel is shattered by those recent reports mentioned earlier. Governments like the one in Ethiopia leave you endlessly filling out the entrance forms at relief headquarters, while they go and “distribute” your donations. Here at home, municipal, county and state relief agencies are more and more inclined to “permit” the church (through diaconal cooperation) to “help” people, but not to evangelize them. If the church (through her deacons) accepts those terms, she emasculates the Word and enslaves herself. The deed and the doer are robbed of power, since neither serves the Word any longer.

This perspective on the deed of benevolence serving the Word needs to be considered, then, before the plate goes by, even before the deacons fix the list of offerings. How shall the deed serve the Word of the gospel? How shall the suffering church of Jesus Christ be helped? How shall the claims of Christ be pressed and the mercy of Christ, obtained and bestowed through His death, be extended? That is to say, how shall the giver with his gift meet the recipient under the Word of the cross?

Nelson D. Kloosterman, Orange City, Iowa.