Redistribution

I had a feeling that Dr. John Perkins would use that word when he preached last Sunday at Northside.  When I preached the early service that day I tried to prepare people for it.  Sure enough he said that word and some other things that got a lot of comments this week.  Most of which did not come directly to me, they were just passed around until somebody thought I 'ought to know" what was being said, not by the person bringing it to me of course.  So I want to address what is being said and what Dr. Perkins was actually saying when he used that word.  What many people heard is not what he was saying.

Let me explain, Dr. Perkins and some other like minded Christians who worked with people in poverty felt it was time for the church to do something to lift people out of poverty.  They saw that government programs had not had the desired results.  So they began to work on what the church could do in poor neighborhoods through new types of ministry.  In the 1980's they came up with Christian Community Development which is now a nationwide association of over 6,000 members and over 600 ministries. 

There are three ways we can go about helping people:
1. Relief - giving emergency help that is immediate and temporary.  Food and shelter after a storm or natural disaster, for example.  It is help for the moment, temporary in its scope and it is what is needed when people cannot help themselves.
2. Rehabilitation - restoring people and communities to their pre-crisis conditions.  This is the longer term work of helping people and communities to function again.  It is the clean up, mud out, fix up process.  What is being done to restore things in West, Texas now after a devastating explosion is rehabilitation.  Rehabilitation works best when the people in the crisis work with people helping them.
3. Development - Working with people through a long-term process of on-going change in which both they and those helping, grow closer to being in right relationship with God and with each other.
Habitat for Humanity and Perpetual Help Home are two local examples.

Dr. Perkins and others saw the damage that continual relief work was doing in poor communities; dependence on relief was a real problem so they began to find ways to do development work with the poor.  As they saw what worked in the long run they called them the three R's of Christian Community Development:
- Relocation - If you are going to change a community you must live in the community  no differently than a missionary must live in the culture of people they are trying to reach.  Relocation also means to bring back into the community some of those who have made a way out of poverty.  They have powerful testimonies that people will hear.
- Reconciliation - Getting people right with God and teaching them how to get right with each other.  That should go without much explanation for Christians.  It is a vital work in any community but especially among the poor where violence and crime run rampant.  There is much reconciliation to be done.
- Redistribution - (you thought I would never get back to it didn't you).  In development work that does not mean taking from those who have and redistributing it to those who don't.  It does mean to go into the community and into people's individual lives and see what resources they already have and help them to see how to redistribute those things for betterment.  Development work, as Dr. Perkins teaches it, starts a discovery of assets not an inventory of needs.  (Read that statement again).

The example of this "redistribution" that I gave in my sermon Sunday was the story of Stella, a woman at Perpetual Help Home who one year ago was caught in the drug culture of her community.  After she came to Perpetual and came to Christ she found she could use the same skills she had used to buy, sell and deal with drugs to prepare and sell salsa.  She now runs her own micro-enterprise "Stella's Sassy Salsa" and markets her product to individuals and restaurants.  She learned how to redistribute her skills and her assets and run her own business.  That is the beauty of development, she started with what she had and found a way to make it work.

You can go to our website www.nbcvictoria.org and under the "Worship Tab" find the February 9th sermon that I preached on this and the sermon that Dr. Perkins preached at 10:45 am that day.  But hopefully you have a clearer picture of what was meant and not just what was "heard."  I know that the most common meaning of "redistribution" today is not what it means in development work.  Remember the three "R's" of development were coined in the 1980's long before the word redistribution became a political hot topic. 

I doubt that at 84, Dr. Perkins is going to change his usage of the word nor change the popular understanding of it.  Perhaps we can all just understand each other a little better.  Hopefully now you understand Christian community development work a little better.  I hope to write soon on another amazing example of it going on in our own city but this has been a long blog so I had better go for now.  Thank you for reading and do let me know if you have more questions.

for the journey...

Tim