Tribal Boundaries around Christian Giving

What I like least about the Evangelical community I grew up in is that generosity and compassion stop at the doors of the church. Not literally at the doors to the church building, though sometimes that is true, but at the boundaries of Evangelical Christianity. My inability to get comfortable with this boundary around generosity and love was one reason I left.

Within the church community, scriptural mandates about clothing the poor, feeding the hungry, or comforting widows and orphans are matters of routine practice. So are the hefty, reliable donations that buy things like classrooms, choir robes, buses, and even baseball fields. In my home church, the ten percent tithe was a benchmark, below which a family might fall because of financial hardship or otherwise with pangs of guilt. But giving went beyond money. It included time, skill and emotional energy. Many people gave to the church and to other Christians at great personal cost.

I have been a recipient of this generosity. In the days after my father’s death, my husband commented with astonishment at the warm food that arrived meal after meal. I, who had grown up in the church, was more startled by his surprise. Since then, week after month after year, men of the congregation have come to fix my mother’s plumbing, to replace loose shingles, to cart my nephews (who she is raising) to club meetings and outings. They give without calling attention to themselves and when thanked they deflect credit: “God has given much to me . .”

Within Evangelical communities, this kind of behavior is the norm. It is an unquestioned part of what it means to follow in Christ’s footsteps.

But if problems and needs exist in the world outside the Church, that is a different matter. Yes, there are ministries to inner city youth and to the elderly and to new immigrants, but always with the intent of winning converts. If the beneficiaries are not believers, then coaching soccer, providing transportation to medical appointments, or filling hungry stomachs is a means to an end. Catholics in Latin America and Muslims in Afghanistan and Hindus in India accuse Protestant aid organizations of exploiting human desperation to entice conversion. They are not altogether wrong. Even on U.S. college campuses, “friendship missionaries” target lonely foreign students, offering companionship with an agenda.

What is ugly to me is that helping to make the world a little better isn’t an agenda in itself. Children in poor neighborhoods have rotten schools? Of course it’s a problem, but not a Christian problem. Drinking water contains high levels of heavy metals? Definitely a problem, but not a Christian problem. Blood transfusions in short supply? Hospitals struggling to provide services for the uninsured poor? Farmland being eliminated by suburban sprawl? Arms traders providing machine guns to orphaned children in the Sudan? Manatees becoming extinct because of pleasure craft activities off the coast of Florida? Not Christian problems.

The Evangelicals I grew up with might occasionally and individually take on such concerns independent of their faith, but they certainly wouldn’t systematically take responsibility for these concerns because of their faith. And any activities along these lines had no place among the moral and spiritual teachings we received every Sunday and Wednesday. No teaching, modeling, discussion, mentoring or practice. The only model was “give to the church and through the church.” By college, it occurred to me that this leaves an awful lot that needs doing in the world to agnostics and Jews and Buddhists and those not-real (liberal) Christians. To make matters worse, while they struggle to do it all, Evangelicals get to sit by, not just with the certainty of their own salvation, but also with a certain sense of moral superiority.

Not only does such a posture seem ugly, it falls short of the thinking of even our early spiritual ancestors. If one looks at the gospel stories, many of Jesus’s miracles and acts of compassion are not accompanied by a “come follow me” message, nor are they tribal. They are simply done. The blind seeing and the lame walking and the hungry being satisfied or even having enough wine for a wedding celebration—all of these are worthwhile in their own right. They aren’t means to an end, they are simply manifestations of Goodness.

When Jesus preaches the beatitudes, He doesn’t say, “Blessed are the meek Jews for they shall inherit the earth.” Nor does he say, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall have mercy if they profess that I am Lord.” The message isn’t about inclusion, exclusion, or conversion. In other words, it isn’t about tribal boundaries. It is about meekness, and mercy and love.