“So, what kind of success rate do you have?”
I am meeting with the pastor of a medium sized church, part of [Really Huge Denomination]. We are in a quiet coffee shop, drinking $4 cups of coffee while talking about poverty. Lucky for me, he is buying.
He asks me this question, I am pretty sure, not because he really wants to know, but because he is not sure what else to ask. In his world, there are numbers to go by - you divide the number of results by the financial cost and the result is how successful it was.
I try to tell him why the world I work in can’t work that way. When you are dealing with individual people, success is hard to quantify. I could tell him that out of maybe 50 people I have a relationship with, three have moved into more permanent housing this year and one of them has decided to follow Jesus, but that would have anything to do with Maria, who still prostitutes herself in order to pay for her drugs.
I don’t know how to put a cost ratio analysis on sitting next to a transgendered person as she cries because she is alienated from her family. Or being told by someone who has had ample reason to hate the church that she attended services last week for the first time in years. How do you decide how much to invest in someone who always lets you down, yet tells other people that you are the brother he never had?
Statistics are safe. Statistics are clean. If you hear that 20 people enter a job program and one year later, 15 of them are still working, that sounds nice - but it doesn’t tell you the struggles they endure to get clean clothing to work in, the challenges of finding a place to shower, the long nights of crying in the back seat of the car they are sleeping in as they battle the urge to drink.
We don’t deal in statistics. We deal with people. We don’t count heads, we count friends. Friends are messy. Friends are inconvenient. Friends let you down.
The pastor is less than satisfied. I understand. Most days, I am less than satisfied too. But if you are going to treat humans like they are made in the image of God, you have to let people make their own choices. If the only way you will spend time with someone is if they do the things that make you happy, then you have a pet, not a person.
Many professional homeless workers are in horror at this concept. They believe that I am rewarding bad behavior and as long as I am not strict with what I will tolerate, then they will never change.
I have a different philosophy. As a follower of Jesus, I believe that I constantly let God down, yet he has not given up on me. I fail again and again, yet am loved completely and without question. And even should I decide to go my own way and make decisions that harm our relationship, he honors my choices and would take me back in an instant. In fact, he would never stop pursuing me in his efforts to take me back.
It’s called Grace. It’s called Love.
And if the cross on Friday and the empty tomb on Sunday have anything to teach us, it is that Love Wins.
Comments 6
Isn’t it sad that so many - as you term them - “professional homeless workers” have yet to learn the lesson of grace?
Grace requires us to view each person - homeless or housed - as a unique individual with needs specific to them. Instead, many of the “professional homeless workers” I have met are more like cattle rustlers, concerned only with “moving the herd along.”
To me, that is one of the reasons that so many shelters do not have any true “success rate.”
Posted 28 May 2009 at 9:27 am ¶@Michael,
Thanks for stopping by! I agree - many professional homeless workers have a power trip going on. The thing that hurts me the most is how often the very churches that preach grace on Sunday are willing to ignore opportunities to show it throughout the week.
Posted 28 May 2009 at 9:35 am ¶Here’s an alternative perspective. Rather than assume your pastor friend is just a heartless show-me-the-numbers jerk (though he may be), we could assume that he’s trying to be a good steward of his church’s money. There are a ton of organizations and people who need help, and your pastor friend has to figure out which ones they should support. While asking “What’s your success rate?” is maybe not the best way to get this information, there are certainly things that you could tell him that would put what you do into terms he could understand and use.
Even though a lot (maybe most) of what you do is difficult to assign hard numbers to, it’s certainly possible to quantify some of it. I bet your pastor friend would find it useful to know roughly what percentage of your time you spend doing what. For example, “I typically work with Raleigh’s homeless about 40 hours a week; about half of that time is just talking/counseling people who are having a rough time, a quarter is helping someone in an emergency situation (victim of violence, etc.) and another quarter is helping people who have some other kind of specific need (transportation to a job, finding some clothes, help with a legal issue, etc.).” (Obviously I’m guessing at the numbers.)
And you could also tell him about the number of people you talk to about God and Jesus, but that your primary concern is just being present with the poor and homeless like Jesus did.
Try not to get too upset with people who want to know more specific information about what you do, especially when they’re trying to decide if you’re worthy to be given some of the money that God has entrusted to them. If you can learn to communicate what you do in words that they understand, you may find that you gain some powerful allies in your work to build the Kingdom.
Posted 28 May 2009 at 11:18 am ¶Lance,
I think you probably misunderstood what I was saying. Nowhere did I call this pastor “a heartless show-me-the-numbers jerk”. The question he asked me is not a bad question - it just cannot be answered the way he asked it. This guy is not a bad guy - actually, he is one of the better ones - and we got around to the sort of numbers you talked about. But until a person sees that Grace is not just a theological conceit but a principle of how God meant for us to relate to each other, then nothing I do out here is going to make much sense to them. My issue is not that the church has abandoned the poor (as true as that may be) but that we don’t act as though the gospel we say we believe in is true.
Posted 28 May 2009 at 3:52 pm ¶Hugh:
Posted 30 May 2009 at 11:24 am ¶Good post, interesting perspectives from both sides of the fence. You are making people think harder about what they do and they are making you think harder about why you do it the way you do.
I’m tempted to carry a copy of this around with me so I can whip it out when people ask. I don’t think I could ever say it this well. Thanks.
Posted 15 Jun 2009 at 11:32 pm ¶Post a Comment