By Pastor John Hulden
Bread for the World was in the news a few weeks ago. Florida Congressman Ted Yoho resigned from its Board of Directors after his very uncivil exchange with New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Bread for the World (“Bread” for short) is not often in the national news spotlight. But it should be. They do amazing work fighting hunger and hunger related causes.
Bread has been my favorite nonprofit advocacy organization since I was a teenager.
As a kid, I was deeply bothered that people were dying all over the world from hunger and hunger-related causes. (FYI, it still bothers me.) The answer, of course, is to send money and food to starving people in the “third world.” Right?
Thanks to Bread I gained a deeper understanding of world hunger. Plopping a boatload of rice on the dock of a majority-world country makes the price of rice plummet in that country. The poor rice farmer is undercut and can’t sell rice for a profit. My teenage mind was blown (poof!) by such second-level thinking.
I CONVINCED MY ENTIRE high school youth group — all three of us — to raise awareness about would hunger by organizing a Hunger Meal. For our Hunger Meal, we got a bunch of people from church to buy tickets, and then we served most people watery soup, a handful of people rice and beans, and a lucky few a full course meal.
We made placemats with world hunger facts. We told them world poverty and starvation rates — and how that related to which meal they were served. We also tried to ignore the grumpy people who didn’t like getting fooled into thinking they’d get a full meal deal.
I also remember seeing a few trying to sharing their “first world” meals with others — but no, we teenage leaders would not allow it. That was against the Hunger Meal rules! (Like the Hunger Games, the Hunger Meal had hard, fast rules!)
Way back in the 1970s, Bread for the World, along with the American Lutheran Church’s World Hunger office (one of the predecessors to today’s ELCA World Hunger program), taught me a very important lesson: If people are starving, you not only need to feed them right now, but you also must be compelled to ask, “Why are they starving?”
Suddenly, grappling with the challenges of world hunger shifted my teenage compassion in dangerous new directions. I started to recognize the difference between charity and justice.
“If people are starving, you not only need to feed them right now, but you also must be compelled to ask, ‘Why are they starving?’”
Art Simon, a Lutheran pastor in New York City, started Bread for the World in 1974. Art’s brother Paul Simon served as a U.S. Representative and Senator from Illinois from 1975 to 1997. The late Sen. Simon was known for saying, “Someone who sits down and writes a letter about hunger … almost literally has to be saving a life.”
Should I feed a starving person? Yes! But I should also write a letter to Congress. Bread has been teaching us how to do that for almost 50 years.
THE U.S. ALLOCATES $26.6 billion (or well under 1% of the federal budget) for overseas poverty-focused development assistance (PFDA). If enough people write a letter to Congress to increase that amount, legislators will be impacted and lives will be saved.
But should we team up with the government to fight hunger?
Yes! We would fail if fighting hunger were just up to churches. If the roughly 400,000 churches in the U.S. tried to raise $26 billion to fight world hunger on their own, each church would have to come up with $65,000. If U.S. churches tried to replace welfare programs here in this country (not even including Medicaid), each and every church would have to pony up roughly $1,157,500 — every U.S. church!
We just can’t have enough garage sales to make that happen. We need to entice the government to help fight hunger, here and abroad.
Thankfully, our Lutheran theology is unequivocal about our gracious and justice-seeking God working through the government.*
“I started to recognize the difference between charity and justice.”
So, … what does this mean? Besides voting and writing a letter, here is one example:
If your church participates in Feed my Starving Children or something similar, … great! But please, please, please don’t stop there. Give folks the opportunity to ask: Why are the children starving in the first place? Take the time to meet before and after you pack those meals. Use this ELCA World Hunger discussion guide for meal packing events. After that discussion, use Bread’s toolkit to organize an offering of letters to Congress.
And, please consider having teenagers lead this effort. They can get it done.
*see the reference to “good government” in the Small Catechism, 4th Petition of the Lord’s Prayer, What then does daily bread mean? ELW p. 1164. And articles on the two realms of God, the left hand (temporal governing) and right hand (spiritual governing), e.g. https://www.livinglutheran.org/2016/10/luther-helps-todays-citizens/