Can I really love from a distance?

Layers of insulation separate the rich and the poor from truly encountering one another. There are the obvious layers like picket fences and SUVs, and there are the more subtle ones like charity. Tithes, tax-exempt donations, and short-term mission trips, while they accomplish some good, can also function as outlets that allow us to appease our consciences and still remain a safe distance from the poor.

With new government funds and faith-based initiatives, the social-work model can easily entangle the church in the efficiency of brokering services and resources in a web of "clients" and "providers" and struggling to retain God's vision of rebirth, in which we are all family. Faith-based nonprofits can too easily be the mirror image of secular organizations, maintaining the same hierarchies of power and separation between rich and poor. They can too easily merely facilitate the exchange of goods and services, putting plenty of professionals in the middle to guarantee that the rich do not have to face the poor and that power does not shift. Rich and poor are kept in separate worlds, and inequality is carefully managed but not dismantled.

When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. She ceases to be something we are, the living bride of Christ. The church becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get clothed and fed), but no one leaves transformed. No radical new community is formed.

(p.157-159 from Shane Claiborne's book The Irresistible Revolution living as an ordinary radical).

There's so much from this book that resonates with me, I would end up quoting the entire book however, the above thoughts from Shane are really making me "soul search" and think hard. Shane Claiborne is a founding member of The Simple Way (www.thesimpleway.org)which is a group of Jesus followers who live in community among the poor and marginalized in the inner city streets of Philadelphia. And what I mean by living "in community", I mean they live like everyone else who lives there and they choose to live that way incarnationally. This community (among others across the country) brings love, dignity, and respect and they help and encourage others by giving of themselves.

I have felt a certain level of self-righteousness having taken a summer missions trip to inner city Philly myself working with kids, having worked at Union Gospel Mission in the downtown eastside in Vancouver for a few years, and seeing first-hand the extreme poverty of a third-world country like the Philippines. I am guilty of keeping the poor and marginalized separate from my life and I am wondering whether all these experiences were mostly meant to better me rather than "those poor people". In reality, I really haven't helped anyone as I came in and left. I am questioning the benefits of mission trips if all we're doing is leaving people depending more and more on us coming back to "help". Giving money and stuff and even volunteering isn't really helping the poor, it's just making us feel good about ourselves. I'm seeing that it's gotta go deeper, it's gotta get more personal.

I know what some are thinking "The Gospel is the ultimate gift you can give anyone. The poor need Jesus." You're right they do but what kind of Gospel are we sharing if we just go into these communities, preaching and teaching our hearts out and then leaving? We talk about Christ dying for them because He loves them but what does that mean to these people who are homeless, hungry, or addicted to drugs? You would think it would mean a lot to them but it doesn't because Jesus isn't real to them. The closest thing to Jesus right now should be us, His followers. Are we really exemplifying Jesus to these people? Do the poor and the marginalized feel the love, the respect and the dignity from us like the tax collector, the prostitute and the Samaritan lady did from Jesus?

I guess I'm asking two things: How do I really live in an attitude of true humility alongside the poor and marginalized? Can I do this without "coming in and then leaving"?