Breaking the Poverty Cycle

PREACHING THE GOSPEL TO THE POOR

Reference: Grigg, V. (2004). Companion to the Poor. GA, USA: Authentic Media in partnership with World Vision.

I HAD BEEN IN THE COMMUNITY THREE MONTHS, and had spent most of that time praying. With a foundation for ministry already laid in prayer, it was time to begin preaching.

I needed to go up and visit the new converts among the Ibanag people, so I prayed for an evangelist to live in my house while I was away. Two days later, Jun and Milleth Paragas came to visit me.

Years earlier, we had worked together to plant a church. I had watched as the Lord gave and developed the gift of evangelism in Jun. He is a man of God, a Bible school graduate from a farming family. Milleth is a petite, charming Filipina, a trained singer, and a joyful wife.

This time, they came to Tatalon for counsel about a problem. While we discussed the problem, I had an idea.

“Why don’t you stay in my house for a couple of weeks while I am away and look after it for me?” I asked. “You will have time to sort through your problem, and you can do some evangelism while you are here!”

They discussed the proposal together and decided to stay. They have stayed ever since!

For two months after I returned from my trip, we lived together in the same two cramped rooms. Then we found a house by the cliff, above the polluted river that circles around Tatalon. It had only one room. Foul smelling mud covered the floor. But outside, between house and river, laya large expanse of land twenty feet wide, ideal for children and ministry activities.

The fellowship of his sufferings

After planting a garden on the land beside the house, we laid concrete on the floor to get rid of the smell of mud. Then we built a small bench, and bought a small gas tank and some cooking pots for Milleth. I offered to pay for all the food in exchange for Milleth’s cooking.

Meals were times of deep fellowship together. As we ate our rice and fish for breakfast together and shared our struggles, I began to learn what Paul meant when he talked of “becoming partakers of the fellowship of the sufferings of the gospel of Christ.” Each morning one of us would be discouraged. It was not easy for Milleth and Jun to live in such a community. They had been moving up socially, in status, economically. To become a squatter was to become a nobody.

One day, Jun came in, excited from his time down on the riverbank, where he had been reading his Bible in the early morning sun.

“I’ve finally understood why we’re living here!” he exclaimed. “I’ve just read 2 Corinthians 8:9. You know what it says? ‘Jesus though he was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, that through his poverty we might become rich.’”

His enthusiasm was contagious. Milleth and I felt our spirits lift.

Our breakfasts became a communion meal where, together, we knew the cup of suffering and the bread of the broken body of Christ, as we uplifted one another. But it was a suffering with joy. James says:

Count it all joy, my brethren when you meet various trials, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness, and let steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete lacking in nothing (James 1:2-4).

Only this spirit of joy in suffering, this knowledge that “It has been granted to you, for the sake of Christ that you should not only believe in him, but also suffer for his sake.” (Philippians 1:29)

Only this spirit can in all honesty invite others to the task of identification with the poor.

Bible studies in the front yard

We decided that on Sundays at four o’clock in the afternoon, as the sun grew cooler, we would go through the Gospel of John.

Each Sunday morning we prepared songs and charts and invited all the neighbors to come to Milleth and Jun’s home in the afternoon. As the shadows grew longer, about 30 adults and twice as many children brought wooden seats from their houses to sit around the blackboard. We sang together for a long time.

The first day, I experienced a wonderful freedom to preach in Tagalog. I began in Genesis and worked through to Revelation, very simply portraying fourteen events through the Scriptures. Because of their Catholic heritage, the people could identify with each story.

As I talked about the cross, the group fell silent. The Holy Spirit was clearly convicting them. I described how the Holy Spirit came to those who believed and repented.

The finale of the Scriptures captured their imaginations. They saw what the return of Jesus would mean for the poor. Even now, God was preparing a place for them, and justice would be done. They delighted in these promises of hope. The gospel is good news for the poor!

The archetypal Filipino personality has a romantic, idealistic streak in it and is easily captured by fantasy. The Filipino mind can easily understand a hopeful future. But what about their problems in the here and now?

They began to ask questions. Somebody asked on behalf of Aling Nena, “Do I need to give up my gambling if I am to go to heaven?” I threw the question back to the crowd. Another, now very interested, asked, “How do I know if I have the Holy Spirit?”

Someone else asked, “Do you mean that even a bad man who believes can have his name written in the book of life?”

As they asked questions, we discussed the Scriptures and the promise of grace in Christ. Milleth, Jun, and I began to experience the joy of seeing the gospel penetrate the daily reality of our neighbors.

The tide breaks

John the Baptist came preaching, “If you have two shirts, give one to the person who has none.” (Luke 3:11). One of our professional friends took John the Baptist seriously and sent some clothes to Tatalon. We decided to give them to Kid.

Kid was the chief drunkard in the community. He was known as “Number One”—a big man, tough, yet wonderfully sensitive and intelligent. He had lost his wife a few years earlier and had never recovered. Instead, he had turned more and more to drink. But God had plans for Kid.

On Christmas Day, I invited him up to the house to give him the clothes donated by our professional friend. I could tell that he was already drunk.

Sitting on the small step between my kitchen and my bedroom, tears welled in his eyes.

“Nobody else gave me a present this Christmas,” he said. He wanted to do something in return. We talked for a long time and he told me of the terrors of being a drunkard. He invited me to come to his home on the following day.

When I went, he was not there. He was drunk. Each day after that as I would enter or leave the community, I would pass Kid. He would be with a different barkada, always drinking. He would call me over and then introduce me to his friends.

“This is Viv, Brother Viv. He is a missionary and a good friend. You are to look after him.” Then he would introduce his friends one by one and I would shake their hands

Kid would say, “He’s going to have a Bible study with all of you.” We would sit and talk a little and then I would continue on my way. Through Kid, I became acquainted with many families in Tatalon.

Jesus-style evangelism
    Pastor Jun and I were born on the same day—December 26. To celebrate, we asked the ladies next door to make sandwiches and pancit (noodles). We invited all the neighbors to come and join us for our birthday party. We sang and we ate. The children came, enjoying the meal of pancit, sandwiches, and juice.

I stood up, sang in Tagalog, and gave my testimony. It was the best birthday I have ever had. It was also Jesus’ style of evangelism—often in the context of feasting! Jesus tells us about birthday parties:

But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just (Luke 14:13-14).

Jesus also talked about fasting. Perhaps he meant the kind of fasting that Isaiah describes. Fasting is to wander around the streets of your city and go and find a beggar, a drunkard, or an old lady and eat lunch with them. This is the kind of fasting that God wants:

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless and poor into your house; when you see the naked to cover him...then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry and he will say “Here I am” (Isaiah 58:7,9).

Fasting and feasting—Jesus’ style evangelism!

Noisy neighbors

One of the first people to experience the gospel breaking the poverty cycle was Aling Nena—my landlady.

Aling Nena ran a gambling den below my bedroom. She took a tong or a percentage each night as her income.

One night I was woken by men arguing over who would go home first. The one who had won a thousand pesos dared not go, lest he be stabbed by the others. Aling Nena was also shouting. She wanted them to go so she could sleep. Finally, they went the winner first, the others some time later.

My diary for the next evening recorded the following:

Today Aling Nena is drunk. She wants to drown out the arguments from last night. She drank all morning and now she’s shouting at Eleanor her daughter. Eleanor shouts back. Eleanor left later in the evening to sleep in another house to be free from the argument. I prayed, “Lord, bring Align Nena to a knowledge of yourself, for I cannot cope with living above such a gambling den. I need more sleep.”

While I was away on a trip, Pastor Jun gathered the whole family and preached the gospel to them. Several believed, including Aling Nena. At first, she closed down the gambling den. But without gambling, she had no money, so she went back to her gambling business.

We helped her to set up a small sari-sari store. A sari-sari store sells a little bit of food, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But Aling Nena was too generous, and gave everything out on credit. Within a short while, the capital was gone. Back to her gambling Aling Nena went.

One evening, at the time everybody sits on their haunches and relaxes after a day’s work, Aling Nena and I sat in the cool shadows and talked about Proverbs 31. She heard the description of a godly woman, an older woman respected as a leader in righteousness in the community. She understood.

From that day on, she stopped her gambling, began to live righteously, and taught her children to do the same. Aling Nena was the key to a whole extended family. Her friends were gamblers and powerful men throughout the community.

However, God blessed that evening conversation even more. As we sat talking, Aling Nena’s niece joined us. She was waiting to go overseas to work in Hong Kong and had been working as a shop assistant in a store. She spent all of her income to process papers to go but had been waiting for months and months.

One of the evils of the poor is the exploitation by export agencies who call themselves “recruiting agencies.” They make exorbitant sums of money for this trade in human flesh—which is legal. Perhaps this whole process of exporting labor should be developed along Christian lines in the way William Booth had proposed in “In Darkest England and the Way Out.” He sought to export people to the English Colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Should we not set up a Christian agency to do the same, and do it justly and honestly, without kickbacks, corruption, evil and slavery?

Despite the exploitation of these export companies, it made more sense for Edith to try to go to Hong Kong and earn dollars than to remain in the poverty of Tatalon. Any hope is better than hopelessness.

Edith has a son. That evening, we talked about raising her son as a man of conviction, and how the Bible was central to building this inward character in his life since he had no father. She understood, and her joy overflowed. She asked me for a Tagalog Bible.

Edith had given up her room for me when I first came. God had now returned her gift with his overwhelming generosity.
 

Drinking men’s Bible study

 

In Tatalon, drinking with friends is a way to fill up the day and drown out the sorrow, the despair, and the insult to manliness inherent in unemployment.

 

As I walked through the community day after day, I watched groups of men sitting around on benches, with bottles of beer and small snacks shared between them. Those that had worked that day would share their money in order to provide the drinks for that evening.

 

I began to pray for the drunkards who would sit in front of our cluster of homes. As I went to my toilet, where I would wash each day from a bucket, I walked through this group of men and greeted them. Sometimes I stopped to sit and talk.

 

There was one man who was totally destroyed by his continual drinking. I cared for him, loved him, and talked with him. Aling Nena rebuked me.

 

“Bale wala iyon” (He’s worth nothing!), she said, telling me not to waste my time. Nevertheless, God cares for the drunkards.

 

One night, I came home late. As I walked down the road, I passed group after group of drinking men. When I clambered up the stairs to my room, I saw the men in my group had gathered in the next-door room upstairs where another couple lived. They were all drinking.

 

I boiled some hot water, made a cup of tea, and went in to join them. We talked and joked together for a while.

 

Then someone asked me, “How do you know there is a God?”

 

In broken Tagalog, I told them my experiences of God. They listened, as they got more and more drunk.

 

“Are you a Catholic priest?”

 

“No, I’m a member of an order which establishes Bible studies and helps people come to a personal relationship with God. We help them apply the Bible to everyday life.”

 

We talked and talked until they were too drunk to understand, and I slipped off to bed.

 

I was glad to establish rapport with these fellows. Later, when they were sober, we would talk more personally. Then I would build on this rapport and communicate the gospel more clearly. I began to pray particularly for this group of about 15 drinking men. I would smile at them, love them, and wonder how we could introduce them to a Bible study.

 

Murderer!

 

Proverbs tells us, ‘The violence of the wicked will sweep them away.” (Proverbs 21:7). Many of the wicked in a soci­ety are swept into the slums. Poverty is an environment for murder.

 

Several people had been killed in Tatalon. We would avoid one track home at night because there had been several murders there.

 

One day, I was talking with my drinking friends. We were sitting on some benches they had set out in the sun on the dry earth between the houses. This open space served as meeting area, children’s playground, and a place for hanging out washing. I began to talk with a stranger, who seemed to be a friend of theirs. We started discussing religious topics. We had some friendly give and take, and I tried to lay the groundwork for further sharing.

 

Gary came over to me afterwards.

 

“Be careful with that one,” he warned. “He is a professional killer. You know the shooting you heard last night?”

 

"Thanks, Gary. I didn’t realize that!” I was humbled again at God’s leading. By his grace, I had spoken gently to this murderer.
 

An old guitar

 

I wondered why there was so little music from a people who are reputedly so musical. Finally, I realized they didn’t have guitars. I bought a guitar that I could lend to the group of men who sat outside drinking.

 

One half-destroyed young man would come regularly to borrow the guitar. I trusted him with it, and he considered this a high honor. I was one of the few people who had trusted him.

 

On New Year’s Day, I returned from celebrating with the staff of the mission group. It was early in the morning, and the mist still clung to the river.

 

The men had stayed up all night and were still singing songs. One of them, Junior, was married to a woman working as a maid in Hong Kong. She sent money back to Junior to support him. The men wanted Junior to tape songs for her and send them to her on cassette. They had no tape recorder, but that didn’t matter! They were sitting singing Filipino love songs.

 

As I sat down to relax with them, I asked, “Might I sing you a love song from New Zealand?”

 

I sang one or two Maori love songs, and then a Filipino love song. I passed the guitar to the man sitting beside me. Somebody brought us all some food to eat. I sat, singing, laughing, and enjoying the dignity and hospitality characteristic of Filipino people. Love for them seemed to overflow in my heart. I asked, “We would like to have a Bible study with you guys, drinking men only!”

 

They responded to the idea with a lot of humor. Pastor Jun joined us and we discussed the idea. The consensus was that we would meet at seven o’clock on Sunday morning before anybody drank. They could not join the study if they had already had something to drink. Pastor Jun would give the necessary leadership to the group—my language was not yet fluent enough.

 

And so our drunkards’ Bible study began.

 

We learned that these men did not enjoy a polite intellectual discussion about the word of God. They wanted us first to teach them, and we would use all the authority and teaching skill we could muster. After the teaching, they would discuss if what was said was true and debate the application of the verses.

 

These men cared for each other. If one could not grasp what was being said, the others would teach him or would argue with him until he understood and believed.

 

A few weeks after the Bible study had begun, I returned to the neighborhood from a teaching trip to the province. I was walking down the concrete paths carrying my little bag when I felt a hand reach out and shake mine, and heard someone say, “Hello, brod.”

 

I looked into a smiling face. It was Gary. None of these men had called me “brod” before. My mind searched its files vacantly, desperately trying to understand the hidden meaning in these words, fighting hard to protect myself from another culture shock.

 

A second man joined him, smiling at my confusion.

 

“Can you get me one of those Bibles, the easy-to-under-stand one?”

 

Finally, I understood what they were trying to tell me. I laughed with joy, enthusiastically shaking the hands of my new brothers. While I had been away, Pastor Jun had set up an evangelistic meeting to which 400 people came. These men had entered the kingdom of God.

 

The kingdom had come to Tatalon.

 

Our cathedral

 

As the numbers of believers grew, we were determined not to waste money on a church building. If we ever constructed a building, it would be related to vocational training or socio-economic development.

 

But we grew to love our “cathedral” in Tatalon. It was magnificent, with its beautiful blue roof miles above us and God’s dusty patchwork on the floor. We even had air-conditioning—the wind and the Holy Spirit blew where they will.

 

Our “overhead transparencies” were a large sheet of four-by-eight-foot paper with songs written on them in Tagalog. The preacher’s lectern was a notebook in his hand. Instead of comfortable pews with cushions, we had wooden benches brought from each house by the people to sit on.

 

But most importantly, God was there in a way I’ve rarely known in some of the architectural monstrosities I’ve visited. Emmanuel attended—God with us, God who dwells among the poor.

 

Emerging fellowship

 

From this point, the fellowship of believers in Tatalon began to grow. The story from here on is not my story, but that of my co-laborers, Jun and Milleth. But let me outline its main thrusts.

 

I had tried to identify with the culturally accepted role of a priest, describing myself as a “brother” in a “movement which has Bible studies to help people come to know God.”

 

Two main thrusts made up the ministry. The first was the Bible studies with the barkada, the groups of unemployed men and their drinking companions. The second was Bible studies to extended families.

 

As more and more people came to believe, we delayed baptism and distinctly Protestant worship. Baptism and worship services are seen as Protestant activities. Baptism is not seen as a symbol of conversion from sin, but as a symbol of conversion to Protestantism. We delayed baptism in order to maintain open links to non-Christian Catholic folk until there were believers in each segment of the community.

 

Rather than assembling people for worship, we had fellowship meetings once a month, each creative and broad in approach. These gradually drew together the Christians into a sense of identity—not within a Protestant church, but around the Lord they worshipped.

 

Discipleship and training in evangelism developed from the worship here. Often young men would oscillate between prayer meetings and drinking sprees until, step by step, as we met with them morning by morning in “group quiet times” (times of prayer and Bible reading), they came to deeper commitment.

 

I wasted a lot of time seeking to develop Tagalog materials for the Bible studies, only to realize that the culture of the poor is not a reading-studying culture. We needed to work directly from the Scriptures.

 

Despite not being able to read well, people devour comics. Comics cost only one peso each. I asked the Lord for the personnel to develop the Bible into comic form. A friend began to help with money given to us by a businessman, but my leaders rightly advised that the whole project was beyond our capacity at the time.

 

But as they became believers, they expected us to give them Bibles. How could we provide Bibles for the poor? Whole Bibles cost 38 pesos ($US4)—a small fortune for the poor! If we sold them, people would become suspicious that we were using evangelism as a moneymaking venture. We tried numerous ways of overcoming this barrier, but until now, we have found no solution except to give or sell them at a small sum.

 

The coming of the middle-class

 

The believers multiplied. Over a period of several months, God led middle-class friends to the area one by one. They came saying, “God has called me to Tatalon.” One of them was Theresa.

 

If Theresa hadn’t responded to the call of God to the poor of Tatalon, she would have been completing her Masters degree in Manila’s top management school. Instead, here she was killing cockroaches! Killing cockroaches takes time and this worried her top-flight executive mind. There were twenty details to be accomplished in finalizing an export link-up to New Zealand, in completing an audio-visual on the squatter ministry, and in assisting a new missionary friend to adjust.

 

I had received a vision concerning her—how she would choose between leading a lonely pioneering life in the slums or marrying a rich man. After a few weeks of working together, I told her about it. With a smile, she told me her story.

 

“I was molded for many years by my boyfriend,” she said. “He was not a Christian and I knew our relationship was wrong. Finally, I broke it off. That is the rich man. It was after this that God called me to the slums.”

 

God had been speaking and that is a difficult thing to ignore—not to mention the more immediate voices of the team cheering her on! Theresa was the first woman (after Milleth) from the middle class to stay for more than a few days in Tatalon.

 

Worship

 

One Wednesday, a band of highly intelligent, committed professionals sat around a room praying and planning. The first phase of the work in Tatalon was almost complete. God had brought a ministry team together. After two years, the Lord had sent a number of these professionals to the slum to develop a discipling movement among the poor. And sitting beside them in worship were now a band of young Christians from Tatalon, some of whom were taking leadership roles.

 

Johnny, a salesman and graduate of the University of St Tomas, one of Manila’s top universities, had a gift of praying for the sick. God healed through his prayers.

 

Resty delighted before the Lord in praise, reminding the Lord of the great issues facing the country, asking that he might be faithful to his call to poverty, and begging for success with the economic projects God had gifted him to develop.

 

Pastor Jun Paragas took up the same theme with the Lord, his prayer reviewing the call, the costs, and the sacrifices for each one, asking God to extend and develop the next steps in evangelism, praising him for newfound patterns of worship.

 

Brother Romy, the engineer, prayed quietly, logically— the strong, silent structural thinker, with a dream from God to be a church-planter.

 

Ofilia added her requests for the medical team she had been organizing.

 

Young Bien, who would go through deep suffering in years to come, lifted his heart in adoration for the Lord’s encouragements to him.