Every morning before school, dozens of children from the low-income neighborhood around a United Methodist Church in Des Moines, Iowa, pile into the church basement. They are there for Breakfast Club, where they eat a nutritious meal and play in a warm, safe place before the elementary school across the street opens its doors. Breakfast Club is one of the services offered by a social service organization housed in the church and run by a friend of mine.

A couple of years ago, Breakfast Club hit an interesting milestone: it had been in operation for 35 years. The minister of the church suggested to my friend that we should have a celebration marking that anniversary. "The fact," said my friend, "that after 35 years there are still children in this community who cannot get a before-school breakfast at home is not something to celebrate."

These days, I live in suburban Washington, DC. Twice a month, my husband and I drive to our church in the city, where we help make 1000 sandwiches to be distributed to the homeless of our nation's capital. That's 24,000 sandwiches a year, and it's a tiny fraction of the food necessary to feed this community's homeless population. This congregation is in the forefront of efforts to create affordable housing, promote justice for the working poor, and end homelessness in Washington. But those changes take a long time, and folks have to eat every day, so the sandwich-making goes on.

Fixing breakfast for poor children in the Midwest and making sandwiches for homeless men in the urban east is critically important— along with filling food pantries and supporting soup kitchens. But it is also popular because we can do it without disrupting our own lives. After all, when we finish the sandwiches, we grab a late dinner at a nearby café and go home.

But Clayton Childers, writing in a recent issue of Circuit Rider,¹ reminds us that charity is not the answer to hunger, homelessness, and poverty. The answer lies in real justice— justice that is so pervasive in our society that soup kitchens and food pantries and sandwich teams and Breakfast Clubs are no longer necessary. That kind of justice is hard to come by.

To imagine a world without hungry children and homeless families is to face the fact that we might have to change the way we live our own lives. We might have to alter the economic system that requires some of us to live on the edges of safety in order for the rest of us to live in abundance and comfort.²

Justice is not the accumulation of more charity (although the lack of justice requires more and more charity). Rather, justice exists on an entirely different plane. Justice requires that we not simply give a bit from our excess to those who live meagerly. Justice requires that we re-think our own needs, and live more simply so that all can live comfortably.

Congregations have a role to play in this process—in the charity, certainly, and in demanding fair wages, accessible health care, and decent housing, absolutely. But congregations also have a role to play in helping their members learn to disrupt their own lives and learn to live in ways that are simpler and more just.

I muse on this after sandwich-making as I drive in the dark to my warm, comfortable suburban home.

— Twila Glenn, November 20, 2009

See also our 11/13/09 Friday Perspective, "Truth-seekers and Peacemakers."