Broken Identity

What does it mean to be wealthy?  This is a persistent question that people seem to always come back to, from Aristotle (who made the point that money is never the end, because it is only useful to get something else) to the "poorest President in the world" (who makes the brilliant statement that poor people are those who have to work to maintain their expensive lifestyle).  Jayakumar Christian and Bryant Myers of World Vision built a new theory of poverty that is based on inequality, not numbers.  One of their major points was that the most universal feature of material poverty is a broken identity, a marred view of the self.

People with a marred identity view themselves as almost less than human because they've been told that, directly and indirectly, for a long time.  It's like moving from saying, "I failed at that," to saying, "I am a failure."  When you internalize it and it becomes part of who you are, your identity has been scarred.  The concept got me thinking about what things we may do today that perpetuate this.  I immediately thought of the common phrase "illegal immigrant."  I've been strongly opposed to this term for some time, because illegal is not a term that can or should be used to describe a person.  All people are created in God's image, and when people are called illegal, it becomes part of their identity.

But are there other terms we don't even think about that do the same thing?  I heard a story one time of a youth group from a church that was doing construction work in a slum in South America.  They were wearing matching t-shirts proudly announcing that they were serving "the least of these."  It's good that the people didn't read English, because they probably would have been appalled to be called "the least!"  Myers and Christian expand our view of poverty by examining other people who have broken identities, and that led them to realize that the non-poor have their own kind of broken identity: a god-complex of pride that elevates them above others!

Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert of the Chalmers Center took this concept and ran with it, emphasizing that we are ALL poor because we all have broken views of ourselves.  When we sweep in to provide the Thanksgiving dinner to the poor family, we run the risk of elevating our own view of ourselves as the saviors of the poor.  The poor don't need another savior - they already have One.  This exposes another dangerous term - "blessed to be a blessing."  If our reason for serving others is because we see ourselves as blessed, we are walking a dangerous line.  We need a new anthropology that acknowledges that we are ALL blessed in a variety of ways.  We have a lot to learn from the "poor!"