When To Give To The Homeless

It's about relationship, not riches

“Don’t give money to panhandlers—they’ll just use it to buy drugs or alcohol.”

So I’ve been told.

But my father has told me a story of benevolence that has inspired my pastoral imagination, and it complicates that claim.

My dad had a close relationship with a pastor when we were living in Burkina Faso. (I lived in Burkina most of my childhood). The pastor spoke upwards of ten languages, was known across the region, and was friends with just about everyone. He was a jolly guy, and he ate raw garlic because his doctor told him to.

One day a town drunk approached him and my father to ask for money. He was clearly going to buy beer at the local pub with it. Rural west African beer is what I imagine medieval European beer to be like: a warm, thick sludge that smells like vomit. I would frequent the local pub when I was a kid because the pub is also where one bought charcoal. I enjoyed grilling a cob of feed corn on the open coals in the late afternoon with my friends. The pub reeked, and men would sit in a line on a bench sipping the sludge from half-gourds. Their eyes were bloodshot, and it was always eerily quiet. I didn’t like visiting.

The pastor immediately grabbed a couple coins from his pocket and handed them to the the man with bloodshot eyes. My father told me he was taken aback by this: Why enable someone’s addiction? How is that Christian, let alone pastoral? But my father also told me he went on to see fruit of this pastoral moment. From then on the town drunk trusted the pastor. In a moment of desperate withdrawal—penniless, and unable to assuage the depth of his craving—this pastor had mercy on him and gave him a moment of relief. The pastor could then speak into his life, have a relationship with him, and invite him to find freedom from more than just the bottle (or the half-gourd, I guess).

Like I said, this story has inspired my pastoral imagination. Now, to be clear, no one has ever asked me for money to buy alcohol (or any other substance). Most of the homeless know that’ll be a non-starter because of the church’s conventional wisdom. Instead, most people that come knocking on the church’s door lie. They concoct a story intended to pull on your heartstrings, but they’re generally pretty terrible story-tellers, so I usually know when they’re lying.

But knowing that they’re lying has never stopped me from helping them. At Resurrection Assembly we almost never hand cash to people from our benevolence fund. But in rare instances we have, even when we know it’ll be squandered. We do that because we intend to have relationships with desperate people, and the relationship is way more important than wise spending habits. Jesus himself is desperate to have a relationship with desperate people. And if we’re honest, I think we’d all admit that we’re desperate for a relationship right back with him—even if our present material need eclipses our awareness of that fact. We prodigals might have vomit running down our chin and onto our shirt, but Jesus never reprimands us for our felt needs.

We’ve all been eating pig slop in a foreign land having squandered our inheritance.

We are all homeless until we are home with God.

May we run to the Father’s arms.