Biography
Dr. A. Ronald Sider, is a man with a distinguished career as a writer, lecturer and Christian thinker. He has written scores of powerful books and articles on the pressing topics which face our world -- peace and war, riches and poverty, prejudice and equality.  Dr. Sider received a Ph.D. in History from Yale University. Following several years of teaching at Messiah College, he joined the faculty of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary where today he is Professor of Theology and Culture. Since 1973, Ron has been an important part of the organization, Evangelicals for Social Action, which he now serves as Executive Director.  [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"We Can Help the Hungry" 
This year, for a mere $500, you could start a new job among the poor, transform a family of five. David Bussau is an Australian businessman and a good friend of mine. He had made his millions by the time he was 35. Then he felt the call to live among the poor, and while living among the poor he learned how to make very tiny loans.

Suppose you are working in Manila in a slum and are delivering packages using a little three-wheeler that you peddle, but you have to rent that three-wheeler every day. You pay a lot of money to the middle-man. If you could just get a loan for a couple hundred dollars, you could pay it back in six months with interest and you would probably double your income. Your whole family would experience a different kind of life. That is the sort of thing David is doing. This year on a mere five million dollars, he is going to start twelve thousand new jobs among the poor at costs of less than $500 per job.

Christians in our world actually have an annual income of about seven trillion dollars. Let's suppose that only one Christian out of seven really cares a lot about the poor, so let's talk about one trillion dollars. Let's suppose we tithe that one trillion. We would have a hundred billion dollars. Let's suppose we give half of that to the local church. We would still have fifty billion dollars. Let's suppose for one year we gave that for that kind of small loan among the very poor. Assuming the efficiency would stay the same, we would create a hundred million jobs, changing the lives of five hundred million people. In two and a half years of spending that kind of money, we could fundamentally impact in a positive way the desperately poor in our world.

There are 1.3 billion people in our world who are very, very poor. They have no health care, no education, virtually no housing -- maybe a cardboard above their heads -- very little food, one meal a day. Their kids are malnourished, often starving. Their annual income totals $200 or $300. Those people are in desperate poverty. By contrast, you and I have a lot. The experts say we're fifteen to seventeen times as rich. It seems to me that for people in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we have got a problem because the Bible says a great deal about God's very special concern for the poor.

A friend of mine went through the scriptures cutting out all the passages that talk about God's concern for the poor. He says that when he was finished, the Bible fell apart.

One of the things the Bible says is that God is actually working in history, lifting up the poor and the oppressed. It goes further. The Bible says that God is actually working in history, casting down rich and powerful folk. Now, not all rich and powerful folk. I think we should create wealth -- that is important. But the Bible says that sometimes we get rich by oppression or sometimes we don't share.

Jeremiah 5 talks about riches by oppression: "For wicked men are found among my people; they lurk like fowlers lying in wait. They set a trap; they catch men. Like a basketful of birds, their houses are full of treachery; therefore they have become great and rich, they have grown fat and sleek. They know no bounds in deeds of wickedness; they judge not with justice the cause of the fatherless, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy. " 'Shall I not punish them for these things?' says the Lord..."

Wealth by oppression offends the God of history. Sometimes the Bible says the rich just don't share. In both of those cases, God is upset. But the Bible goes still further. The Bible says that if we try to worship God and neglect the poor, then we're really not God's people at all. Amos says, "I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies." Why? Because they were bribing the judges. The poor couldn't get a fair deal in the courts and Amos said, "Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like an everflowing stream."

Jeremiah talks about a wicked King Jehoiakim, who built a grand palace by forced labor. Then he switches and talks about the King's father, a good King Josiah. He cared about the poor, Jeremiah says. He administered justice for the needy and then Jeremiah says, " 'Is not this to know me?' says the Lord."
In the biblical viewpoint, knowing God means being concerned, among other things, for justice for the poor. So you see, the Bible is very concerned about the poor and demands that we be concerned about that.

There is a second biblical theme that is equally important. That is that structures can be unjust. So often we think about the problems of poverty in individualistic terms and that is partly right. But we also need to ask about the structures. Dom Helder Camara was a wonderful Catholic archbishop. He said, "When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why the hungry don't have enough food, they call me a Communist."

You see, the Bible raises that kind of question. Psalm 94:20 talks about mischief by statute, about laws that are unfair. Amos, Chapter 4, verses 1-2 talks about this kind of structural injustice. It is an amazing passage uttered against the upper-class women of his day. Amos says, "Hear this word, you cows of Bashan..." Now really, that is not how you win friends and influence people in society, is it? Amos goes on. He speaks to the women and says, "You oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to their husbands, 'Bring, that we may drink!'"

The picture is clear; the wives are saying that they need a little more money to maintain their standard of living. What does God say? The next verse says, "...The days are coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fish-hooks. And you shall go out through the breaches, every one straight before her; and you shall be cast forth into Harmon..."

I suspect that those women didn't understand very clearly the connection between their gorgeous clothes and spirited parties and the oppression of the poor. Maybe they were kind to an occasional peasant; maybe they gave them Christmas baskets once a year. But God said that those women were responsible because they were part of a whole system that was unfair. Therefore, God said that they were responsible and accountable.

So, two key biblical themes -- God has a special concern for the poor and structures also matter. What can we do? How can we reduce poverty?

That is not an easy question to answer because there are many causes of poverty. Some poverty is caused by laziness, wrong choices about drugs and alcohol. We need to call people like that to responsibility. Some poverty is caused by a natural disaster, earthquakes, floods. We need to get there with Christmas baskets just as fast as we can through good relief agencies. Some poverty is caused because people don't have the right tools. We need to get there, digging wells, providing better agricultural technology so they can increase their production, earn their own way and take care of their kids.

Some poverty is caused by structures that are unfair. My adopted daughter was born in Central America. In Central America a very high percent of the children die before five. They die of starvation, malnutrition. Seven times as many kids, in fact, die before they are five in Central America as in the U.S., per one thousand population.

But you know what? Half of the land in Central America is used to grow export crops for North Americans -- bananas, flowers, all kinds of things. The poor kids there don't get the rice and beans that they need because their parents don't own any land and they don't have any jobs. You and I compete with them in the international supermarket. Their kids die of starvation and we have more than we need -- an unfair structure that displeases God.

How can we make a difference in our personal lives? How can we make a difference in our churches? How can we make a difference in the larger society? I think you and I need to live more simply so that others may simply live.

I am not talking about poverty. I am not suggesting for a minute that we reduce our income to a point that we are almost starving. I don't do that. I don't think you should, but we could spend less on ourselves, less on clothes, less staying up with fashions, less on our cars. The result would be that we could give a lot more to others.

That is what David Bussau is all about. He doesn't live in poverty, but he is creating jobs among the poor. This year you could give $500 to that kind of job creation program and change the lives of five people. In fact, a lot of us could give more than that. A lot of us could create two jobs, even ten jobs, by spending less on ourselves and giving more to others. We can make a tremendous difference. We can help the poor stand on their own feet, earn their own way.

I think we also need to change the church. I am not sure that we need a lot more glass cathedrals in an age of hunger. Sometimes, of course, we do need church buildings, but why don't we do a matching fund then? If we are going to spend a million dollars on ourselves, why don't we raise two million? The second half we can send to the Third World to create new jobs and to make sure that mothers don't have to watch their kids die of starvation.

We need to change our personal lives; we need to change the church. We also need to change the larger society. Somebody has said that if you give a fish, you feed a person for a day. That is an immediate handout when somebody is starving and that is important. But if you teach a person to fish, you feed that person for a life time. That is helping the person dig wells; it is making them a loan so that they can start a new job, create a new business and earn their own way.

The problem is that a lot of the fish ponds in our world are owned by just a few wealthy people, sometimes our multi-national corporations. If people are going to fish for a life time, they have got to get a share in the fish pond, and that means change. It means land reform so that farmers can have their own land and earn their own way. It means quality education because education is the basic capital in an information society; quality education so the poor truly have an equal opportunity.

In Sri Lanka they had a dreadful problem with malaria. Then they sprayed the marshes where the mosquitoes were breeding because the mosquitoes were spreading the malaria. You know what happened? In that preventative medicine approach, in three years they cut back the death rate by as much as Western Europe had cut back the death rate in three hundred years. That is getting to the structural root of the problem.

A decade ago in India I met a bishop who told a very interesting story to underline the importance of a structural approach. He said that there was an insane asylum that had a very interesting way of deciding whether or not someone was well enough to go home. They would take the person over to a big tub of water, turn the tap on, fill the tub up with water and then leave the tap running and give the person a spoon. They would say, "Please empty the tub." If the person starting dipping the water out, one spoonful at a time and never turned the tap off, they knew he was still crazy.

Don't we so often go with the complex problems of world hunger in that person by person approach? Of course, we give a hungry person a food basket. Of course we dig wells and we give loans, but we also need to ask why so many people are poor. We need to ask how land reform or changing the educational system would really empower the poor. That, of course, takes involvement and organizations, like Bread for the World that is working at public policy. We need to do that.

You can decide this year to use $500 and give a poor family a fantastic present -- a job. You can persuade your church to give more to empower the poor. You can join an organization working to change public policy so that all God's people can indeed stand on their feet, earn their own way and have a joyful life in this good creation.

Interview with Ron Sider
Interviewed by David Hardin

David Hardin: Ron, this organization that you are involved with, Evangelicals for Social Action, someone might say that's kind of an oxymoron -- two conflicting ideas. The evangelicals have focused more on the spiritual side of converting people maybe some of the main-line churches have focused on meeting material needs through social action. What is this organization of yours all about?

Ron Sider: Evangelicals for Social Action believes that we need to combine those two. Certainly personal faith is central to transform persons and transform societies, but we also need to change the structures.

I go to a church in the inner-city and it is perfectly clear that there is no way to solve the ghastly problems of our cities simply by better government programs. There needs to be a radical transformation at the core of people's lives; the family needs to be rebuilt. Only our religious institutions can do that, but at the same time people have got to have decent quality education.

Hardin: Let's take off on that a little bit. We all know about our failure to do a good job of educating, especially among the inner-city poor. You have written about this. What about it? What can we do?

Sider: In the January-February issue of our newsletter, we are going to talk about educational vouchers. I think it is a way forward. Everybody knows now that private schools, Catholic schools for instance and other private schools, do a much better job of educating inner-city folk than the public schools.

Hardin: And, I believe that it is at somewhat less cost.

Sider: At significantly less cost. The problem is that they don't have enough money and not enough people can go there. We can't make grants to private schools run by churches because that would violate separation of church and state. What we can do is give an educational voucher to every parent. They can take that voucher anywhere they want to take it. They can take it to the present public school; they can take it to a private Christian school; a private Muslim school, wherever they want to go. It gives parents the freedom to make key choices about their childrens' education. It also gives them the power to make sure that the schools teach.

Hardin: Has anybody ever tried it?

Sider: It has been tested here and there. It has been demonstrated that the private schools do a much better job. More and more people are talking about it. I think its time is coming.

Hardin: Let's say that everybody in Chicago who has a child in school got a voucher. A huge percentage of them -- maybe forty thousand -- want their child to go to a specific Chicago school and the school takes care of four hundred. What happens then?

Sider: Every school would have its own selection process and they are free to say no. They would only take as many as they could handle this year. Next year they would expand and take more students and the following year still more.

Hardin: It would gradually evolve into a system where people would be going to the schools that work best and it wouldn't cost any more money.

Sider: Probably less.

Hardin: The Chicago Reform System has decentralized authority. The school boards at each school have a lot more power. They can hire and fire the principal, etc. Is that a good idea?

Sider: It's a step forward. What it doesn't do is create more alternative schools. A voucher system would encourage a whole lot of different people to create new schools. We would have more of a variety, more competition and it would work better.

Hardin: That's a good idea but this is even a better idea.

Sider: It would go even much further.

Hardin: It's a pretty radical idea. I hope maybe somebody will give it an awfully good shot.