At the Table of the Poor

Table of the PoorWhat does the church owe the person sleeping on the street?And what has the church been doing instead?America spends billions of dollars annually on homeless services. The homeless population has grown. The fraud is documented. The politics are shameless. And the church - the one institution with the capacity, the calling, and the theological conviction to produce genuine change - has been writing checks and looking away.At the Table of the Poor gathers five voices around a table that most conversations about homelessness never build: a street-level pastor with thirty-five years of Tuesday mornings, a radical servant formed in the tradition of Mother Teresa, an economic analyst who grew up in poverty and will not let the data lie, a social worker who knows what the system produces and will not pretend otherwise, and the Socratic questioner who will not let any of them stop short of the honest answer.The conversation they have is not comfortable. It names what the money funds. It names the fraud. It assigns the blame - to the politicians, the nonprofits, the donors, the taxpayers, and the church itself. It examines the three groups of homeless people that every program treats as one. It asks what happens when a person is too ill to choose and too free to be forced. It names the wide gate and the narrow gate and asks the church whether it is willing to stand beside the narrow one long enough to matter.And it follows James. The man who walked through the door asking for gas money on a Tuesday morning in November. Across seventeen Tuesday mornings. To the question that precedes every genuine change. To the mission that takes no government money. To the prayer in the dark. To the phone call to Raymond. To the beginning of something.This is not a book about homelessness. It is a book about what the church was built to do - and what it will cost to actually do it.