Christianity, Helping People in Poverty, and Embodied Relationships

Abstract

This article demonstrates that people animated by Christianity draw on faith to help people in poverty through building relationships. Contrasting with the literature that presents relationships as a means to change people, including through evangelizing, we find that relationships are conceived as an end in and of themselves. Drawing on an Australian ethnographic study with pastors and volunteers in church-based community centers and people living in poverty, we illustrate how the realities of poverty subvert relationships. People in poverty prioritize their material needs. The challenges developing relationships notwithstanding, the article argues that elements of relationships found in this research represent an opportunity to advance knowledge of what it means to draw on faith to help people in poverty. Relationships can be a vehicle to change oppressive systems, but the capacity to do so must be assessed in the contexts of religion's position in dominant political and power structures.