A sewing machine in somebody's front room does more than a cheque does
Give a man a fish and he eats today. Teach him to fish and he eats for the rest of his life. Everybody has heard it, usually from somebody explaining why they are not going to give you the fish.
Strip the sentiment off and there is a real distinction underneath it. Charity against ability. Charity meets a hardship this week. Ability changes what a household can do for the next twenty years, and it does something charity cannot do at all, which is that it hands somebody back their own agency.
I want to be careful here, because the fish line gets used as a reason to close a wallet. Sometimes the right answer is the fish. A family that has not eaten today does not need a training module. But if the fish is the only thing a church ever does, it has built a queue rather than a way out, and after a few years the queue is the relationship.
What this looks like in practice
A sewing machine costs less than most churches spend on a single conference banner. Put one in the front room of a woman whose child has a disability and cannot be left, and she can earn without leaving the house. That is not a metaphor. I have watched it work in Hyderabad, and the change it makes is not really the income. It is what she says about herself afterwards.
Most congregations already contain the teachers. There is a tailor in the third row, an electrician, somebody who has run a small shop for fifteen years and knows exactly how a small shop fails. Nobody has to be hired. They have to be asked.
Most congregations already contain the teachers. Nobody has to be hired. They have to be asked.
On vocational training in local churches
The movement, and what it actually says
There is a global network of people thinking about this seriously, and its own working introduction, written by Jo Plummer of the BAM Global Think Tank, puts the idea plainly.
Business is a God-given vocation and institution in society, with the potential to bring multiple benefits to people, communities and nations.
That first clause is the load-bearing one. Business as a vocation, not as the compromise a Christian makes when he fails to get into ministry. A profitable company that lasts creates jobs, and a job is the most reliable anti-poverty device anybody has yet invented. There is no version of caring about the poor in this country that can afford to be sniffy about commerce.
Why the church keeps stopping short
The usual objection is that this is not spiritual work. Paul disagrees, and his reasoning is worth reading slowly.
Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.
The purpose of the work in that sentence is not survival and it is not status. It is capacity to give. Paul assumes a believer will end up on the giving side, and the route he names is ordinary employment. Nothing about that is a lesser calling.
And notice the order, because it is the order in everything Paul writes. He is not telling a thief to earn his way back into acceptance. He is writing to people he has already spent three chapters telling that they are seated with Christ, accepted, complete. The work comes out of that. It never buys it.
One thing this is not
I should say this plainly, because it matters here more than it did in 2013. Helping somebody earn a living is not a strategy for changing what they believe, and it must never be run as one. Training that comes with an expectation attached is not generosity, whatever it is called, and in several Indian states it is also the precise thing the law is written to catch.
Do the work because a woman with an income is better off than a woman with a monthly envelope. That reason is sufficient on its own. It does not need a second one.
The vision of the church in India has been limited to what happens inside the building on Sunday, and it was never meant to be that small. Break a cycle of poverty in one family and you have changed a street within a generation. There is money sitting in church accounts across this country that could start tomorrow.
Premasis Satman
Founder and Executive Director of 5Talents Magazine, writing from Hyderabad. He has written the magazine's editorial column since the first issue in July 2012.
Work · Poverty · Church · Business · Editorial · Point of view