Beyond Anger and Pity by Lester Sumrall

Author:Lester Sumrall [Sumrall, Lester]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-03-23T12:33:15+00:00

Chapter Six

Two Million Homeless

"Our parish is made up of numerous old hotels that have been turned into emergency housing centers," Bill Wilson, our pastor contact for our Feed-the-Hungry giving in the ghetto of Manhattan, explains. "It is estimated that over 7,000 children are living in these hotels that the New York welfare officials have called S.R.O. — Single Room Occupancy. These occupants are here as a result of evictions, homes being condemned or being destroyed by fire. It is not uncommon to find a family of five or six living in one room."18

It is estimated that presently there are 2 million homeless people living in this country, but according to a recent study funded by the Congress, by the year 2003, nationwide there will be nearly 10 million homeless Americans.

Kozol calls particular attention to the welfare hotels that Bill Wilson called his "parish". In his book, Rachel and Her Children, Kozol shows the startling amount of money spent by the city (meaning taxpayers) to the owners of these indescribably wretched places. Can you imagine taxpayers handing over an average of $1,800 a month for these single rooms through government-produced welfare checks.

Bill Wilson says, "Overcrowding and the subsequent filth of these kitchenless rooms is maddening enough for adults, but borders on cruelty for the children. Summer and winter, year in and year out, the children are cooped up in these decaying old buildings, more like prisoners than residents...It is an absolutely hostile environment for children."

It is to these "hotels" that Bill Wilson and his Saturday Sunday School workers go every week, picking up the children and bussing them to Metro and Glad Tidings Church where they are loved, nurtured, fed, and taught Bible stories.

The Rejected Waste of Our Society

The situation in New York is not an isolated case. Such pockets of desperation exist in every metropolitan area. They may also exist in your community. One of our "King's Court" directors tells of walking into tenement houses in Dallas where you can hear the rats clawing in the walls.

The living conditions, disease and filth are indescribable.

An editor friend tells of walking the streets of San Francisco for his morning exercise ritual and seeing the homeless and hungry wherever he goes.

Jesus said the poor will always be among us. (John 12:8). Neither the early church nor Jesus Himself insisted on absolute economic equality. If anyone came close to suggesting this, it was the apostle Paul who said: "I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened; but by an equality, that now at this time your abundance may supply their lack, that their abundance also may supply your lack—that there may be equality" (2 Corinthians 8:13-14).

Paul then went on to point to the biblical example of the gathering of manna in the Exodus account: "As it is written, 'He who gathered much had nothing left over, and he who gathered little had no lack.'" (vs. 15). Paul's premise, it appears, is that just as God insisted on equal portions of manna for the people in the wilderness sojourn, so now the Corinthian Christians should follow suit.

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