Since my season of reconstruction, which can be roughly timed to when I began prison ministry and started attending Freedom Fellowship (stories I recount in my book Stranger God), I have often been asked on podcasts about what people can do to reinvigorate a wavering faith. And the answer I have given many times over the years has been this: "Worship with the poor."
This was also a discovery made by Chris Arnade as he recounts in his book Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. As an agnostic photojournalist, Arnade encountered the vitality and power of faith as he toured economically impoverished areas of America. As he recounts:
When I went into graduate school for physics I spent six years studying the big questions--how the universe started, what it was made of, and what is our place in it. I embraced the belief that humans can understand and figure out our world, and that there was no question too big that we couldn't solve, accepting an implicit arrogance in mankind's ability to rise above our surroundings...
I was not alone. Most of us in the front row [the wealthy, privileged parts of America] had decided that it was impossible to identify absolutes, that any moral certainties in religion were suspect, and that all we could know or value was what science revealed to be quantifiable. Religion was often seen as an old, irrational thing that limited and repressed people...
Yet over the years I kept finding myself in churches, as I kept finding myself in McDonald's, going there for one reason: because the people I wanted to learn from spent their time there.
Often the only places open, welcoming, and busy in back row [poor, marginalized] neighborhoods were churches and McDonald's. Often the people using McDonald's were the same people using the churches, people who sat for hours reading or studying the Bible at a table or a booth...
This is how it is on the streets. Faith is the reality and the source of hope. Science is the distant thing that doesn't necessarily do much for you.
This is what I discovered out at the prison and worshiping at Freedom. What I've found life-giving about worship in marginalized contexts is being in a place where the gospel matters, where the stakes are life and death.
Circling back to Psalm 62, this is why I think Jesus says that it is difficult for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God. Not because wealth is inherently contaminating. Or that wealthy people are morally corrupt. The issue, it seems to me, is how wealth insulates you from your neediness, your vulnerabilities, dependencies, and brokenness. Separated from your neediness your days can be blissfully passed in delightful spaces and lovely experiences. Wealth cocoons you, and eventually entombs you.
Thus the exhortation from Psalm 62: "If wealth increases, don’t set your heart on it."
