This is a re-post of a piece from the St. Paul Area Synod blog, by Vernita Kennen of Incarnation Lutheran Church in Shoreview, MN. The original blog post can be found here.

 

People who care about hunger issues from the Saint Paul and Minneapolis Area Synods gathered in March to talk about how we might work together. We acknowledged needing renewed efforts within our congregations, communities and our synods. Some of us came from congregations, some from specific hunger ministries, some from synod and churchwide staffs but all came with a heart for those who live with hunger. Some had years of experience working on hunger issues and others had less, but everyone came with a passion somehow connected to hunger.

Conversation about programs and policies, local and global efforts, immediate aid and sustainable efforts abounded. Networking was raised as a need as was acknowledging monetary contributions, advocacy, and hands-on efforts. We see the need to talk about “on ramps” to engage others in hunger ministry. Our hope is that we can work towards something that supports the current hunger ministries across the synods as well as moves to more education and learning for all of our congregations.

Additional voices, experience, and questions are valuable and welcome! Please contact or Justin Grimm (Saint Paul Area Synod) at justin.grimm@spas-elca.org or Bob Hulteen (Minneapolis Area Synod) at: b.hulteen@mpls-synod.org if you are interested in joining future planning.

Vernita Kennen
Incarnation, Shoreview

The following is taken from the 2024 ELCA World Hunger Lent Study. The full resource can be ordered as a hardcopy or downloaded as a PDF in English or Spanish at the link here.

Week 3 — Crucifixion Exodus

•••

Exodus 20:1-17

Psalm 19

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

John 2:13-22

 

“We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.”

 —1 Corinthians 1:23

In this week of Lent, having reflected on encountering God in reconciliation and in transfiguration, we turn toward Paul’s message of “Christ crucified” and reflect on what it means to encounter God in crucifixion, to be confronted with our own participation in systemic oppression.

Founded in 1888, Bethlehem Lutheran Church in the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans, La., is the oldest historically Black ELCA congregation in the continental United States. The church has a long legacy of responding to the needs of its members and neighbors. One way Bethlehem carries on that legacy is through the Community Table, a feeding ministry that provides free, no-questions-asked gourmet meals every week. This ministry, which is supported by ELCA World Hunger, helps to meet the need for food in Central City. The median household income in Bethlehem’s ZIP code is slightly more than $26,189, less than one-third of the median household income in the United States ($69,021 at the time of writing). More than 15% of the people in Orleans Parish are food-insecure.

With so many workers relying on the city’s tourism and hospitality industry, Bethlehem Lutheran saw a rapid increase in the number of people needing food during the COVID-19 pandemic. Working with partners, the Community Table was able to expand, and by this spring it was providing a free lunch four times a week, serving over 600 meals weekly. As the need has increased, Bethlehem Lutheran has been able to meet it.

A key leader in helping the Community Table and Bethlehem respond during and after the pandemic was Chef De, who planned, coordinated, supervised, cooked and served hundreds of meals for people who came to the Table. “I don’t think Bethlehem would have made it through the pandemic if it were not for Chef De,” says the Rev. Ben Groth, pastor of Bethlehem Lutheran. “And I also believe it to be true that many of our neighbors would not have made it without her, too.”

As noted by Mike Scott, a writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Central City neighborhood has a long, rich history: it is home to New Zion Baptist Church, where the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formally incorporated. Yet, as Scott also writes, by the early 2000s, Central City had become “defined [by some people] by its crime rate” and its “crushing poverty.”[1]

Some people might easily let the community’s present challenges define its future. We see this often when cities are dealing with statistically high rates of poverty, food insecurity or crime. Outsiders looking in dismiss such neighborhoods as nothing more than their statistics or decide they must be “saved” by the decisive action of political leaders.

Journeying together through Lent, we are invited to consider what it means for us today that God’s son was crucified 2,000 years ago. Lent has often been a season for us to take stock of our own sinfulness and need for repentance. In many ways the cross is a mirror, reflecting back to us our entanglement in sin. Yet the cross is also a lens, a way of perceiving and apprehending the world. All too frequently during Lent, we lose sight of the latter aspect.

As a lens, the cross shapes how we understand ourselves, our world and our communities. It reminds us that God is present in Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross. This doesn’t mean that suffering or death are God’s work or that there is something redemptive in suffering or death. Quite the contrary: a cross-shaped (cruciform) lens compels us to recognize suffering for what it is, to name it and confront it.

This is the foolishness Paul describes in his letter to the Corinthians. Who would ever recognize God in the broken, pierced and dying body of Christ? Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, upon seeing a painting of a dead Christ, is reported to have remarked to his wife that such a painting could cause one to lose their faith. This is what Paul means, in part, by the “foolishness” of the message of the cross (1 Corinthians 1:18). To preach the message of Christ crucified is foolishness to those who cannot fathom the presence of divinity within frailty or weakness, who cannot comprehend God as both actor and victim.

Yet that is precisely what the cross demands of us. To preach Christ crucified, to journey through Lent to the cross, is to bind ourselves to honesty, to the sort of truth-telling that names suffering and injustice for what they are yet still affirms the presence of God. For Central City and Bethlehem Lutheran Church, the message of Christ crucified affirms that stories of poverty or hunger aren’t the only stories being written or told in the community. It may be foolishness to those on the outside looking in, but it is gospel truth for those who encounter God at a community table where neighbors prepare, provide and share meals.

To encounter God within the crucifixion is to be reminded that we cannot ignore the truth of suffering, hunger, poverty, violence, death and injustice in a world still waiting for the fullness of the reign of God. But to encounter God in this event is to be radically open to God’s presence in this same as-yet-incomplete world. It is to seek God within our communities and one another, even as the world declares this seeking to be “foolishness.” It is to affirm with faithful certainty that in the stories of our neighbors and neighborhoods, God is being revealed to us in sometimes new and surprising ways.

 

Reflection Questions

What do you think Paul means by “foolishness”?

How does your perception of Central City or your own community change when you look at them through a cross-shaped lens?

In what new or unexpected ways have you encountered God, especially as you faced your own “crosses”?

What might it mean to “bind ourselves to honesty, to the sort of truth-telling that names suffering and injustice for what they are yet still affirms the presence of God”?

 

 

Semana 3 — Crucifixión

•••

Éxodo 20:1-17

Salmo 19

1 Corintios 1:18-25

Juan 2:13-22

“Mientras que nosotros predicamos a Cristo crucificado. Este mensaje es motivo de tropiezo para los judíos y es locura para los no judíos”. —1 Corintios 1:23

En esta semana de Cuaresma, después de haber reflexionado sobre el encuentro con Dios en la reconciliación y en la transfiguración, nos dirigimos hacia el mensaje de Pablo de “Cristo crucificado” y reflexionamos sobre lo que significa encontrar a Dios en la crucifixión, para ser confrontados con nuestra propia participación en la opresión sistémica.

Fundada en 1888, Bethlehem Lutheran Church [Iglesia Luterana Belén] en el vecindario de Central City de Nueva Orleans, Luisiana, es la congregación históricamente negra de la ELCA más antigua de los Estados Unidos continentales. La iglesia tiene un largo legado de responder a las necesidades de sus miembros y vecinos. Una de las formas en que Bethlehem continúa con ese legado es a través de Community Table [Mesa Comunitaria], un ministerio de alimentación que todas las semanas ofrece comidas gourmet gratuitas y sin hacer preguntas. Este ministerio, que cuenta con el respaldo de ELCA World Hunger, ayuda a satisfacer la necesidad de comida en Central City. El ingreso familiar promedio en el código postal de Bethlehem es un poco más de $ 26,189, menos de un tercio del ingreso familiar promedio en los Estados Unidos ($ 69,021 en el momento de escribir este artículo). Más del 15% de las personas en Orleans Parish sufren inseguridad alimentaria.

Con tantos trabajadores que dependen de la industria del turismo y la hospitalidad de la ciudad, Bethlehem Lutheran vio un rápido aumento en el número de personas que necesitaban comida durante la pandemia de COVID-19. Al trabajar con socios, Community Table pudo expandirse, y para esta primavera estaba dando un almuerzo gratis cuatro veces a la semana, sirviendo más de 600 comidas semanales. A medida que la necesidad ha aumentado, Bethlehem Lutheran ha sido capaz de satisfacerla.

Una líder clave que ayudó a Community Table y a Bethlehem a responder durante y después de la pandemia fue la chef De, quien planificó, coordinó, supervisó, cocinó y sirvió cientos de comidas para las personas que vinieron a la mesa. “No creo que Bethlehem hubiera sobrevivido a la pandemia si no fuera por la chef De”, dice el reverendo Ben Groth, pastor de Bethlehem Lutheran. “Y también creo que es cierto que muchos de nuestros vecinos no lo habrían logrado sin ella.

Como señaló Mike Scott, escritor de New Orleans Times-Picayune, el vecindario de Central City tiene una larga y rica historia: es el hogar de la Iglesia Bautista New Zion [Nueva Sión], donde se incorporó formalmente la Southern Christian Leadership Conference [Conferencia de Liderazgo Cristiano del Sur]. Sin embargo, como también escribe Scott, a principios de la década de 2000, Central City había llegado a ser “definida [por algunas personas] por su tasa de criminalidad” y su “pobreza aplastante”.[1]

Algunas personas podrían dejar que los desafíos actuales de la comunidad definan su futuro. A menudo vemos esto cuando las ciudades se enfrentan a tasas estadísticamente altas de pobreza, inseguridad alimentaria o delincuencia. Las personas externas que miran hacia adentro desestiman esos barrios como nada más que sus estadísticas o deciden que deben ser “salvados” por la acción decisiva de los líderes políticos.

En nuestra jornada juntos durante la Cuaresma se nos invita a considerar lo que significa para nosotros hoy que el hijo de Dios fue crucificado hace 2,000 años. La Cuaresma ha sido a menudo una temporada para que hagamos un balance de nuestra propia pecaminosidad y necesidad de arrepentimiento. En muchos sentidos, la cruz es un espejo que nos refleja nuestra participación en el pecado. Sin embargo, la cruz es también una lente, una forma de percibir y aprehender el mundo. Con demasiada frecuencia, durante la Cuaresma perdemos de vista este último aspecto.

Como lente, la cruz moldea la forma en que nos entendemos a nosotros mismos, a nuestro mundo y a nuestras comunidades. Nos recuerda que Dios está presente en el sufrimiento y la muerte de Jesús en la cruz. Esto no significa que el sufrimiento o la muerte sean obra de Dios o que haya un elemento redentor en el sufrimiento o la muerte. Todo lo contrario; una lente en forma de cruz (cruciforme) nos obliga a reconocer el sufrimiento por lo que es, a nombrarlo y enfrentarlo.

Esta es la locura que Pablo describe en su carta a los Corintios. ¿Quién reconocería a Dios en el cuerpo quebrantado, traspasado y moribundo de Cristo? Se dice que el novelista ruso Fiódor Dostoievski, al ver una pintura de Cristo muerto, le comentó a su esposa que tal pintura podría hacer que uno perdiera la fe. Esto es lo que Pablo quiere decir, en parte, con la “locura” del mensaje de la cruz (1 Corintios 1:18). Predicar el mensaje de Cristo crucificado es una locura para aquellos que no pueden comprender la presencia de la divinidad dentro de la fragilidad o la debilidad; que no pueden comprender a Dios como actor y víctima.

Sin embargo, eso es precisamente lo que la cruz exige de nosotros. Predicar a Cristo crucificado, caminar a través de la Cuaresma hasta la cruz, es comprometerse con la honestidad, con el tipo de verdad que llama el sufrimiento y la injusticia por lo que son, pero que aun así afirma la presencia de Dios. Para Central City y Bethlehem Lutheran Church, el mensaje de Cristo crucificado afirma que las historias de pobreza o hambre no son las únicas historias que se escriben o cuentan en la comunidad. Para las personas externas que miran hacia adentro puede ser una tontería, pero es la verdad del evangelio para aquellos que se encuentran con Dios en una mesa comunitaria donde los vecinos preparan, proveen y comparten comidas.

Encontrar a Dios en la crucifixión es recordar que no podemos ignorar la verdad del sufrimiento, el hambre, la pobreza, la violencia, la muerte y la injusticia en un mundo que todavía espera la plenitud del reino de Dios. Pero encontrar a Dios en este evento es estar radicalmente abierto a la presencia de Dios en este mismo mundo aún incompleto. Es buscar a Dios dentro de nuestras comunidades y entre nosotros, incluso cuando el mundo declara que esta búsqueda es una “locura”. Es afirmar con fiel certeza que, en las historias de nuestros vecinos y vecindarios, Dios se nos está revelando de maneras a veces nuevas y sorprendentes.

---

[1] Mike Scott, “A Brief History of Central City, the Forsaken Heart of New Orleans,” Nola.com, July 12, 2019, tinyurl.com/mpks2x8m.

[1] Mike Scott, “A Brief History of Central City, the Forsaken Heart of New Orleans” [Breve historia de Central City, el corazón abandonado de Nueva Orleans] Nola. com, 12 de julio de 2019, tinyurl.com/mpks2x8m

Knowing the numbers for hunger and poverty can go a long way to helping us talk about the issues accurately and craft effective, forward-looking responses. For those who share with their congregation information about hunger and poverty, these numbers can also be helpful in putting together presentations or workshops.

There are several sources for data that are particularly reliable and useful[1]:

• The World Bank’s poverty report;
• The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ (FAO) annual “State of Food Security” report;
• The US Census Bureau’s annual reports on poverty and income; and
• The US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) annual “Food Security in the US” report.

We are still waiting for the release of the USDA’s report, hopefully within the next week, but already, the data are showing some troubling trends and some surprising shifts in understanding hunger and poverty.

Rather than litter this post with a ton of footnotes, the sources are summarized below.

Information and infographics about global hunger and food security come from:

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO. 2023. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023.

Urbanization, agrifood systems transformation and healthy diets across the rural–urban continuum. Rome, FAO. https://doi.org/10.4060/cc3017en

Information and infographics about incomes in the United States come from:

Gloria Guzman and Melissa Kollar, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-279, Income in the United States: 2022, U.S. Government Publishing Office, Washington, DC, September 2023.

Information and infographics about poverty in the United States come from:

Emily A. Shrider and John Creamer, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-280, Poverty in the United States: 2022, U.S. Government Publishing Office, Washington, DC, September 2023.

 

Global Hunger

The first troubling trend in the data is that the spike in hunger we have seen in recent years has not eased. Hunger is still “far above pre-pandemic levels” (FAO, 2023, viii). In 2022, between 690 and 783 million people were hungry. If we look at the middle of this range – 735 million – we find about 122 million more people hungry in 2022 than in 2019 (613 million.) The prevalence of undernourishment, which is the measure the FAO uses to determine the rate of hunger, has increased from 7.9% in 2019 to 9.2% in 2022 – nearly 1 in 11 people around the world.

Fortunately, that’s come down a bit from 2021. There were about 3.8 million fewer people facing hunger in 2022 compared to 2021, but the number remains remarkably high. The rate of hunger in 2022 was a slight decrease from 9.3% in 2021, but still the highest rate since 2005. In some areas, especially Africa, Western Asia and the Caribbean, hunger continues to rise, in part because of reliance on more expensive exports.

We see even more concerning news if we turn to another measure the FAO reports, namely food security. While the prevalence of undernourishment measures long-term, chronic signs of hunger, the FAO also reports on food security, which is a shorter-term measure of people’s access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food year-round.[2] In 2022, 2.4 billion people were food-insecure, an increase of 391 million people since 2019, relatively unchanged from 2021. This means nearly 30% of people around the world cannot reliably access the food they need.

What is keeping hunger and food insecurity so high?

For starters, one critical factor is the war in Ukraine. The FAO estimates that, without the war, 23 million people would not have faced hunger in 2022. Another factor is rising costs. Food is more expensive, fuel is more expensive and incomes haven’t risen to match the jump in prices. Many countries at risk of hunger are dependent on exports. The “world food import bill,” which measures how much is spent globally on the import of food and food products, reached nearly US$2 trillion in 2022, the highest on record and an increase of 10% from 2021. This puts enormous pressures on importing countries and translates into much steeper prices for consumers. The cost for imports of agricultural inputs, such as fertilizer (a huge export of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus), was even more staggering – $424 billion in 2022, an increase of 48% from 2021. Put together, it’s more expensive to bring food in and significantly more expensive to produce food in-country.

One of the trends impacting hunger and the cost of food is urbanization. More and more people globally are moving into large cities or closer to cities. By 2050, nearly 7 in 10 people worldwide are expected to live in cities. The result of this shift, according to the FAO, is that the old framework of a rural-urban divide simply doesn’t match the world as it is. In general, as people move toward cities, their economic prospects grow, and their risk of hunger and poverty decreases (slightly.) The problem we are seeing now, though, is rapid urbanization without economic growth. While we used to think of hunger as primarily a rural issue globally, the data point us toward understanding the need to attend to a continuum of rural-to-urban, including people who live in the in-between spaces between cities and rural areas.

As people move into cities, their diets change, and this presents a challenge to traditional thinking about hunger. For years, the truism has been that the world produces enough food to meet everyone’s needs. That might not be the case going forward. Between diets changing and more people moving away from food production in rural areas, the FAO finds that “the availability of vegetables and fruits, in particular, is insufficient to meet the daily dietary requirements in almost every region of the world” (FAO, 2023, xxii; 62). The reality seems to be that the world doesn’t produce enough food for everyone in every region to enjoy a healthy diet. Hunger isn’t just a problem of access but of production that meets changing needs – and changing understandings of nutrition and health.

 

Another surprising finding is that, in most of the countries the FAO analyzed, the majority of food consumed in rural households is purchased, not produced. This, too, challenges the traditional picture of rural subsistence farmers relying solely on food they grow or produce and makes the relationship between access and production more complex. The reality is that, in rural areas, the share of food that is produced by a household represents only about 33-37% of the food they consume, according to the FAO. The rest is purchased from grocery stores, street vendors or other suppliers.

There are a couple of consequences here. First, the growth in food purchases also means, in many cases, increased consumption of highly-processed foods, which can have lower nutritional value. This may mean that improving food security and nutrition will require new regulations to incentivize healthy eating and prevent exposure to unsafe foods, especially convenience foods purchased from street vendors. Second, focusing on increasing yields and production among rural farmers is important but may need to be combined with other efforts. It may also be important to focus on ways to generate income and to connect people to markets, particularly through improved infrastructure, such as navigable roads. That said, there still needs to be a focus on increasing farming production, especially of fruits and vegetables but also of staple grains, to meet the growing needs of an urbanizing population and to build resilience to shocks to export markets, as we’re seeing with the war in Ukraine.

The long-and-short of it is that the data suggest that the world may face a problem of not producing enough food to meet the changing diets of the world, and rural subsistence, as we tend to envision it, doesn’t completely reflect people’s actual dietary lives. These are huge shifts in our understanding.

Poverty and Income in the United States

As mentioned above, we are still waiting for new data on food security, but we do have information on income and poverty, courtesy of the US Census Bureau.

In 2022, the official poverty rate in the US was 11.5%, representing about 37.9 million people living in poverty. The good news is this wasn’t significantly different from 2021; the bad news is that this rate is far too high and still slightly higher than in 2019, before the pandemic.

 

One thing to note in the data is geographic differences in poverty. While people living in every type of setting – city, suburb, rural– face vulnerability to poverty, the highest rate of poverty in the US is found “outside metropolitan statistical areas” or, in other words, rural areas. Fifteen percent of people living in rural areas in 2022 experienced poverty, compared to 11.0% living in urban centers (“metropolitan statistical areas.”) In principal cities themselves, poverty remained above 14% for 2022. So, the picture of poverty in the US as being primarily urban is not quite borne out by research; rural areas actually experience poverty at a slightly higher rate.

In addition to the official poverty measure, the US Census Bureau also calculates a Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM.) You can read more about the differences here, but one of the interesting things the SPM lets us see is how certain safety net programs and benefits help alleviate poverty. It also allows us to estimate how much certain costs contribute to poverty. Moreover, it determines the threshold of income that is “in poverty” a bit differently.

One important caveat before getting into the numbers: the numbers below are from the Supplemental Poverty Measure, not the official poverty measure. While they are illuminating and help us to analyze poverty more deeply, they should not be used as a replacement for the official poverty measure.

Here is where the news gets a bit frustrating, to be honest. We knew when the Child Tax Credit was expanded that we would see a rapid reduction in child poverty, and we did. Of course, that expansion and COVID-19 stipends expired in 2022, so the rate of child poverty in the US went up, as we knew it would. In fact, between 2021 and 2022, according to the SPM, child poverty more than doubled, from 5.4% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022. At the same time, the official poverty rate for children stayed relatively stable, showing the deep impact the Child Tax Credit expansion had on child poverty. Perhaps even more worrisome is that the share of children in households with income of less than half of the poverty line also doubled, showing an increase of more than 100% for children living in what is considered deep poverty. Increases in deep poverty were true across the board for all age groups. The share of the population with resources below 50 percent of the SPM poverty threshold increased for every age group in the US. What this may point to is the way in which tax credits and stimulus payments had had a particularly significant impact on people living in deep poverty. What it also suggests is that ending poverty for households, even households in deep poverty, is not impossible; progress just takes bold but doable policy choices.

 

From the SPM, we can also get an idea of how effective certain public programs were in keeping people out of poverty in 2022. As the graph below indicates, for example, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly food stamps) and the National School Lunch Program lifted 5.1 million people out of poverty, while out-of-pocket medical expenses moved 7.1 million people into poverty, which means that, after medical expenses are subtracted from their resources, more than 7 million people had household resources below the poverty line.

 

In terms of income, real median household income in the US decreased 2.3% between 2021 and 2022, from an estimated $76,330 per household to $74,580. More people were working full-time, year-round, but real median earnings of workers (including both part-time and full-time) decreased 2.2%. For just full-time, year-round workers, the drop in earnings was 1.3% from 2021 to 2022. So, the next time someone complains about how workers “these days” earn so much, you can gently and gracefully remind them that earnings are lower now than they were last year when accounting for inflation– at the same time (and partially because) goods cost so much more.

 

 

Moreover, the next time someone says, “People just don’t want to work anymore,” it might be helpful to point out that the number of full-time, year-round workers increased 3.4% between 2021 and 2022, compared to an overall increase in workers of 1.7%, which, according to the US Census Bureau, suggests that what we are actually seeing is a shift from part-time work to full-time, year-round work. The percentage of people 16 years and older who were in the labor force in 2022 was 63.5% – not much different from the 63.6% 5-year average from 2017-2021.

In terms of racial disparities in real median income, White and non-Hispanic White households experienced a decrease of 3.5% and 3.6%, respectively, while the change in income for other racial groups was not statistically different from 2021. This change may be because of long-term income disparities. White and non-Hispanic White workers tend to be paid disproportionately higher incomes than other racial groups, sometimes as much as 25-100% higher, and still, despite the modest decrease, get paid real median incomes of $108,700 per year per household, the highest among racial groups. Further analysis shows that the losses in real median income nationwide largely occurred in middle and high income brackets, so this makes some sense.

This drop in middle and high incomes means that income inequality was lower in 2022 than in 2021. In fact, the US Census Bureau reports that 2022 represented the first drop in the Gini coefficient – a common measure of income inequality – since 2007. There is some good news there, though, if we look at other measurements, such as the mean logarithmic deviation of income, which is a bit more sensitive to changes at the lower end of the income spectrum, we still see income inequality at the highest rate it has been since 1967, with the exception of 2021, of course.

What this means is that, yes, income inequality decreased because of drops in income at the middle- and high-income levels. But when the lowest 20% of income earners draw in only 3% of the total income of the country, and the highest 20% get more than 52% of the total income, can we really say that we are making headway on inequality? Probably not. There’s more work to be done.

Where to go from here?

“More work to be done” is a good way to sum up what we can learn from the data. Certainly, we are nowhere near the worst of projections from the early months of the pandemic. But we are also a far cry from the Sustainable Development Goal of ending hunger by 2050.

We know, though, that things do not have to be this way. We have come a long way from where we were as a country and a world in 1974, when the Lutheran hunger appeals that became ELCA World Hunger began. As we look ahead to the 50^th anniversary of this ministry next year, we do so with hope and faith. Hunger and poverty are not givens. What the last few years’ worth of data demonstrate isn’t the intractability of hunger but the risk our world runs when we collectively ease up on progress toward ending hunger and poverty.

Working together, learning from one another, listening to each other, advocating together and creating spaces for communities to build trust and address the injustices that create vulnerability will all be important steps along the way.

 

[1] What makes data “reliable and useful”? One of the first things to consider is whether the sources of data describe their methods, including limitations of the data. This can help point to whether the data are reliable or not. Another factor to consider is consistency. The agencies named in the list use the same methods year after year, so data can be compared over time, and they report any changes to methods that might impact comparability.

[2] In the past few years, there has been more attention to “food crises” around the world and reports that use a measurement referred to as IPC/CH to determine risk of famine. The FAO has a great explanation of how food crisis measurements compare to undernourishment and food security measurements in the 2023 “State of Food Security” report. See Box 1, page 12 of the report.

 

In March 2023, countries in southeastern Africa were hit by one of the most powerful cyclones in memory. Tropical Cyclone Freddy moved across Madagascar, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, bringing torrential rain and powerful winds. Freddy was one of the longest-lasting tropical cyclones and most intense cyclones on record, generating accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) that the World Meteorological Organization has said was equivalent to a full North Atlantic hurricane season.

The storm created new challenges and worsened existing challenges in the country of Malawi, where over 70 percent of the population lives below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day.

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to join colleagues from the ELCA in visiting the Blantyre region in southern Malawi to learn more about the impact of the cyclone and to hear about the ways the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Malawi (ELCM) and its development arm, the Evangelical Lutheran Development Service (ELDS), are accompanying communities impacted by hunger, poverty and disaster, with support from ELCA World Hunger and Lutheran Disaster Response.

The stories we heard of the cyclone were devastating. The people who spoke with us told of homes destroyed by winds and rock slides, livestock and fields of crops washed away, and family members lost in the floodwaters. The pain was palpable as they shared their stories and showed us piles of bricks that used to be their homes. Many of the people we met spoke of trauma and a need for both material goods, such as food and clothing, and spiritual and emotional care as they discern a path forward.

Yet, we also heard a bold commitment to continue moving forward, to replant and to rebuild, and to continue making progress against hunger and poverty. “We cannot remain idle,” one woman said. A man from a community near Chimvu echoed her: “We have to keep going.”

ELCM and ELDS are accompanying the communities as they forge a new path ahead. With support from Lutheran Disaster Response, ELCM and ELDS are distributing food in areas hit by Tropical Cyclone Freddy. The bags of meal and soya will not meet every need, but they will provide critical food for the hardest-hit communities. And, as we heard, the food is an important symbol of the ongoing presence of ELCM and ELDS within the communities. It is a sign that they are not alone.

Despite the challenges of recovery, the communities accompanied by ELDS and ELCM are also continuing the important long-term work of reducing food insecurity and poverty. With support from ELCA World Hunger, ELDS is working with communities to expand food production, support small businesses and strive for gender justice. Our group had the chance to visit newly planted fields of sweet potatoes and cassava, to learn about women-owned businesses and even to meet some young piglets.

There is much need in the communities we visited, but there are also so many assets and strengths to witness. The leaders in each community inspired us with their hope, determination, creativity and resilience that make it possible for this work to continue.

Below, you have the chance to virtually witness some of this for yourself through a virtual tour of the communities in Zomba and Phalombe. In this virtual tour, you will be able to meet some of the people we visited, to watch as one leader describes her fuel-efficient wood-burning cookstove, to hear the exuberant singing and dancing of the communities and to learn more about how ELCA World Hunger, Lutheran Disaster Response, ELCM and ELDS are partnering together to accompany our neighbors in Malawi.

The virtual tour is accessible on computer or mobile device. Each text box also has an icon for a screen reader. Click on the picture or link below to get started.  Once the tour opens, scroll down just a bit to find a button allowing you to view it full-screen. To navigate, simply click any of the pulsing icons on the pictures. Each icon will pull up a video, picture or text box. You can use the back arrow and the home icon at the top left of the screen to go back or to re-start.

May the people and the stories you encounter in the tour inspire your ongoing prayers for continued recovery from Tropical Cyclone Freddy and inspire your hope and active support through the strength and courage of our neighbors in Malawi.

Hunger and Hope in Malawi: Virtual Tour

Ryan P. Cumming, Ph.D., is the director of education and networks for the Building Resilient Communities team in the ELCA.

ELCA World Hunger’s Domestic Hunger Grants are one way this church accompanies communities throughout the United States and Caribbean as they respond to hunger and poverty.

Domestic Hunger Grants Open May 1!

Our team is excited to share that the application process for Domestic Hunger Grants will open May 1, 2023. For those who are familiar with the Domestic Hunger Grants, this year’s process will look a bit different, but we hope that the changes described below will improve the process in some important ways. To learn more about the updated process and how to apply, please visit https://elca.org/domestichungergrants.

This year, we are implementing a two-step process for ELCA World Hunger’s Domestic Hunger Grants, which we hope will increase efficiency, shorten the time for award decisions, reduce barriers to the application process and allow for deeper engagement with partners invited to submit a full proposal.

New Process for Grant Applications

Prior to submitting a full grant proposal, we ask grant applicants to fill out a letter of inquiry (LOI) which briefly describes the project proposal. Registering on our granting portal, ELCA GrantMaker, is not required at this step. Simply fill out the LOI form located here (https://bit.ly/3Ngcm6f) after May 1. LOI submissions are open from May 1 until May 31, 2023. After May 31, our grants team will conduct a review and send invitations and decline letters directly to applicants on or before July 31, 2023.

Applicant Info Webinar

On May 3, 2023, at 2:00pm CDT, ELCA World Hunger will host a webinar for interested applicants and others to learn more about the process. We will go over the new grant application process and how to submit an LOI, and we will answer questions from grant applicants. To join us for this virtual event, please register here (https://bit.ly/3n9e8LS.) Participants will be provided with a link once registered. The webinar will be recorded and accessible via the Domestic Hunger Grant FAQ page (https://sway.office.com/x58hDlDzJCCe1e4l.)

Domestic Hunger Grants Application Timeline

• May 1-31, 2023: Letter of inquiry form open
• June-July 2023: Letter of inquiry review period
• July 31, 2023: Response to the letter of inquiry sent to applicants (decline or accept)
• August 1-31, 2023: Invited applicants to complete grant application in ELCA GrantMaker
• August-November: Review and correspondence between ELCA World Hunger staff and grant applicants on proposal
• November 2023: Award notifications shared to applicants
• February 2024: Grant agreements signed and publicly announced
• March 2024: New Domestic Hunger Grants begin

Daily Bread Matching Grants Update

Registration and applications for Daily Bread Matching Grants is currently closed while we re-imagine how to better support our feeding ministry partners. Thank you to all of the feeding ministries across this church who have participated in Daily Bread Matching Grants previously and who continue to ensure access to food in their communities.

 

Thank you for all you do to work creatively and courageously toward a just world. If you have any questions about the process or about ELCA World Hunger, please reach out to our team at Hunger@elca.org.

With gratitude for the ministry and mission we share!
ELCA World Hunger

Blessings as we enter holy week! Many of you have journeyed with ELCA World Hunger through Lent as we have reflected on the Psalms and what meaning that vast collection of hymns, poems, laments and prayers might have for hunger ministry today. As the season comes to a close, thank you for being part of the 40 Days of Giving!

Lent is a common time for congregations to focus on hunger and social ministry. Indeed, almsgiving is one of the traditional “three pillars” of Lent (the other two being prayer and fasting) and is still found as one of the disciplines of Lent observed by Lutherans today. While many of us think of fasting as the core practice of Lent, the history of the church reminds us that fasting and giving are two sides of the same coin. The witness of Isaiah goes even further, describing authentic fasting as intimately tied to love and justice for the neighbor:

Is this not the fast I choose, to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? (Is. 58:6)

Scripture and tradition make a good case for focusing on hunger ministry during Lent. But this upcoming weekend may be an even more important time to reinvigorate our efforts. As pointed as Isaiah’s message about fasting may be, for Lutherans, it is the feast – and not just the fast – that calls to us.

Sharing the Feast

Say what you will about Martin Luther (no, seriously, say whatever you want – he deserves heaps of both praise and blame), but he certainly knew how to craft a pithy phrase or two. One of his most famous couplets comes from his 1520 “Treatise on Christian Liberty”:

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

As paradoxical as it might seem, what Luther is getting at is that we don’t experience God as humanity’s captor, binding us to rules and obligations, but as our liberator. That’s not to say that there aren’t obligations and demands – the Law is still the Law and still God-given. But within the Gospel, God reveals Godself to be the one who frees us from bondage to sin, death and to the notion that we can save ourselves, hence “perfectly free.”

This is a dramatic shift in Christian ethics. Why do we do “good works”? Certainly, for Lutherans, we know that those works won’t save us. No amount of fasting or almsgiving will merit a reward (or even make us good people.) And it’s not merely because the Law, with its rules for righteous living, is so compelling (we can’t fully follow it anyway.) Instead, what motivates Lutheran ethics is the experience of being loved and set free from the burden of trying – and failing – to overcome our own sin. The foundation of loving a neighbor, of striving for justice and of working to end hunger is nothing more or less than gratitude.

To play a bit with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s popular phrase “cheap grace,” this isn’t “cheap thanks.” It’s not the kind of gratitude for all the great things we have or, worse, the gratefulness that “at least we aren’t like them.” It’s deeper than that. What moves us to choose for ourselves being “subject to all” is the realization that our entire lives, our eternal salvation, is an undeserved gift. We don’t have to worry about our own salvation, or feeling as if we aren’t enough, or fearing that the world around us will corrupt our souls or separate us from God. Instead, we can freely and boldly love and serve one another. Social ministry is not a legalistic requirement but a response to an invitation to be part of what God is doing in the world: “Come and see!”

Easter, then, isn’t the celebratory end to the sacrifice of fasting and almsgiving in Lent but the very foundation of a new life lived in gift and promise, the free gift to be bold in our love of one another and the assured promise that in so doing, we are bearing witness to God’s building of a just world where all are fed. The feast of Easter nourishes us for the work ahead.

Surveying the Cross

We can’t get there too quickly, though. All too often, our Holy Week moves from Good Friday to Easter Sunday without giving us time to hang in the liminal space of Holy Saturday. Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar says that the church needs to avoid this temptation of moving too quickly from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. We have to be in that Holy Saturday moment with the disciples, von Balthasar writes, even just for a bit. For those disciples, that first day after Friday, Jesus is dead. The one they’d given up their lives to follow is now laying in a tomb. A quote often attributed to Luther describes the moment: “God’s very self lay dead in a grave.” For the disciples, there is no Easter Sunday. The messiah is dead, and hope seems lost.

Living after the resurrection, it’s difficult to fully understand that kind of grief, but we must because in that grief is honesty. For all the joy and hope and feasting of Easter, we live in a world where the number of people facing hunger is growing, not declining, where income inequality continues to rise, and where justice and opportunity seem further and further away, especially for communities whose strides toward progress are often stymied by violence, marginalization and oppression.

It’s a grief not only for our world, though, but also for our own shortcomings. As the church, the death of Christ reminds us of our own complicity in human suffering. Sure, the church has done some wonderful things, but the cross confronts us with the ways we have fallen short, the ways we have contributed to rather than alleviated injustice, the communities harmed by the church’s good intentions, and the people pushed aside, sometimes violently, as we have pursued what we call “mission.”

Living and Serving in Holy Week Tension

Living in Holy Saturday means living into that grief and honesty about ourselves and our world. Where Easter inspires joy in God’s promise, Holy Saturday fills us with a sacred longing for that same promise. In Easter, we celebrate it. In Holy Saturday, we yearn for it.

That movement between celebration and yearning, between joy and grief is the tension that grounds our work together as ELCA World Hunger and as a church accompanying neighbors in need. We are caught between the cross and the empty tomb, embodying the grief and longing of a long Holy Saturday before we see the promise fulfilled. And we should be. We celebrate as God works through communities near and far to create new opportunities for abundant life through neighbors joining together with determination and hope. And we lament for a world where the crosses of injustice, violence, marginalization, inequity, racism, heterosexism, sexism, ableism, ethnocentrism, exploitation and more continue to dot the landscape.

This is where the ministry of the church in a hungry world begins. Not in the self-sacrifice of Lent but in in grief and joy, in lament and hope, in yearning and thanksgiving, in the tension between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. It’s a costly faith that we find there, with no easy answers – but with the assurance that even then, God is still at work.

What might that mean for our day-to-day responses to hunger? What might it look like for hunger ministry to be grounded in both hope and lament? As we emerge into the season of Easter, I pray that that those questions can stay with us, that we can carry a bit of both Easter Sunday and Holy Saturday with us into the rest of the year.

Our journey through Lent doesn’t end at the cross or even the empty tomb but continues in the long walk with one another toward the future that is both promised and deeply, deeply needed.

 

Ryan P. Cumming, Ph.D., is the interim director for education and networks for the Building Resilient Communities team.

March 22 marks the 31^st annual World Water Day, a United Nations observance to celebrate the progress the world has made in providing access to clean, safe water for all and to remember how far we have to go as a global community toward that goal.

This week, the UN will host an international conference on water in New York City to commemorate World Water Day and to encourage “bold action” in pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goal of “clean water and sanitation for all.” The ELCA will be represented at the conference by staff from the Building Resilient Communities team and the Lutheran Office for World Community, learning and sharing together with other faith-based groups, governmental actors and organizations. Reaching the goal of clean water and sanitation for all is critical. As the conference announcement shares, “Water is a dealmaker for the Sustainable Development Goals, and for the health and prosperity of people and planet.” Indeed, without access to clean water and sanitation, many of the other Sustainable Development Goals will be out of reach.

Water and Hunger

This is especially true of the goal of ending hunger. Projects and initiatives that provide access to clean water and sanitation have long been part of the work supported by ELCA World Hunger. And with good reason. Northwestern University anthropologist Hilary Bethancourt notes, “In some cases, the most sustainable way to improve food security may be through improving water security.” Bethancourt and a team of researchers found in a 25-country study that people who frequently faced water insecurity[1] were nearly three times as likely to face food insecurity as those who did not.

What might be surprising is that one of the few longitudinal studies of water and food insecurity found that water insecurity actually precedes and may predict future food insecurity. So, rather than occurring together due to a single cause, water and food insecurity interact, with water insecurity actually occurring before food insecurity.

Similar dynamics are found in research in the United States. A study published last year examining tap-water avoidance found that food insecurity was more than 20% higher among the 61.4 million Americans who do not use tap water than among those who do use tap water.[2] What the study suggests is that access to – and use of – clean, safe, affordable tap water can help reduce the risk of hunger.

Addressing access to water is important, too, for solutions to hunger. As Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF Director of the Office of Emergency Programmes, has said bluntly, “No matter how much food a malnourished child eats, he or she will not get better if the water they are drinking is not safe.”

Perhaps even more startling are the results of a study involving 69 experts from around the world. When asked by researchers to identify the top threats from extreme events to global food security, the four most common responses involved water, while 6 of the 32 threats identified directly mentioned water.

Water and Sanitation by the Numbers

Where do we stand with progress on clean water and sanitation? What are some of the realities that are behind the “global water crisis”?

• 2 billion people lack access to safely managed water.[3] The rate of people with access to safely managed water services increased from 70% in 2015 to 74% in 2020.
• That number includes 2 billion people who lack access to basic drinking water services.[4]
• By 2025, half of the world’s population could be living in water-stressed areas.
• 6 billion people around the world lack access to safely managed sanitation services, which puts them at higher risk of waterborne illnesses.
• Diarrhea resulting from unsafe water and insufficient access to adequate medical care claims an estimated 829,000 lives every year.

Some progress has been made, but we are not yet on track to reach the Sustainable Development Goal of clean water and sanitation for all. This makes the question raised Rev. Philip Vinod Peacock of the Church of North India, in his reflection on the words of Jesus, all the more poignant: “While the offer of living water is made, how come many still cry, ‘I thirst’”?[5]

Water and Power

Water scarcity affects communities in nearly every country around the globe, and the number of people facing water crises continues to grow. But that doesn’t mean the burden is shared equally. As Peacock notes about his context in India,

“The issues of water scarcity and pollution and its resulting impact…are closely connected with issues of justice and peace, caste and gender.”[6]

In discussions of water crises, Peacock writes, “another issue that has to be taken seriously…is the place of power relations.”[7] His co-authors in Waters of Life and Death: Ethical and Theological Responses to Contemporary Water Crises offer examples of the many ways water scarcity reflects and springs from marginalization and injustice, from the displacement of Dalit and indigenous Adivasi communities by large dam projects (J. Jeremiah Anderson) to the theft of groundwater in the village of Plachimada by Coca-Cola (Philip K.J.)

Their sentiments are echoed by Catholic ethicist Christiana Zenner:

“Clean water flows toward power.”[8]

Without a doubt, there is a global water crisis – or, rather an interlocking set of water crises – with a rippling impact. But the water crisis is not just a hydrological or ecological crisis. It is a political and economic crisis. We see this in the racial disparities in water access here in the United States, where people of color are more likely to live in homes without full plumbing for clean water or sanitation and where water systems are more likely to violate the Safe Drinking Water Act in communities of color and in communities with households with low-income. The likelihood of a water system protecting residents from unsafe water decreases in communities as the proportion of people of color and households with low income increase.

Along with racial and economic disparities are clear gender inequities when it comes to water. In areas without basic drinking water services, the burden of water scarcity and lack of sanitation often falls on women and girls, who are typically responsible for collecting water for their households. The time spent on this, according to UNICEF, could be as high as 200 million collective hours each day.[9] A study on sanitation found that girls also bear the brunt of lack of sanitation facilities in schools. In a study of West African countries, WHO/UNICEF found that 15-25% of girls missed school during their period, in part due to a lack of adequate sanitation facilities and resources, such as running water, soap, sanitary supplies or waste bins.

Ripples of Hope

The communities ELCA World Hunger is invited to accompany inspire hope that change is possible, despite the complex undercurrents of injustice that flow beneath the global water crisis. This hope is rooted in movements that not only provide clean, safe water but that open opportunities for local communities and neighbors to make meaningful decisions about their own ecological future. Each of these stories – from microbasin restoration in El Salvador to awareness-raising and advocacy to reduce lead contamination in Milwaukee, from drought-resistant agriculture in Bangladesh to rainwater harvesting in Zimbabwe – is a step toward providing clean water or sanitation and an invitation to bear witness to the effective solutions that can come from communities working together for change.

We have a long way to go. But in faith, we journey together with neighbors and companions, taking seriously the words of Rev. Atle Sommerfeldt, the former General Secretary of Norwegian Church Aid:

Water is too important a matter to be left to politicians and technicians alone. Water must be an integral part of our spiritual and social agenda in every local community and nation.”[10]

Commemorating World Water Day

This World Water Day, and the gathering times that follow it, set aside time to pray for neighbors near and far facing water scarcity and water injustice, and give thanks for the local leaders whose tireless efforts inspire us with hope.

With your congregation or your household, use one of ELCA World Hunger’s educational resources to learn more about water and hunger:

Water and Hunger Toolkit

River of Life Vacation Bible school

Want to plan a larger event for this Spring or Summer? You can also check out ELCA World Hunger’s Walk for Water, an interactive track experience with a complete DIY guide.

 

Ryan P. Cumming, Ph.D., is the interim director of education and networks for the Building Resilient Communities team in the ELCA churchwide organization.

—————-

[1] “Water insecurity” can be defined as lacking reliable access to clean, safe and sufficient water to support livelihoods and human well-being. This is related to other terms such as “water stress” or “water scarcity.” Water scarcity generally describes the relationship between supply and demand, while water stress is a bit broader, encompassing not just adequate availability but dependable and sufficient access. See Young SL, et al.. Perspective: The Importance of Water Security for Ensuring Food Security, Good Nutrition, and Well-being. Advances in Nutrition. 2021 Jul 30;12(4):1058-1073.

[2] The reasons for tap water avoidance can vary. This can include a lack of adequate plumbing, safety or contamination concerns, shut-offs due to lack of payment, and lack of trust in municipal services and government.

[3] The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) define “safely managed drinking water service as “an improved water source that is accessible on premises, available when needed and free from faecal (sic) and priority chemical contamination. Improved water sources include: piped water, boreholes or tubewells, protected dug wells, protected springs, and packaged or delivered water.”

[4] WHO and UNICEF define a basic drinking water service as “drinking water from an improved source, provided collection time is not more than 30 minutes for a round trip.”

[5] Philip Vinod Peacock, “Water Conflict,” in Sam P. Mathew and Chandran Paul Martin, eds. Waters of Life and Death: Ethical and Theological Responses to Contemporary Water Crises (Chennai: UELCI/ISPCK, 2005), 65.

[6] Ibid, 64.

[7] Ibid, 63.

[8] Christiana Zenner, Just Water: Theology, Ethics, and Fresh Water Crises (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2018).

[9] This estimate was derived by calculating the number of women and girls living in areas where water sources are more than 30 minutes away from the home.

[10] In Mathew and Martin, eds., xi.

Our garden at home has finally started yielding its bounty, which means we have more tomatoes than we know what to do with and are engaged in constant battle with rabbits to preserve our harvest. Now is the season when we get to enjoy the fruits of our time spent planting and preparing the soil, with fresh bites from the garden in every meal. It’s a reminder of the growing season and of nature’s wonders.

The fresh veggies making their way from my yard to my plate has had me thinking more about community gardens recently, especially with the rising costs of food making harvests more important for many of us. Interestingly, though, it was not my own garden or food prices that made me look into the history of gardens in the United States. It was, of all things, a comic book.

Most people who know me know that I am obsessed with comics, especially propaganda comics from World War II and early 1950s horror comics that drew the ire of parents and the federal government alike. I recently picked up a copy of this little gem from 1943:

World’s Finest Comics is pretty unremarkable, except for its run of war-themed covers in the early 1940s. Issue #11 here features Superman, Batman and Robin working away in a “victory garden.” (Oh, how nice it would be to have the super-speed of Superman or the ingenuity of Batman to take care of weeding and tilling, right?) Victory gardens, as they were called, were home gardens that the US government encouraged people to start during the war, ostensibly to increase food production at home when so much produce had to be sent to troops overseas, though their significance went far deeper, as we will learn below.

Many people trace community gardens today back to these victory gardens. But the community gardening movement actually started much further back, and the government was not as “super”-supportive of victory gardens as Superman and Batman were – at least early on.

The 1890s – Community Gardens Begin

According to Smithsonian Gardens, part of the Smithsonian Institution, community gardens trace their roots back to Detroit, Michigan, in the 1890s. The economic depression of 1893 hit the city hard, particularly affecting its largely immigrant population. Worried about food shortages and high unemployment, Detroit’s progressive Mayor Hazen Pingree started a public works program for jobs and then encouraged the city to use vacant lots to grow vegetables for the coming winter. “Pingree’s Potato Patches,” as they were called were called, were effective and popular.

Mayor Pingree had another motive besides providing food. The depression had increased economic inequality in the city, and the response of Detroit’s wealthy citizens was to provide charity to address the deep challenges faced by the workers most impacted. Rather than addressing the problems, charity drives fostered a system of patronage, leaving low-income Detroiters dependent on small amounts of help from rich benefactors. Pingree’s gardens were steps toward a more equitable solution, providing spaces for Detroiters facing hunger and poverty to exercise agency. It was a movement for both food security and economic justice. As the Detroit Free Press wrote in 1935, “Pingree’s potato patches broke the back of hunger. They were nationally acclaimed and copied. They revealed a city of boundless energy and industry unwilling to live on doles (the meager charity of the wealthy).”

 

Turn of the Century and World War I

Pingree’s model was copied in many major cities. As the depression eased, schools turned to gardens both to supplement nutrition and to help an increasingly urban population of children connect back to nature and learn responsibility and the value of work. Perhaps the most famous advocate for the school garden movement was Fannie Griscom Parsons, a tireless leader whose work led to the creation of gardens and farms for children throughout New York City in the first two decades of the 20^th Century. Parsons famously wrote,

I did not start a garden simply to grow a few vegetables and flowers. The garden was used as a means to teach [children] in their work some necessary civic virtues; private care of public property, economy, honesty, application, concentration, self-government, civic pride, justice, the dignity of labor, and the love of nature by opening to their minds the little we know of her mysteries, more wonderful than any fairy tale.

With World War I, the gardening movement gained a lot of ground and new support, this time from the US War Gardening Commission. With this fervor, the Commission reported that by 1917, there were more than 3.5 million war gardens across the country, helping supply needed fruits and vegetables during the lean years of the war.

As should be clear by now, though, the gardens were about more than just food. The war gardens of World War I became a symbol of community agency and renewal, especially for African American residents, whose urban neighborhoods were neglected by governments after the war. Drawing on their horticultural skills and passion for beautifying their communities, African American gardeners in Detroit, Philadelphia and other cities scaled up their post-war efforts, even holding contests for residents with the best gardens. These gardens became an important lifeline during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

World War II – Victory Gardens

The World War I gardens planted the seed (ahem) for the victory gardens of World War II. By this point in agricultural history in the US, the government was more reluctant to support gardens. As the Smithsonian notes, most officials thought that large-scale agriculture was more effective. What ultimately convinced the government to promote victory gardens, though, wasn’t a compelling argument about production. Rather, it was the awareness after decades of use that gardens play a powerful role in bringing communities together, improving relationships between neighbors and strengthening morale.

The gardens ended up proving effective in both areas, though. They strengthened communities and they provided an abundance of food – as much as 40 percent of vegetables grown in the US by 1944.

Hidden Depths

The brightly-colored produce, however, hid some gnarled roots, and Superman, Batman and Robin’s smiling faces on the cover of World’s Finest Comics #11 belied deep injustices when it came to gardens and farms in the United States in the 1940s.

As World War II began, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal and internment of Japanese Americans. While in public press, the order was motivated by fear of spies (a belief that had no basis in reality), the internment campaign had more sinister roots. Japanese Americans, especially in California, had drawn on their deep agricultural knowledge to build successful farming businesses upon their arrival in the US. It was these farms, and the valuable land that Japanese Americans owned, that drove some to call for internment.

Indeed, one of the first documented lobbying efforts to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast came from none other than the Salinas Valley Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, which sent a lobbyist to Washington, DC, to argue for forced removal of Japanese American farmers.

By 1942, with Japanese Americans interned and their land under government supervision, white farmers began seizing control of their farms, and the managing secretary of the Western Growers Protective Association reported “considerable profits were realized” by member growers “because of the Japanese removal.”

While incarcerated at the internment camps, many Japanese Americans continued using their skills, however, and developed camp gardens. Despite the desolate landscape of many of the camps, internees used their wisdom, creativity and tenacity to start thousands of thriving gardens. These gardens helped to supplement their diet, but perhaps more importantly, the gardens served as a symbol of resistance against internment, an attempt to hold on to community and traditions and to refuse the dehumanization of internment.

Gardens that had once been indicators of successful business and wealth for immigrant families now, through acts of protest against the injustice of internment, were revealed as symbols of courage, strength and resilience.

Sowing and Reaping

Still today, community gardens carry these multiple layers of meaning. On the one hand, they provide fresh, healthy food. But on a much deeper level, as researchers Rina Ghose and Margaret Pettygrove report, community gardens are spaces where community is formed and citizenship is fostered. They are a protest against powers that control food, land and jobs. And they can be spaces that bear witness to new kinds of communities, new kinds of relationships and new understandings of the economy.

Martin Luther once wrote that farming is an act that imitates God’s creation of the world. By digging into the soil, planting and nurturing crops, we are imitating God’s hands-on approach to making the world. But the long history of gardens in the United States – from immigrants tending “Pingree’s Potato Patches” to investments in gardens for under-served urban children to beautification of segregated neighborhoods and the witness of camp gardens – points to an expanded understanding of how this work imitates God’s creative endeavors.

Yes, we are gifted with the opportunity to witness the Creator God in action as crops take root, but on a deeper level, the community that is nurtured and grown at the garden testifies to the ongoing work of God as the redeemer of the world, reconciling us to one another and building a just world where all are fed.

We aren’t superheroes, but we don’t need to be. The world does not need superheroes as much as it needs neighbors willing to work together, to participate in the restoration of just relationships and communities, asserting together that our neighborhoods are worth investing in and that each and every one of us can play a part. As we’ve learned time and again, gardens can be sacred spaces where neighbors build relationships with one another, assert their pride and dignity, and create a bountiful harvest for the community to enjoy. The hard work of tilling, planting, weeding and watering yields far more than vegetables. It can nourish the growth of communities in profound, life-giving ways.

As we harvest from gardens this season and get ready for planting next spring, this history begs the questions: what are we really sowing? And what new wonders might neighbors working together for the transformation of the landscape and the community reap?

 

If you are interested in starting your own community garden, or finding new ways to expand the garden your community has, check out ELCA World Hunger’s Community Gardens How-To Guide, available in English and Spanish! You can order hard copies from the ELCA World Hunger resources page too!

 

Ryan P. Cumming, Ph.D., is the program director of hunger education for ELCA World Hunger.

Welcome to “More than Food,” the podcast of ELCA World Hunger’s Global Farm Challenge!

Find out more information below about the Global Farm Challenge and how you and your group can become involved. Links to the podcast episodes are also below.

What is the Global Farm Challenge?

The Global Farm Challenge is a youth-centered, whole-church effort to raise awareness and gifts to support the work of ELCA World Hunger with farming communities around the world. ELCA World Hunger works through congregations, companion churches and partners to accompany smallholder farmers around the world. This work includes adapting to climate change and sustainable farming practices. But it also includes helping farmers learn new techniques for increasing yields and decreasing costs, build collectives for shared power and gain access to land, seeds and tools. By joining the Global Farm Challenge, you can be an important part of supporting this work!

Why the Global Farm Challenge?

We know that the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone person. But hunger is on the rise, and the very people who produce the world’s food – farmers and farmworkers – face higher levels of hunger and poverty. They are vulnerable to climate change-related disasters, health risks and laws and policies that lock them out of access to land or financing they need to expand their farms.

With the war in Ukraine causing global food shortages and rising prices making it harder for vulnerable families to feed themselves, meeting immediate needs now and building resilience for the future are critical steps. The Global Farm Challenge, by empowering ELCA World Hunger to accompany farmers around the world, is a key way we can all be part of God’s work toward a just world where all are fed.

What is “More than Food”?

“More than Food” is a podcast designed to go along with the “Global Farm Challenge To-Go Card Game,” a game your group can play anywhere – even on the road! In the game, players follow stories of smallholder farmers and farmworkers and learn about the challenges and opportunities farmers face. Each of the stories in the game is based on real stories of neighbors involved in the projects supported by ELCA World Hunger and the Global Farm Challenge. In the podcast, we will dive into these stories and learn more about the projects and the communities involved.

You can share this podcast on your congregation’s website or social media, listen to episodes as part of a group study or play episodes in the car while you travel to a service site this summer.

Play the game, talk about your experiences and hear about our neighbors’ experiences as you consider supporting ELCA World Hunger’s Global Farm Challenge!

Join us in learning more about the many ways God is at work through us and our neighbors!

 

Episode 1 – In this episode, learn more about the Global Farm Challenge and how to get involved.

Transcript: Ep 1 Introducing More than Food Transcript

Episode 2 – In this episode, Brooke and Ryan talk about why justice is at the very foundation of faith and why it is so important to think about ending hunger as “more than food.”

Episode 3 – In this episode, Ryan talks with Franklin Ishida, the director for the Asia and Pacific regions for the ELCA, about growing pumpkins – and a whole lot more – through a project in Cambodia. This project is one of the stories featured in the Global Farm Challenge To-Go Card Game.

Transcript: Episode 3 – Pumpkins and Cambodia Transcript

Episode 4 – In this episode, we hear from Giovana Oaxaca, the ELCA’s program director for migration policy, who shares some of the ways ELCA World Hunger supports farm workers in the US. This work part of the story of citrus fruit in the Global Farm Challenge To-Go Card Game.

Transcript: More than Food Episode 4 – US Farmworkers Transcript

ELCA World Hunger’s 40 Days of Giving

Lent 2022

In English and en Espanol

Week 5: A Way in the Wilderness

“Do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19)

Read

• Isaiah 43:16-21
• Psalm 126
• Philippians 3:4b-14
• John 12:1-8

Reflect

Each of the sessions of this Lenten study has been grounded in a verse from this week’s readings:

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert (Isaiah 43:19).

From the first-fruits offering of Deuteronomy to the teaching of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, our reflections have pointed to how God continues to “make a way in the wilderness” and calls us to be part of that journey for ourselves and our neighbors. The Scripture readings this season remind us of the promise of new life in Canaan for our ancestors and new life in Christ for us all.

We have imagined a world without hunger, heard of God’s abundant provision of manna and seen the ways the church has worked tirelessly, in the past and today, to end hunger.

Now we reach the culmination of this movement toward the fulfillment of God’s promise, wherein Jesus announces: “You will always have the poor among you” (John 12:8 NIV).

It’s not the most encouraging verse in the Bible.

How often have people twisted these words into an excuse for passivity or a sneering retort to proclamations of hope that hunger and poverty can, one day, end? Along with its partner in 2 Thessalonians (“Anyone unwilling to work should not eat”), it’s one of the “hard passages” for people of faith eager to inspire others to respond to hunger and poverty. These troublesome verses are often used to support restrictive, counterintuitive policies and practices that inhibit real progress against hunger and poverty. Why try harder to end hunger and poverty if even Jesus says poverty isn’t going away?

The passage yields more when we dig a little deeper. Jesus may actually be referring to an earlier part of the Bible here, and in that earlier verse the words are no statement of fact but a challenge to the people of God. The verse appears in a section of Deuteronomy about the Jubilee Year, a time every seven years when debts were forgiven. That earlier passage sheds new light on the verse from John:

Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land” (Deuteronomy 15:11).

Far from resigning us to poverty in the world, the verse challenges followers of Christ. In his commentary on Deuteronomy, Martin Luther writes, “‘The poor you always have with you,’ just as you will have all other evils. But constant care should be taken that, since these evils are always in evidence, they are always opposed.”

For Luther, to “always have the poor among you” meant to be confronted always by God’s call to respond to human suffering and oppose the evil that creates it. This is not resignation but activation of the people of God in the service of the neighbor.

What’s more, we may find in Jesus’ words a lesson for our identity as church together. “You will always have the poor among you.” If we are truly the
people of God, then we are called to be in community with neighbors who have been marginalized, excluded, oppressed and impoverished by the world’s injustice.

As church, our calling is not merely to minister to our neighbors but to bear witness to the “new thing” God is doing in our world, a new community God is making possible. This is not easy work. Confronting hunger and poverty alongside our neighbors means facing the dangerous realities that impact our neighbors.

In Palestine, Defense of Children International–Palestine (DCIP), supported by ELCA World Hunger, works with children and families to protect their rights and give them the care and support they need. Settlement expansion in the West Bank and increased military presence in daily life put children at risk of negative encounters with Israeli forces. Children detained for
violating the often-discriminatory laws of Israeli occupation risk abuse from both Israeli and Palestinian forces. Despite significant legal reform in recent years, DCIP has found that practices have yet to fully align with domestic or international legal frameworks for juvenile justice and that children are paying the price, navigating a military legal system that fails to meet the minimum international standards, particularly for juveniles.

DCIP provides both legal and social support for children accused of crimes, and it works with their families, many of whom live in poverty, to improve their situations emotionally, socially and financially through vocational training, the support of social workers and more. This support is critical to addressing the root causes of hunger and poverty in Palestine.

Responding to hunger means accompanying neighbors as they confront the systems of injustice that create hunger. It means facing harsh realities with realistic perspectives. This is not the false “realism” that twists Jesus’ words in the Gospel but the realistic acknowledgement that we face our own journey in the wilderness before we reach the fullness of God’s promise. Friends, we have a long way to go.

And yet … and yet …

As we have seen throughout our Lenten journey, we are not going it alone. God is with us along the way, inspiring hope and courage and revealing Godself in the neighbors we encounter along the way. We know that this Lenten journey is not the end. The season’s fasting, praying and selfreflecting spiritual disciplines prepare us for the road ahead, the road that leads to the cross — and beyond, to a new community God makes possible.

This is not an easy road to travel. But we know that, even amid the challenges ahead, the “new thing” God is doing “springs forth,” that God is even now working to “make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:19).

Do you not perceive it?

Ask

1. What does it mean for the church to “always have the poor” with us? How might we rethink Jesus’ words in light of the study session for this week?
2. In what ways does your congregation act as a neighbor toward people in need in your community?
3. Why is the church called to work for justice in the world? What might the work of DCI-Palestine teach us about being the people of God?
4. How can the church inspire hope when the promised future can seem so far away?
5. Where is God calling you and your congregation to be today? How can or will you be part of the “new thing” God is calling forth?

Pray

God of the poor widow, the lost sheep, and the wandering Aramean,
God of the hungry, the thirsty, and the stranger,
God of the naked, the ill, and the imprisoned,

We confess before you that the church has not always been where
you have called us to be. We have failed to seek your face in our
neighbors in need. We have allowed despair to bind our hands and
feet. Change us, O God. Free us to act with hope and courage.

Open our hearts to perceive your presence in and among our
neighbors. Inflame us with holy passion for the work you invite us
to in the world. Breathe new life into your church, that we may be
the people you call us to be in the world you call into being:

A church of the poor widow, the lost sheep and the wandering Aramean.
A church of the hungry, the thirsty and the stranger.
A church of the naked, the ill and the imprisoned.

Do a “new thing” with us and through us, that we may be a
community of hope, comfort and welcome — a living sign of the
way we are making in the wilderness. Amen.

 

SEMANA 5: Un camino en el desierto

“¿No se dan cuenta?” (Isaías 43:19).
Lecturas: Isaías 43:16-21, Salmo 126, Filipenses 3:4b-14, Juan 12:1-8

Cada una de las sesiones de este estudio de Cuaresma se ha basado en un versículo de las lecturas de esta semana:

¡Voy a hacer algo nuevo! Ya está sucediendo, ¿no se dan cuenta? Estoy abriendo un camino en el desierto, y ríos en lugares desolados (Isaías 43:19).

Desde la ofrenda de primicias de Deuteronomio, hasta la enseñanza de Jesús en el Evangelio de Lucas, nuestras reflexiones han señalado cómo Dios continúa “abriendo un camino en el desierto” y nos llama a ser parte de esa jornada para nosotros y nuestro prójimo. Las lecturas bíblicas de esta temporada nos recuerdan la promesa de una nueva vida en Canaán para nuestros antepasados y una nueva vida en Cristo para todos nosotros.

Hemos imaginado un mundo sin hambre, hemos oído hablar de la abundante provisión que Dios hizo de maná, y hemos visto las formas en que la iglesia ha trabajado incansablemente, en el pasado y en la actualidad, para acabar con el hambre.

Ahora llegamos a la culminación de este movimiento hacia el cumplimiento de la promesa de Dios, en la que Jesús anuncia: “A los pobres siempre los tendrán con ustedes” (Juan 12:8 NVI).

Este no es el versículo más alentador de la Biblia.

¿Cuántas veces la gente ha tergiversado estas palabras en una excusa para la pasividad o una réplica burlona a las proclamas de esperanza de que el hambre y la pobreza pueden, algún día, terminar? Junto con su versículo compañero en 2 Tesalonicenses (“El que no quiera trabajar, que tampoco coma”), es uno de los “pasajes difíciles” para las personas de fe ansiosas por inspirar a otros a responder al hambre y la pobreza. Estos versículos problemáticos a menudo se usan para apoyar políticas y prácticas restrictivas y contraintuitivas que inhiben el progreso real contra el hambre y la pobreza. ¿Por qué esforzarse más para acabar con el hambre y la pobreza si incluso Jesús dice que la pobreza no va a desaparecer?

El pasaje brinda más cuando cavamos un poco más profundo. En realidad, Jesús podría estar refiriéndose aquí a una parte anterior de la Biblia, y en ese versículo anterior las palabras no son una declaración de hechos, sino un desafío al pueblo de Dios. El versículo aparece en una sección de Deuteronomio sobre el año del jubileo, un tiempo cada siete años en que las deudas eran perdonadas. Ese pasaje anterior arroja nueva luz sobre el versículo de Juan:

Gente pobre en esta tierra, siempre la habrá; por eso te ordeno que seas generoso con tus hermanos hebreos y con los pobres y necesitados de tu tierra” (Deuteronomio 15:11).

Lejos de resignarnos a la pobreza en el mundo, el versículo desafía a los seguidores de Cristo. En su comentario sobre Deuteronomio, Martín Lutero escribe: “‘El pobre siempre lo tienen con ustedes’, así como tendrán todos los demás males. Pero se debe tener el cuidado constante de que, dado que estos males siempre son evidentes, siempre se les presente oposición”.

Para Lutero, “a los pobres siempre los tendrán con ustedes” significaba ser siempre confrontado por el llamado de Dios a responder al sufrimiento humano y oponerse al mal que lo causa. Esto no es resignación sino activación del pueblo de Dios al servicio del prójimo.

Lo que es más, en las palabras de Jesús podemos encontrar una lección para nuestra identidad como iglesia juntos. “A los pobres siempre los tendrán con ustedes”. Si realmente somos el pueblo de Dios, entonces estamos llamados a estar en comunidad con los vecinos que han sido marginados, excluidos, oprimidos y empobrecidos por la injusticia del mundo.

Como iglesia, nuestro llamado no es simplemente ministrar a nuestro prójimo, sino dar testimonio de “algo nuevo” que Dios está haciendo en nuestro mundo, una nueva comunidad que Dios está haciendo posible. Este no es un trabajo fácil. Enfrentar el hambre y la pobreza junto a nuestro prójimo significa enfrentar las peligrosas realidades que afectan a nuestros vecinos.

En Palestina, Defense of Children International–Palestine (DCIP) [Defensa Internacional para los Niños de Palestina], con el apoyo de ELCA World Hunger, trabaja con niños y familias para proteger sus derechos y brindarles la atención y el apoyo que necesitan. La expansión de los asentamientos en la Ribera Occidental y el aumento de la presencia militar en la vida cotidiana ponen a los niños en riesgo de encuentros negativos con las fuerzas israelíes. Los niños detenidos por violar las leyes a menudo discriminatorias de la ocupación israelí corren el riesgo de sufrir abusos tanto por parte de las fuerzas israelíes como de las palestinas. A pesar de la importante reforma legal de los últimos años, el DCIP ha descubierto que las prácticas aún no se han alineado plenamente con los marcos jurídicos nacionales o internacionales para la justicia de menores, y que los niños están pagando el precio, navegando por un sistema legal militar que no cumple con las mínimas normas internacionales, particularmente para los menores.

DCIP da apoyo legal y social a los niños acusados de delitos y trabaja con sus familias —muchas de las cuales viven en la pobreza— para mejorar emocional, social y financieramente sus situaciones a través de la capacitación vocacional, el apoyo de los trabajadores sociales y más. Este apoyo es fundamental para atacar las causas profundas del hambre y la pobreza en Palestina.

Responder al hambre significa acompañar a los vecinos mientras enfrentan los sistemas de injusticia que crean hambre. Significa hacer frente a realidades duras con perspectivas realistas. Este no es el falso “realismo” que tergiversa las palabras de Jesús en el Evangelio, sino el reconocimiento realista de que enfrentamos nuestra propia jornada en el desierto antes de alcanzar la plenitud de la promesa de Dios.  Amigos, nos queda un largo camino por recorrer.

Y sin embargo… y sin embargo…

Como hemos visto a lo largo de nuestra jornada cuaresmal, no vamos solos. Dios está con nosotros en el camino, inspirando esperanza y valentía y revelándose a sí mismo en los vecinos que encontramos en el camino. Sabemos que esta jornada cuaresmal no es el fin. Las disciplinas espirituales de ayuno, oración y autorreflexión de la temporada nos preparan para el camino por delante, el camino que conduce a la cruz; y más allá, a una nueva comunidad que Dios hace posible.

No es un camino fácil de recorrer. Pero sabemos que, incluso en medio de los desafíos que tenemos por delante, el “algo nuevo” que Dios está haciendo “brota”, que Dios incluso ahora está trabajando para “abrir un camino en el desierto y ríos en lugares desolados” (Isaías 43:19).

¿No se dan cuenta?

Preguntas para la reflexión

1. ¿Qué significa para la iglesia que “a los pobres siempre los tendremos con nosotros”? ¿Cómo podríamos replantearnos las palabras de Jesús a la luz de la sesión de estudio de esta semana?
2. ¿De qué maneras actúa su congregación como el prójimo de las personas necesitadas en su comunidad?
3. ¿Por qué está llamada la iglesia a trabajar por la justicia en el mundo? ¿Qué podría enseñarnos la obra de DCI-Palestina en lo que respecta a ser el pueblo de Dios?
4. ¿Cómo puede la iglesia inspirar esperanza cuando el futuro prometido puede parecer tan lejano?
5. ¿Dónde está llamando Dios a su congregación y a usted a estar hoy? ¿Cómo puede ser o será parte del “algo nuevo” del que Dios está hablando?

Oración

Dios de la viuda pobre, de la oveja perdida y del arameo errante, Dios del hambriento, el sediento y el extranjero, Dios del desnudo, el enfermo y el encarcelado:

Confesamos ante ti que la iglesia no siempre ha estado donde nos has llamado a estar. No hemos podido buscar tu rostro en nuestros vecinos necesitados. Hemos permitido que la desesperación nos ate las manos y los pies. Cámbianos, oh Dios. Libéranos para actuar con esperanza y valentía.

Abre nuestros corazones para percibir tu presencia en nuestros vecinos y entre ellos. Enciéndenos con santa pasión por el trabajo al que nos invitas en el mundo. Sopla nueva vida a tu iglesia, para que podamos ser las personas que nos llamas a ser en el mundo que llamas a ser:

Una iglesia de la viuda pobre, la oveja perdida y el arameo errante. Una iglesia del hambriento, el sediento y el extranjero.

Una iglesia del desnudo, el enfermo y el encarcelado. Haz “algo nuevo” con nosotros y a través de nosotros, para que podamos ser una comunidad de esperanza, consuelo y bienvenida; una señal viva del camino que estás abriendo en el desierto. Amén.