Last week I pointed to the very significant debt we are building up at the various levels of government and suggested that as a nation we are living beyond our means.   Cutting back on government spending will not be popular and it will create hardship but tough decisions will need to be made if we are not to have the kind of meltdown that is threatening some European countries.

One of the big ticket items for governments is welfare.   Of course it’s only a couple of generations ago that there was no welfare.   I recall the story of my grandfather contracting pneumonia when he still had four boys at school.   Because of his health problems my granddad lost his job.   The landlord put the family and their furniture on the street.   My father, coming home from school, was sent to an acquaintance for help.   The family finished up living in the “poor house” for some years.   None of us want to go back to those bad old days when there were no safety nets for those kinds of family crises.

One of the things about the time when my grandfather was raising his family was that welfare was mostly done through the church.   Of course people often fell through the gaps and my father wrote in his memoirs that in their crisis the church could and should have done more to help.   But the harsh reality of life was that apart from the church there was virtually no welfare at all.   If our modern society implodes from financial bankruptcy then we may again be in a situation where the only welfare available is that provided by the church.

I’m not wishing for that to happen but have to admit that there were some benefits in that.   Let me mention two in particular.

First we need to be aware that not all the tax dollars that are allocated to welfare actually serve to help the poor.   There is a huge government bureaucracy to administer government welfare.   Sometimes such bureaucracies take on a life of their own.   They become a huge overhead that is immensely draining on governments.   Here in Queensland we are presently seeing attempts to whittle back public sector jobs and reduce government bureaucracies.   That is proving painful, as recent polls are making clear.   The reality is that when the church provides welfare it has usually been done by volunteers, so with little or no overheads.   It’s tempting to suggest that church members should be taxed less on the understanding that they support the diaconate of their churches and that churches should be given a greater responsibility to administer welfare in our communities.   The Westside congregation recently had some wonderful opportunities to administer welfare to those affected by last year’s floods.

A second concern about welfare is that it is difficult for government employees to work out which cases of welfare are genuine and which are not.   Historian Marvin Olasky relates that back in the days when welfare was administered by the church it recognised two categories of people among the poor.   The first were called the “worthy poor”.   People who were willing to work – even at odd jobs – in return for help.   These were people who tried hard to get an education, were faithful to spouse and family and stayed off drugs and alcohol.   People like that rarely (like my grandfather) stayed poor for long.   The second group were called the “unworthy poor”.   These people wanted handouts with no string attached – they wanted to hear of no demand for them to work or to give up alcohol.   Basically welfare only increased the irresponsible behaviour of these people.   The point is that a local church is often in a much better position to work out which category of needy people are being dealt with.   The church can therefore reach out to each type with the right kind of help – and of course, to do that in the name of Christ.

John Westendorp