Editorial: Christians must stand together to feed the children

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A seasoned seminary professor once told a class full of ministerial students, “Show me your church’s budget, and I’ll tell you all about its priorities.” The same wisdom can be applied to individuals, families, communities and even nations.

Now is the time for all people who care about children to place a priority on securing the health and well-being of American kids who are most at risk of hunger and malnutrition.

knox newEditor Marv KnoxCongress is beginning to consider the 2016 budget. Lawmakers recently received several administration proposals that would help secure desperately needed nutritional assistance for the nation’s poorest children. The budget proposals include provisions for tax credits for low-income families. They also strengthen the so-called “safety net” programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—SNAP—and a summer program designed to make sure poor children have access to healthy food.

The tax proposals would make permanent a couple of policies—the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit—set to expire. These tax credits are not welfare. Far from it. They are policies designed to benefit the working poor, who can’t raise a family on low wages. 

An alternative to maintaining these tax credits would be to raise the minimum wage. In fact, while establishing the tax credits and increasing wages would be good news for the working poor, millions still would face a challenge raising their children and providing the education necessary for productivity in the coming decades. But at the very least, the tax credits provide a positive incentive to hold down a job while raising a family.

Here-and-now needs

The SNAP program meets here-and-now needs—feeding hungry, at-risk children. Advocates note about 90 percent of SNAP households live below the poverty line, and 40 percent of recipient households live on less than half the poverty level. SNAP recipients shop in local grocery stores and boost local economies. But most importantly, SNAP helps more than 40 million Americans dodge hunger.

Similarly, the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children program helps children who receive school lunches and sometimes school breakfasts eat when school is not in session. A U.S. Department of Agriculture study showed a $60-per-month per-child summer supplement reduced very-low food insecurity among children by a third. 

“The budget debate has a central moral dimension,” stressed David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, a “collective Christian voice urging our nation’s decision makers to end hunger at home and abroad.”


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Moral measure of the budget

“As Christians, we believe the moral measure of the budget is based on how the most poor and vulnerable people fare,” Beckmann added. He called the proposals steps in the right direction to provide “a framework for working-class families, who tend to have little voice in politics, an opportunity to improve their economic situations.”

(Here’s a link to information about Bread for the World’s 2015 Offering of Letters campaign to provide food for America’s children.)

Of course, all Baptists and other Christians—even Baptists and other Christians who love children and want to see them fed and nurtured—do not agree on how to combat hunger. Some insist “this is the church’s responsibility” and want congregations and other faith-based groups to carry the entire load of caring for the nation’s poor and disadvantaged. Others say the breadth of the nation’s poverty and hunger extends beyond the church’s grasp. They contend Christian citizenship demands advocacy on behalf of people who cannot advocate for themselves.

Place a priority on hungry children

Perhaps Baptists and other Christians of both perspectives will place a priority on hungry children, overcome our differences and advocate for these basic programs in the next budget. Several facts and advantages to this approach:

• Nearly 16 million U.S. children live in “households struggling to find enough food to eat,” USA Today reports. That’s almost 22 percent of the nation’s children.

• In Texas, the child food-insecurity rate is 27.4 percent, placing the Lone Star State eighth nationally. More than 1.9 million Texas children have trouble finding adequate food across the year.

• The challenge of feeding these children is too expansive for churches to meet alone, at least in the next two years. Churches simply don’t have the infrastructure—facilities, staffing, food access, finances—to feed about 16 million children nationally and 1.9 million in Texas on their own right now. 

• These basic food and family-tax programs reflect values Baptists and other Christians broadly uphold. They affirm labor. They support intact families. They respect dignity. They nurture children. They provide care for people whom Jesus called “the least.”

• Individuals, churches and other groups that believe only churches, and not government, should alleviate poverty can look at this as a time-buying step. Every child they feed, every family they lift out of poverty, every worker they train will lighten the burden on government programs. This shifts the challenge—and the opportunity—to churches. If congregations and other faith-based organizations “do their job” of transformation, then the next time lawmakers write a budget, they’ll need fewer dollars for food supplement and poverty alleviation. We can’t begin to imagine the spiritual benefits of such compassionate Christian ministry.

• And who knows? If Christians show broad-based collaboration, then maybe a bipartisan spirit of cooperation can break out in Congress. Do you believe in miracles?


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