Finding the Kingdom of God in the Slums of the Philippines
Finding the Kingdom of God in the Slums of the Philippines
By Dr. Viv Grigg
At 24 I went to the Philippines after completing a degree in Engineering and then teaching. After some time in student ministries I ended up following Jesus in the slums.
Some alcoholics came to the Lord. I sat with them as they were drinking. We drink. I drink coffee!! They drink their beer!! I say, “What about a Bible study? Just drunkards only?”
They were like, “Yeah, let’s do it." They decided Sunday morning before they get drunk.
And so they do. Three weeks later they respond to the Jesus that is sitting with them in the person of a skinny Kiwi (me).
One of them read the Bible in three weeks. Then he came to me and said, “Kuya (big brother) Viv, if I don’t find a job, I am just going to go back to my drinking, what do I do?” We tried to find him a job, we didn’t succeed. He went back to his drinking and died an alcoholic.
This experience set me on a deeper search for God because I’d followed the rules. Rules that if you study the Bible and pray you become more spiritual - but it wasn’t happening. Then I stumbled on a verse in Jeremiah, that to know God, was to do justice - and the world made sense again.
The gospel of spiritual salvation that we’d been taught, a fundamentalist gospel, didn’t work in the slums. So… what exactly was the gospel for the poor? At the time I was studying under Bill Dynness, as he began to go from Genesis to Revelation in a theology class about the Kingdom of God. That whole theme broke open my understanding of “What is the gospel?” That the gospel is not the gospel of super-spiriutality, but of the Kingdom of God. A gospel, which impinges on the social and the economic and the political and every dimension of life - so that as we are engaging with poverty we deal with poverty, as we are engaging with oppression, we deal with oppression.
So, your immediate discipleship in the slums, in settings of poverty, is economic. It’s spiritual, but spirituality engages the Spirit of GOD who created the earth and economics.
The question in my mind was, How do I find jobs for these converted alcoholics? Some 70 ladies back in New Zealand were praying for me. They thought I should get married so they gave my $1000 to get married. I didn’t know who to marry so I gave it to this young fellowship and they discussed, “What do we do with this money?” They decided to create a cooperative where people could come with proposals for small businesses. So that become a revolving loan fund that began to get people out of poverty. 20 people took loans that first year for small businesses, and 18 repaid them. 18 families came one step out of poverty!
This was the Kingdom of God at work, the gospel among and for the poor of the slums -salvation from sin, and salvation form poverty - good news!!
