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Transforming Communities: From Scarcity to Abundance
Have you ever considered that our approach to helping the poor might be fundamentally flawed? In "Having Nothing, Possessing Everything," Michael Mather challenges decades of conventional wisdom about poverty and community development. As a Methodist pastor who has spent over thirty years serving in low-income neighborhoods in Indianapolis and South Bend, Mather's journey represents a radical shift in perspective that has influenced community organizations nationwide. The book has become required reading in numerous seminary courses and community development programs, praised by figures like Father Gregory Boyle of Homeboy Industries for its "exquisite mutuality" approach. What makes this work so compelling is not a new program or model to implement, but rather a complete inversion of how we see communities labeled as "poor" - recognizing that the greatest transformation happens not when we help others, but when we allow ourselves to be changed by them.
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The Journey from Scarcity to Abundance
When I first arrived at Broadway United Methodist Church in Indianapolis in 1986, I saw what most people trained in ministry and social services see: a neighborhood in decline. The once-grand "White House" cathedral stood in a community transitioning from predominantly white to predominantly Black, with visible signs of economic distress everywhere. As the "hoodlum priest" assigned to street ministry, I believed my role was to help the needy, to be Christ-like to the hurting. I was the savior; they were the saved.
But something unexpected happened. As I encountered the neighborhood people, I began to see them not as helpless but as powerful, brave individuals with extraordinary gifts. Take Seana Murphy, a seventeen-year-old who intervened when a young woman with a knife threatened another girl outside our church. Terrified but determined, Seana pushed the knife-wielder away with a broom while praying. Years later, that same woman became a good mother with a decent job.
This intersection of violence and beauty defined my ministry and gradually transformed my perspective. I realized I wasn't meant to be the lead actor in this community's story but rather a witness to the glories already present. My role shifted from providing services to organizing our work around investing in neighbors' gifts rather than treating them as drains on resources.
The transformation wasn't immediate. For years, I continued operating from a scarcity mindset, focusing on what was missing rather than what was present. I created summer programs that received praise and attention, feeling tremendously proud of our accomplishments. But then came a devastating reality check: nine young men from within four blocks of our church died violently in my last nine months as associate pastor. Their deaths forced me to confront a haunting question posed by sociologist Lisbeth Schorr: Were we helping a few people beat the odds, or changing the odds for everyone?
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Hidden Abundance in Plain Sight
The pivotal moment in my journey came on Pentecost Sunday in South Bend, when a woman in our congregation challenged me after hearing the reading from Acts where Peter quotes Joel saying, "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh." She asked, "If what Joel said is true, why don't we treat people like that? We ask people how poor they are rather than how rich they are."
Her observation struck me with shame as I realized our practices contradicted our beliefs. We claimed God's Spirit flows through everyone while treating people as if it weren't true. This insight led us to adopt Asset-Based Community Development principles, asking people about their gifts rather than their needs. We began asking three key questions: What can you teach others? What would you like to learn? And who's going with you on your journey?
When I returned to Broadway in Indianapolis as senior pastor in 2003, the neighborhood showed early signs of gentrification, but much remained unchanged. The congregation was anxious about growth and sustainability, constantly asking "How can we grow?" rather than recognizing the vibrant life already present. We were missing our own gifts and failing to see the talents of our neighbors.
This changed when De'Amon Harges, who called himself "Parradoux," began visiting me at Broadway. On his four-block walk to the church, he'd meet neighbors and bring their stories to me - the chess player who gathered young people on his porch, the street-corner watchers, local artists and entrepreneurs. De'Amon started bringing different neighbors to our church meetings, introducing them by highlighting their gifts rather than their needs. This simple practice helped church members see neighbors not as charity recipients but as gifted individuals.
In 2005, we hired De'Amon as a "Roving Listener" to survey each block and gather residents to share their gifts. He quickly learned that introducing himself as a neighbor rather than an institutional representative was crucial; people trusted neighbors, not institutions. Through weekly reports, he shared discoveries from visiting homes - noticing awards on walls, cooking aromas, and music playing. Rather than directly asking about gifts, he asked neighbors about each other, learning the difference between opinions and "generative themes" that motivated action.
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Transforming Our Approach to Community
By March 2008, I knew our approach needed to change fundamentally. Though we'd applied for funding to run the same summer program we'd operated for twenty years, De'Amon's insights were transforming our perspective. I gathered our summer program leaders and announced we wouldn't continue the old model. Instead of working with 25, 50, or 150 kids, we'd involve all 4,000 people in our neighborhood corner - with no registration forms.
We created "Name, Bless, and Connect," hiring young people to identify neighbors' gifts, bless them, and connect them with others sharing similar passions. They transformed our old thrift shop into "The Loaves and Fishes Room," filling walls with Post-it notes naming people and their gifts, using arrows to connect them. These young rovers discovered remarkable neighborhood treasures - a man who created "The Dirty Dozen Hunting and Fishing Club" to teach children, women who were poets and seamstresses, musicians, artists, and entrepreneurs.
This approach reflected a profound insight from Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood," where Hazel Motes preaches a "Church Without Christ" where "the blind don't see and the lame don't walk" - a critique of how churches often remain blind to the change God has brought into the world. One of our wisest church leaders, who is blind, corrected my co-pastor Rachel when she referred to the "seeing world" rather than the "sighted world," noting: "Just because you have sight doesn't mean you can see."
This distinction became central to our work. For decades, neighborhood youth had been bussed to distant schools that told them they lived in a bad place with bad parents and neighbors who didn't care. Now they were recognizing the truth: abundance existed in every corner of their lives.
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Noticing People's Gifts
Once we recognize people's gifts, how do we build on what we see? In Acts 3, Peter and John tell a lame beggar, "Silver and gold have we none, but we offer you all that we have. In the name of Jesus Christ, get up and walk." The man leaves "walking and leaping and praising God." I wanted to experience that joy, but when people asked our church for emergency assistance and I wrote checks, they never left leaping with joy. I had rewritten the biblical story to say, "Silver and gold have we some. Here you go. See you later."
This realization led us to create "The School of the Spirit" after a musician and electrical engineer named Joe asked if he could teach neighborhood kids music. Anyone who could find three students could offer a class in anything - cooking, car repair, songwriting - and we'd provide materials. Teachers kept any money students contributed. Classes included music, painting, Tai Chi, conversational physics, film, Mexican cooking, auto repair, and quilt-making. The food pantry became a way to discover people's gifts rather than just dispensing food.
Sometimes tragedy sparked transformation. After seven-year-old Columbus Coleman was killed by a stray bullet while playing in his grandmother's yard, we hired fourteen-year-old Aaron as our first "Animator of the Spirit" to "pull out Aaron's talents for the benefit of the larger community." Aaron repaired computers at the Boys and Girls Club and taught an art class where neighborhood children drew positive images of their community. When fifty children collected over a hundred pounds of broken glass during a cleanup, they created a beautiful mosaic incorporating the children's drawings, with "You are the light of the world" proclaimed on one side.
Learning to notice gifts around us was a slow process, as I struggled to break the habit of focusing only on needs. I had often viewed young Black men in our neighborhood as threatening problems - uneducated and aggressive. But as I sat with them, listened to their stories, and showed I wasn't going away, they began educating me about their music and sharing their dreams. When "Fat Mike," a neighborhood teenager, complained that "the church doesn't do anything around this community," I challenged him to talk about it. This led to Mike and his friends dressing as Santa Claus and distributing gifts door-to-door on Christmas Eve - a joyous neighborhood celebration that grew as they moved down the street. Everyone wants to give - even those labeled as troublemakers or at-risk.
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Getting Out of the Way
The "iron rule" of community organizing - "Never do something for someone that they can do for themselves" - resonated powerfully with people labeled as mentally ill, who cheered wildly when I mentioned it because "no one ever lets us do anything." This principle became central to my approach of making room for neighbors' gifts rather than "helping" in ways that diminished them.
Lucy came to our church needing to complete community service hours for her parole after a prostitution conviction. When I asked what she was good at, she said "I'm really good with people," so we put her to work providing hospitality at our confusing church entrance. When I later asked what she'd do if money were no object, she surprised me by saying she'd like to own a flower shop. Despite my initial skepticism, we borrowed $100 from the bank, bought wholesale flowers before Valentine's Day, and went door-to-door selling them as "Lucy and the Rev's Flowers." We made $500, and Lucy donated $50 to the day care center that looked after her daughter. Though Lucy was later arrested and given a six-year sentence, she returned after early release and borrowed from our new micro-lending fund called Lucy's Fund.
During a trip to South Africa, I met Rev. Welile Sigabi who pointed out that all liturgies are written by city people, ignoring rural realities where "a man is not a man unless he has a cow" and "a woman is not a woman unless she has a chicken." This made me realize how our liturgies reflect our prejudices and keep us blind to what others value. When I finally recognized the abundance around us, I changed my approach. Instead of listing deficiencies on grant applications, I wrote that our biggest need was "to be needed" and highlighted our neighbors' gifts.
John McKnight once asked Ivan Illich when everything started to go bad. Illich pointed to an 8th century Italian village where hospitality to strangers shifted from homes to a monastery hostel - the moment "when the community gave away its power to care for one another." When charity becomes institutionalized, we forget our capacity to respond directly to neighbors. After thirty years in urban ministry, I've completed countless neighborhood needs assessments. The fundamental problem with these surveys is twofold: they ask me rather than the residents themselves, and more critically, they focus on what's missing rather than what's present. You can't build with what you don't have.
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Making Sense of Money
When an intern interviewed a neighborhood woman about what churches should be doing, she bluntly replied they should "give some of that money back" - the money from "runnin' those programs and not havin' to pay taxes." Her critique hit home. Despite decades of church and social service activity, conditions hadn't improved for most residents. This realization led us to conversations with economists, physicians, and community developers worldwide, discovering that successful community development focused on building upon existing gifts and local wisdom.
My own childhood experiences taught me about money's power. At five, I found my mother crying because she couldn't afford shoes for her children. At seven, church members pressed silver dollars into my hand when we moved to a new town. At ten, I proudly rode my bike to pay for my schoolbooks, only to be pushed off and robbed by an older boy - leaving me humiliated and ashamed. Despite these formative experiences with money's significance, I had divorced this knowledge from my work with people in poverty, failing to recognize that money (and its absence) remains central to their daily lives.
I'd been taught that poverty stemmed from bad decisions, poor education, early pregnancy, and addiction - everything except the simple truth that being poor means not having money. In my work across low-income communities, we provided numerous services and programs but rarely addressed the fundamental issue of money itself. Common sense would suggest finding ways to get money into the hands of those who need it, yet most poverty interventions fail to address this most powerful factor affecting education, health, and opportunity.
We shifted our approach by creating an "Abundance Fund" instead of emergency assistance. Rather than paying people's bills, we began investing in their talents - buying cookies from bakers, hiring singers to perform, connecting mechanics with customers. Initially people were surprised when we asked about their gifts rather than their needs, but gradually different stories emerged. When De'Amon discovered forty neighborhood gardeners within five blocks of our church, we hired local youth to connect these gardeners with potential customers. This project later received $40,000 in hospital funding - an opportunity that would never have materialized if we had continued running community gardens the old way.
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Practicing Hospitality
Hospitality means creating a welcome place at the table and recognizing visitors as family. When Duane Carlisle joined our staff as Pastor for Children, Youth, and Families, we warned him not to start a traditional youth group. Instead, he created "celebration meals" where young people gathered with family, friends, and carefully selected community members. These meals became powerful affirmation experiences where everyone shared what gifts they saw in the youth. The young person would then speak about their own sense of calling, often revealing dreams they'd never shared before. Attendees would offer concrete support for these dreams - like when a professional opera singer offered to mentor a young woman who loved opera.
At Broadway Church, we mentor seminary students by having them organize monthly meals with people who share common interests. When interns ask about the agenda, I explain there isn't one - when people who care about the same things gather, conversation flows naturally. These gatherings often lead to deeper relationships and unexpected connections.
Sometimes true hospitality begins with saying no. When Frances came seeking shelter after her house was shot in a drive-by shooting, we declined to put her in a hotel but helped her reconnect with her cousin. Though Frances initially believed her neighbors didn't care about her, our custodian discovered they were actually concerned and collecting her mail. This reconnection led to Frances volunteering at the church, where members discovered her cooking talents. Now she prepares meals daily in a commercial kitchen, sharing her gifts that were uncovered through hospitality that began with "No."
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Taking Learning Journeys
Like my freshman year journey to meet jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, who taught me "It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play," I've sought wisdom from those more skilled than myself. These learning journeys are like jazz compositions - I take a melody from someone whose notes resonate with mine, and we jam together in conversation, never knowing where it might lead but always learning something valuable.
In the late 1990s, I met Maria Varela in Los Ojos, a poor village in northern New Mexico. Maria had originally come to organize a health clinic but noticed local women creating beautiful textiles. She helped shepherds process their own wool rather than selling it raw, then helped women make and sell finished products in their own store. Her work inspired our congregation to see economic possibilities in our neighborhood and the power of young people.
In South Africa, Rev. Charles Villa-Vicencio shared a joke from the apartheid era: "There are two possible solutions to our crises. One is miraculous - God sending angels to sort us out. That's the realistic solution. The miraculous one is that we will sit down and talk with our enemies." These stories inspire us to look for miraculous solutions in our own work, building upon the best in our neighbors despite the brokenness around us.
Gordon Cosby of Church of the Savior shocked us with his statement that "Vision is the destroyer of essence." Despite their impressive work in Washington D.C., he admitted they'd "forgotten Jesus" - the unique holiness in each person. This became our mantra whenever we worried about building institutions that blinded us to people's gifts.
At the Family Independence Initiative in Oakland, founder Mauricio Lim Miller rejected the traditional social service model that rewards neediness. Instead, when someone asks for help, they must bring "four or five people who know you and love you" to build a two-year plan using their own connections. This inspired me to ask a man seeking rent assistance to bring people who loved him. When they described his fishing talents, we hired him to cook fish after church, which led to a restaurant job downtown. His community held the solution to his own problem.
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The Lights of Broadway
When you learn to see abundance where others don't expect it, you begin to see it everywhere. Counterintuitively, abundance appears most clearly in communities labeled poor and needy - in "at-risk" youth, in elderly people considered useless. When materialism and pretense are stripped away, what remains is the true essence of a person and their gifts.
Miss Rose, an elderly woman in her eighties with a dusky gray complexion, sweeps our inner-city streets daily in her housecoat and tennis shoes. Despite witnessing violence and hardship, the years haven't bent her much - perhaps due to her constant striding forward. She watches from her porch with sunflowers in front and beans in back, knowing how to grow things amid broken pavement. Day after day, she gathers trash, crushed cans and shattered glass - the slow, steadfast work of building community.
Joe King fills any room with energy - laughter, ideas, movement. Though retired from selling insurance, he remains connected to Fall Creek, which has been his teacher and provider since boyhood when fatherless, he waded into its waters where men gathered to fish and became his fathers. Now he leads creek clean-ups twice yearly, explaining, "I talk to the creek, and the creek talks to me, and I tell it I will not forsake it."
Six years ago, our church articulated six guiding principles for our neighborhood work:
1. Our neighbors are God's people. Act like it.
2. Everything begins with and builds on the gifts of our neighbors.
3. Parents and guardians are the first and best teachers. Respect this.
4. We invest first and foremost in the good the people of the neighborhood seek.
5. Money must flow to the neighborhood.
6. Practice neighbor love.
After establishing these principles, we needed ways to reinforce them since they challenged our long-standing habits. We "gamified" our work, creating a monthly competition where whoever scored the most points bought cupcakes for other players. Our twelve scoring opportunities included counting the number of people whose homes we visited and blessed, people we introduced to each other because of shared callings, people we prayed with in various settings, and other meaningful interactions.
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A Vision for Transformation
When asked if I was suggesting dropping money on poor neighborhoods, I replied that while not my suggestion, it would be better than 90 percent of what I used to do and most social service programs. Five years ago, when a coalition raised two million dollars for a "Circles out of Poverty" program, I proposed an experiment: give us half the money to distribute $100,000 each to ten neighborhood families, then compare results after two years. They refused the challenge.
I'm not proposing a model for ministry or urban work - there's no replicable system to be imitated. No poverty simulations or programs bought online will change communities. Only attention to the wondrous people around us and their gifts will make lasting difference. This book offers a way of looking at the world, a set of lenses. As Wendell Berry said, the best economy is the kingdom of God - an economy where attention is paid to every hair on our head and God's abundance in surprising places.
In 1986, I envisioned students flooding Broadway's hallways for tutoring with volunteers from the church and community. Years later in 2005, De'Amon called about Maya, a neighborhood resident running her own tutoring program from home. Working nights at AT&T, she tutored local children during summer weekdays, covering "everything from phonics to Sophocles," and hosted Friday cookouts where families came to see the children's work. Rather than recruiting her as a tutor, we realized we should support her existing work.
A church leader invited Maya to Sunday service, where the congregation pledged their support for her ministry. When Maya, dressed in her Sunday finest, turned to see the standing congregation thundering "WE WILL!" in support, two things became visible: the church saw a neighbor doing remarkable work they hadn't noticed, and Maya discovered a congregation ready to spiritually and practically support her calling - work she did well without being asked. This moment captures the essence of transformation - not when we help others, but when we allow ourselves to be changed by recognizing the gifts already present in our communities.
