The Feeding of 10,000

In Kolkata, India’s second largest city, mass poverty affects millions. More than a third of the region’s 18 million people live in slums and 70,000 are homeless. Street and slum dwellers in Kolkata are mostly refugees or migrants from rural areas, driven into the city in search of livelihood. Whole families live in fragile shanties, bus shelters, and railway platforms, earning a meager living as rag pickers, petty hawkers, and daily wageworkers. Trapped in a vicious poverty cycle, they struggle daily for survival.

But it is also the site of broad-scale social programs rooted in Pentecostal faith.

“First feed our bellies ... then tell us about a God in heaven who loves us!” Decades ago, a hungry beggar flung these words at Mark Buntain, a young missionary-evangelist from North America who, with his wife, Huldah, had come to share the good news of Jesus with the people of Kolkata. The Buntains were convicted by these words, and the Assembly of God Church they founded 60 years ago launched a social outreach program that has served the poor of Kolkata ever since.

The Kolkata Assembly of God Church’s theory of change is deeply rooted in the gospel of Christ, with our ultimate goal being fullness of life for all, especially for the poor and marginalized in society. Though our initial response to the poverty trap was a spontaneous attempt to meet immediate needs at the grassroots level, with time we also developed a more studied response geared toward sustainable empowerment.

Programs that continue to serve immediate needs on broad scale today include a feeding program that serves more than 10,000 meals a day in the streets and slums, provision of bio-sand filters for clean drinking water, and free or subsidized basic health care. Long-term interventions include 10 schools where underprivileged children receive a hot midday meal, essential health care, and a basic education. A vocational training school offers a wide range of certified skill-development courses including catering, hospitality, computers, tailoring, and bedside nursing care, with promising job prospects for sustainable livelihood.

This multifaceted approach attacks the evil of poverty at several levels. Its breadth of scope, however, sometimes limits adequate in-depth engagement and our capacity to measure success outcomes with precision. The benefits of the social programs are offered to people of all faiths unconditionally and are never used as inducement for spiritual conversion. But the power of Christ’s love that nourishes and propels the church’s social engagement inevitably results in people being drawn to Christ, for which evidence is available in abundance.

“But for the AG School, I would probably have been working by the roadside,” says Ranjit, an AG school graduate. His goal now is to be an Indian Administrative Service officer and to open a school where all poor children will have opportunities to fulfill their dreams. Social justice takes on new meaning when Christ’s promise of fullness of life is able to fulfill the dreams of a vulnerable and powerless child from the streets of Kolkata.