Person-first Christianity

     As a middle-class, liberal, Christian, I want to make things better.  I want my church to make things better for our congregation, our community, our society.  I want to solve problems.  In his book, The Promise of Despair, Andrew Root says, “The church feeds the poor, gives shelter to the homeless and help to the ill, not because it naively imagines that it can in so doing make hunger, homelessness, and sickness disappear.  When the church acts in such a way, when it vigorously gives voice, feeds, shelters, and cares for those thrust into death by [society], it is living for the future of God that has not yet come, but is coming.”

When I read this, I thought, “That’s not enough.”  I want to help, to solve problems, to make a difference.  Isn’t that what we are supposed to do, already?  Isn’t that what the kingdom of God is about?  Taking care of the least of these and so on?   Is it really enough to trust that the kingdom will come around someday?  Don’t we need to get things done?  It reminds me a little of being a special education teacher.

Within the complex world of education, I want to help.  I desperately want to write good curriculum, to measure student progress, to increase reading scores, etc.  Sometimes I become so distracted by the big picture that I can’t see the trees for the forest.  My primary job, as a special education teacher, is to relate to my students as people, meet them where they are, support their needs and enhance their strengths.  My job is to speak for my special students within the wide world of education, to make sure they are recognized, counted, and valued, to make sure they have an opportunity to thrive.

One of the first things I learned in my Special Education master’s degree program was how to speak about my students.  They call it “person-first language”; it means to literally refer to people as “people first, condition second.”  For instance, we learned to not say “Down syndrome adult”, “learning-disabled student”, “autistic child”.  We learned to say, “person with Down syndrome”, “student with a learning disability”, or “child with autism”.  It seems clumsy and unimportant, but the way we speak of a person makes a vast difference in the way we regard a person.  Just the act of saying “person with…”, puts the emphasis on the human being, not the condition.  Rather than looking at my students as a problem to be solved, or a puzzle to be completed, I should look at them as a complex person with various strengths and needs.  I should value them as a person first.

Christianity is about relationship, relationship between person and God, and person and person.  It is about seeing people, loving people, treating people as people first, with respect, humility, and compassion, regardless of their condition.  Maybe my little church, or even any big church, or even the holy, catholic church, cannot solve the problem of the poor, or the problem of injustice, or the problem of racism.  But we can just treat people like human beings, and that is no small thing.  Maybe merely treating people with dignity, empathy, and love is the entire message of the kingdom. 
 When we treat the “other”, as a person, when we see the complex strengths and needs all wrapped up in the one we are trying to help, we become a little more human, and a little more connected to God.  After all, the Lord of all became a human; in person-first language, he was a “man who is also God”.  He treated everyone he met as a person, whether they were women, children, prostitutes, blind, or lepers.  When he hung dying on the cross, he saw the humanity in his persecutors and he prayed, “Father, forgive them.” He did not solve the problems of society; he transcended death and let grace pour down through his love for all the persons in the world.