The importance of Christian charity was first impressed upon me in university by a friend named James. He was the older brother of a close friend, doing graduate studies in history. We were involved together in an evangelism project on our university campus. I don’t remember the context anymore, but he once gently chided me for thinking the worst of someone. James told me that, as Christians, we should strive to be charitable. Little things said a long time ago sometimes stick with you.
When I was in seminary, one of my professors told a story from a congregation he’d once served in the Netherlands. It was in a small town where everyone watched everyone else. There was a poor widow everyone knew was receiving help from the deacons. One day she was seen around town wearing a brand new coat, one which was obviously far beyond her means. The tongues began wagging about how she was abusing the help she was getting from the church. She was judged harshly in the court of public opinion. As it turned out, the coat had been a generous gift, but of course, a falsehood travels round the world while the truth is still pulling up its pants.
Wes Bredenhof | “Why Do I Find It So Easy to Think the Worst?” | May 20, 2025
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This is a tangent, but relevant. From Dr. Bredenhof’s article at the link (for those who won’t click and read it): “I had asked him to read a chapter in the Bible that I was confident would be very helpful for him. Yet each time we met he confessed, with what I thought was feigned embarrassment, that he had not yet read it. I was about to stop meeting with the man when I thought I would try one more thing – we would read the chapter together. It was then that I discovered that his ‘obstinance’ was actually something else. The man could not read.”
I’ve had something almost identical happen to me when I was doing inner-city ministry and working with an older woman who had moved from the Deep South during the “Great Migration” of poor Black people to Northern cities where they could find jobs and would have less trouble with racial discrimination. I knew from my history books about the issues faced by Reformed churches in working with non-literate people, and had seen it before in Hispanic ministry, but had never before run into an English-speaking person who was completely unable to read and write. Not limited literacy, or dyslexia, but full illiteracy.
I’m not certain but I don’t think she had gone beyond early elementary education, probably leaving school around the second or third grade. Before we say, “That just couldn’t happen,” in her era, even if she had gotten an education, it would have been unusual for people to go beyond eighth grade. I’ve personally known pastors from her generation who graduated from eighth grade but didn’t have the opportunity to go to high school because there was no high school available, or the high school was only for whites, so they educated themselves while working secular jobs after leaving school at age 14, like nearly everyone else in their communities whose families didn’t have the money to send them to a community large enough to have a high school.
In this woman’s case, apparently nobody thought it was important for a young Black girl to learn to read or write, and believed during the dire poverty of the Great Depression that she would be more useful in the fields than in elementary school. She had successfully hidden her illiteracy by relying on her children and grandchildren. I had no idea until I tried to hand her some articles on sovereign grace, and her family took me aside and explained that she loved to have her Bible read to her, and had memorized huge numbers of verses, but could not read her Bible or Christian books or magazines, so the family read them to her.
To her credit, she knew more Bible passages and had a better understanding of many biblical principles than a lot of people I knew who had whole libraries full of books. She obviously loved the Lord, loved to have the Bible read to her, and I wish some pastor or elder had taken the time when she was a young adult to teach her to read. Part of why she liked attending a Reformed church was that “You’re not like most white preachers. You tell it like it is, lots about our sin, lots about the devil, and you back it all up from the Bible!”
In the modern world we assume basically everyone who is a native speaker of English has the ability to read and write, at least at a rudimentary level.
That’s not the case and we shouldn’t assume. Especially with older people and with immigrants.
FWIW, this isn’t just a non-Western problem or a problem of the American South due to the legacy of slavery. In rural Italy of the mid-to-late 1800s, illiteracy rates were typically in the 90 percent range. My immigrant great-grandparents were unusual in their generation for being able to read and write, and while I don’t know for sure why, I suspect the reason is that another one of my relatives was a priest who cared about teaching literacy to his parishioners, including his own relatives. One of the open doors Protestant missionaries used in rural southern Italy was get the Italian government to appoint them as village schoolteachers in places nobody wanted to go.
The Reformed faith teaches the importance of being able to read our Bibles. It can and historically did change entire societies by teaching people, regardless of their socioeconomic status, the necessity of being able to read God’s Word for themselves.
You don’t know how perfectly timed this article is.