The Poor People's Campaign - a conversation

The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis will lead a discussion about the theology that guides her work and the new effort to build a Poor People’s Campaign to unite the poor and dispossessed into a broad social movement. It is inspired by the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the last years of his life, King became convinced that a movement led by a united force of the “poor and dispossessed” was what was needed to confront the triplet evils of racism, poverty, and militarism. Like the Rev. Dr. King, the leaders of today’s Poor People’s Campaign believe this is not only a struggle against specific laws and policies, but a struggle for our deepest moral and religious beliefs. This will be an opportunity to learn about the Poor People’s Campaign and how Presbyterians might engage this initiative. The Rev. Denise Anderson and the Rev. Jan Edmiston, co-moderators of the 222nd General Assembly (2016) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), have called the church to study the Rev. Dr. Theoharis’ book, Always with Us?, and to learn more about the Poor People’s Campaign.

The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, the co-director of the Kairos Center and the co-chair of the Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, has spent the last two decades with grassroots, community-led, anti-poverty organizations working to build the movement to end poverty. In her book, Always with Us?, she argues that being poor is not inevitable and that a theology that suggests otherwise has stifled the growth of a transformative movement to end poverty.