ATLANTA (ABP) — Dragging middle class folks out of the classroom or out of their comfortable homes for a brief immersion experience into poverty is not something new.
Larry McSwain, who popularized poverty plunges while teaching at Southern Seminary, now is a professor at McAfee School of Theology.
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When Larry McSwain was a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1971 he trained for three weeks with the Urban Training Center in Chicago, a now defunct operation that showed the inner-city ropes to people interested in urban ministry.
After a general orientation to Chicago McSwain's group each received $4.50, was shown the door and told not to come back for three days. At first, he was scared, but he eventually felt confident enough in his ability to survive to spend $1.50 on a general admission ticket to see the Cubs play baseball.
McSwain slept in a hallway of Moody Bible Institute, until a night watchman hit him with his club and told him to find a flophouse downtown.
Now a professor of leadership and doctor of ministry supervisor at McAfee School of Theology, McSwain adopted what he learned for his students at Southern, where he taught for 23 years.
Strictly voluntary, students were to walk a poverty stricken neighborhood in Louisville for three hours. When he picked them up at 9 p.m., two of the six students had been robbed at gunpoint.
"They were white when I picked them up and they couldn't stop talking," McSwain said. "Both ended up doing inner city ministry work."
The evening dip proved to be such a powerful learning experience, McSwain fashioned a 24-hour plunge for students whom he set loose with 50 cents in their pockets.
"I have students to this day who tell me it was their most formative experience in seminary," McSwain said, including the wife of his current pastor.
"I encouraged them to panhandle and see who would give them money and who wouldn't," McSwain said. "They'd stand outside the theaters and art centers and people would look right past them. They'd go downtown and drunks would give them a dollar."
Ultimately, immersing yourself into a foreign environment is an effort to learn and it tests your values. Before the plunge, McSwain said, students never would have stolen to eat. Afterward, they told him if necessary, they would steal to eat.
"They saw that much desperation in the people around them," McSwain said. "They came back being more willing to lie or manipulate in order to survive. The survival value overtook all other competing values."
Students also came back with a significant increase in compassion for the poor; with a changed attitude toward their humanity and their generosity.
Students became ministers to those they encountered and universally lost a lot of fear. They realized the foreign environment "is not as dangerous as our myths make (it) out to be."
The experience softened students' attitudes toward the homeless, and hardened attitudes toward their own middle class affluence because of how they were treated on the street.
Students gained a greater appreciation of Catholic social ministries because they were not as "manipulative" as they saw among some evangelical ministries, he said.
McSwain gave up the plunge experience after about 10 years when he could not devote the necessary time. And, by the late '70s, he concluded the legal risk for an institution to sponsor such events "was probably pretty high."
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Norman Jameson is reporting and coordinating special projects for ABP on an interim basis. He is former editor of the North Carolina Biblical Recorder.
Read more New Voice stories:
• Plunge soaks participants in ways of poverty
• Debriefing a poverty simulation
• Poverty simulation begs middle class questions