The economy exists to serve human life, not the other way around. Markets, investment, technology, and development are valuable instruments for creating opportunity and improving society. Yet when economic success increasingly depends upon exclusion, displacement, and the protection of prosperity from poverty, the economy begins to lose sight of its deepest purpose.
One visible expression of this shift is what may be called a fence economy.
A fence economy does not merely build barriers around property. It gradually constructs barriers around belonging. As housing costs rise beyond the reach of ordinary workers, neighborhoods become inaccessible to those who once sustained them. Longtime residents are displaced, the unhoused are pushed from one place to another, and public spaces are increasingly regulated through fences, locked gates, defensive architecture, and other forms of exclusion.
These structures reveal more than changing city design. They reflect changing social priorities.
When barriers multiply while affordable homes remain scarce, when investment grows while communities fragment, and when prosperity becomes increasingly separated from human dignity, the landscape itself begins to testify to a widening divide between wealth and poverty.
The Gospel presents a profoundly different economy.
Jesus consistently moved toward those whom society had pushed aside. He crossed boundaries that others refused to cross. He touched the untouchable, welcomed the stranger, ate with the excluded, and announced good news to the poor. His Kingdom was never organized around protecting privilege but around restoring communion.
The Cross stands at the center of that Kingdom.
Significantly, Christ was crucified outside the city gate. He entered the place of exclusion in order to open the way to reconciliation. What humanity closed, God opened. What society rejected, God redeemed. The Cross therefore reveals that the economy of God is fundamentally different from every economy built upon fear, exclusion, or possession.
The economy of the Cross is an economy of welcome.
It measures wealth not only by accumulated capital, but by restored relationships.
It measures prosperity not only by rising markets, but by whether neighbors can remain, flourish, and belong.
It values land without forgetting the people who live upon it.
It honors property without diminishing human dignity.
It seeks justice without abandoning mercy.
This vision does not reject enterprise, innovation, or responsible stewardship. Rather, it insists that economic growth reaches its highest purpose when it strengthens the common good. Markets are healthiest when they expand opportunity instead of narrowing it, when they make room for families, workers, the elderly, children, and those who have fallen into hardship.
Every society eventually reveals its true economy through the structures it builds.
If it continually builds fences, it teaches fear.
If it continually builds homes, it teaches hope.
If it continually builds communities, it teaches love.
The Gospel therefore calls both the Church and society to examine not merely the strength of the economy, but the character of the economy. For an economy that protects wealth while abandoning neighbors cannot fully reflect the justice of God.
The Kingdom of God is never measured first by the height of its walls, but by the breadth of its table.
For where Christ reigns, fences no longer define the future.
The neighbor does.
Pastor Steven G. Lee
St. GMC Corps
July 1, 2026
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