Hunger is a great motivator to work.
Taking care of the poor is and always has been the job of the church as commissioned by Jesus and it should be to get people back on their feet, like the Amish do, not as a permanent lifestyle which your proposed plan would end up being, just as present day welfare is now.
No hand outs from the government. Period.
All you’re offering is welfare lite, which will not stay that way and will not motivate people to get off it.
What I'm offering is a handful of suggestions as to what Republican/conservative social programs might plausibly look like if pubbies had the sense to do it and, again, Ronald Reagan was on my side on this one or he would not have commissioned the study I mention. Ronald Reagan was conservative enough for me at least...
Other than that, I'd be happy with a church-only approach if you could guarantee me that no child in America would ever be left out of such a system because either he didn't fit into some church's scheme of things or because the church was too busy fighting lawsuits involving celibacy (or the lack thereof) to deal with it.
Eva Peron mentioned giving some poor woman a sewing machine and getting a letter in the mail the next week with five pesos in it from the woman's first earnings with the thing. That's the sort of thing which strikes me as a rational social program and the churches in Argentina had had years and multiple opportunities to provide that poor woman with a sewing machine and had never done it.