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February 25, 2018
I realized that while I have sufficient education and training to deliver a sermon on God’s sovereignty with no forewarning, these slum dwellers were trusting in God’s sovereignty just to get them through the day. And I realized that these people had a far deeper intimacy with God than I probably will ever have in my entire life.
At some level I had implicitly assumed that my economic superiority goes hand in hand with my spiritual superiority. This is none other than the lie of the health-and-wealth gospel: spiritual maturity leads to financial prosperity.
my own arrogance is likely to increase the poverty of the materially poor people I encounter by confirming their feelings of shame and inferiority.
it is not legitimate to conclude that there is nothing uniquely devastating about material poverty. Low-income people daily face a struggle to survive that creates feelings of helplessness, anxiety, suffocation, and desperation that are simply unparalleled in the lives of the rest of humanity.
Sen, it is this lack of freedom to be able to make meaningful choices—to have an ability to affect one’s situation—that is the distinguishing feature of poverty.
poverty consists of broken relationships. Furthermore, we saw that the brokenness in these relationships is expressed not just at a personal level but also in the economic, political, social, and religious systems that humans create.
Poverty is rooted in broken relationships, so the solution to poverty is rooted in the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection to put all things into right relationship again.
We are not the reconciler; Jesus is.
POVERTY ALLEVIATION Poverty alleviation is the ministry of reconciliation: moving people closer to glorifying God by living in right relationship with God, with self, with others, and with the rest of creation.
Rather, the goal is to restore people to a full expression of humanness, to being what God created us all to be, people who glorify God by living in right relationship with God, with self, with others, and with the rest of creation.
MATERIAL POVERTY ALLEVIATION Material poverty alleviation is working to reconcile the four foundational relationships so that people can fulfill their callings of glorifying God by working and supporting themselves and their families with the fruit of that work.
material poverty alleviation involves more than ensuring that people have sufficient material things; rather, it involves the much harder task of empowering people to earn sufficient material things through their own labor, for in so doing we move people closer to being what God created them to be.
How we work and for whom we work really matters.
But part of our striving is also to fall on our knees every day and pray, “Lord, be merciful to me and to my friend here, because we are both sinners.” And part of our striving means praying every day, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven, for without You we cannot fix our communities, our nations, and our world.”
simply having sufficient material things is not the same as “poverty alleviation” as we defined it above. We want people to fulfill their calling “to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever” in their work and in all that they do.
the local church, as an institution, has a key role to play in poverty alleviation, because the gospel has been committed by God to the church. This does not mean that the local church must own, operate, and manage all ministries. Parachurch ministries and individuals have a role to play as well. However, it does mean that we cannot hope for the transformation of people without the involvement of the local church and the verbal proclamation of the gospel that has been entrusted to it.
New Song Urban Ministries and Community Church, which has created a fifteen-block beacon of hope in the darkness. Now in its twentieth year, New Song employs more that eighty staff members and manages a multimillion-dollar annual budget to run its programs for housing, job placement, health care, education, and arts. More than two hundred homes have been rehabilitated, and there is hope in the eyes of the residents for the first time in decades. Deservedly, New Song has received national attention as one of the premier models of church-based community development in North America.
Instead of imposing our own agendas, we sought to place our lives in service to the community…. For over two years we weren’t working to renovate houses, we were out and around in the community, “hanging out.”
So during the summer, for example, at least once a month all of us would pile into a couple of vans and go to a park for a picnic. We would go downtown and sometimes take trips to other cities. Community came through having fun together, sharing our lives, and learning to be followers of Christ together.
As Mark, Allan, and Susan developed friendships with the long-standing residents, they all began to dream together about what could be done to improve the community.
This was a community-based strategy that would enable the people of the community—who had always been left out of the process and the benefits of urban development—to own, manage, and be stewards of their architectural and economic environments. We didn’t start planning by considering the funding or even what funds we thought could be raised. Instead, we began with what was right for Sandtown and faithful to the gospel.3
A long-standing debate in the political arena concerns the extent to which people are materially poor due to their personal failures or to the effects of broken systems on their lives.
Jesus’ redemption is cosmic in scope, bringing reconciliation to both individuals and systems. And as ministers of reconciliation, His people need to be concerned with both
Carl Ellis, a scholar who has studied “ghetto nihilism” extensively, notes that incidents like this emanate from a worldview of “predatory gratification” that is embraced by some members of the criminal subset of ghetto populations. This worldview sees other human beings simply as “prey” that may be destroyed if it fills the hunter’s belly.
As these examples illustrate, faulty worldviews can be key obstacles, implying that worldview transformation must often play a central role in poverty-alleviation efforts. In fact, in some cases people’s worldviews are so distorted that it is difficult to bring about any progress at all until the people undergo a major paradigm shift. This has huge implications for the design of our programs and ministries and for the funding sources that we choose. Governments are not usually good donors for biblical worldview transformation!
You don’t know how it is to take a life until you value life itself. Those boys didn’t value life. Those boys didn’t have too much reason to value life. Now they killed someone and a part of them is dead too.12
having the right concept about how a relationship is supposed to work does not automatically make the relationship work well.
Healthy relationships require transformed hearts, not just transformed brains.
most of the systems in which the materially poor live—systems that contribute to their poverty—are outside of their control.
The vast majority of the economic, social, religious, and political systems in which a particular individual lives are not created or even influenced by that individual. Rather, most of these systems are the result of thousands of years of human activity operating on a local, national, and international scale. Yes, these systems have been and continue to be shaped by human beings, but most individuals, particularly the materially poor, have very little control over them. Nevertheless, these systems can play a huge role in contributing to their material poverty.
Unfortunately, as recent research has demonstrated, Caucasian evangelicals in the United States, for whom the systems have worked well, are particularly blind to the systemic causes of poverty and are quick to blame the poor for their plight.15 Evangelicals tend to believe that systemic arguments for poverty amount to shifting the blame for personal sin and excusing moral failure.
Yes, Alisa sinned by having extramarital sex, and this was a major contributor to her poverty. But many people commit the same sin without plunging into decades of poverty. Why? Part of the answer is that for a variety of historic and contemporary reasons, ghetto residents are embedded in systems that are distinctly different from that of mainstream society. Some of these systems are of their own making, but many of them are not.
Does Alisa have personal sins and behaviors that are contributing to her material poverty? Yes! But to reduce her problem to this ignores the comprehensive impact of the fall on both individuals and systems and blinds us to our need to bring the reality of Christ’s redemption to bear on both.
“evangelical gnosticism,” a sacred-secular divide in which God is lord of the spiritual realm—Sunday worship, devotions, evangelism, discipleship, etc.—but is largely irrelevant to the “physical” or “secular” realms—business, the arts, politics, science, and poverty alleviation.
too often the North American missions movement has exported this sacred-secular divide to other cultures, failing to communicate the full implications of Christ’s kingdom for all aspects of life.
Too often we drill wells, dispense medicine, and provide food without narrating that Jesus Christ is the Creator and Provider of these material things. Then later we offer a Bible study in which we explain that Jesus can save our souls. This approach communicates evangelical gnosticism: material things solve material poverty, and Jesus solves spiritual poverty.
“Colossians 1 Jesus.” As a result, we fail to introduce materially poor people to the only one who can truly reconcile the broken relationships that underlie their material poverty.
Seeing this, the Bolivian farmers may very well go from worshiping the Pachamama to worshiping the penicillin! In other words, we may inadvertently replace the traditional worldview with a secular, “modern” worldview, which puts its faith in science, technology, and material things.17
Failing to root the curriculum in an explicitly biblical worldview could have been devastating, even if the program participants successfully obtained jobs and increased their incomes as a result of the program. Remember, the goal is for everyone involved to glorify God, not just to increase people’s incomes.
we are very prone to putting our trust in ourselves and in technology to improve our lives, forgetting that it is God who is the Creator and Sustainer of us and of the laws that make the technology work.
the Bible never suggests that these realities should prevent us from studying, applying, and communicating the gospel and its implications to others (Ps. 119:105, 130; Matt. 28:18–20; 2 Tim. 3:16–4:5).
Yes, we must be humble and must constantly reexamine ourselves in the light of Scripture. But we must not shy away from declaring biblical truth, for our confidence rests in the power of the Word of God and in the active presence of the Holy Spirit to overcome our inadequacies.
In summary, at the end of the day, people need to move from worshiping Pachamama to worshiping the Creator of the penicillin. Such a move requires a verbal articulation of biblical theism: the penicillin works bec...
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Do the ministries to the poor with which you are involved narrate that God is the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of the technology, resources, and methods that you are bringing? Or are you inadvertently communicating that the power is in the technology, resources, and methods?
A helpful first step in thinking about working with the poor in any context is to discern whether the situation calls for relief, rehabilitation, or development.
“Relief” can be defined as the urgent and temporary provision of emergency aid to reduce immediate suffering from a natural or man-made crisis.
The key feature of relief is a provider-receiver dynamic in which the provider gives assistance—often material—to the receiver, who is largely incapable of helping himself at that time.
“Rehabilitation” begins as soon as the bleeding stops; it seeks to restore people and their communities to the positive elements of their precrisis conditions.
“Development” is a process of ongoing change that moves all the people involved—both the “helpers” and the “helped”—closer to being in right relationship with God, self, others, and the rest of creation. In particular, as the materially poor develop, they are better able to fulfill their calling of glorifying God by working and supporting themselves and their families with the fruits of that work.
One of the biggest mistakes that North American churches make—by far—is in applying relief in situations in which rehabilitation or development is the appropriate intervention.
