When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself

by Steve Corbett

the North American church should have a profound sense of urgency to spend ourselves “in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed” (Isa. 58:10).

“The kingdom is the renewal of the whole world through the entrance of supernatural forces. As things are brought back under Christ’s rule and authority, they are restored to health, beauty, and freedom.”

When a sick person goes to the doctor, the doctor could make two crucial mistakes: (1) Treating symptoms instead of the underlying illness; (2) Misdiagnosing the underlying illness and prescribing the wrong medicine. Either one of these mistakes will result in the patient not getting better and possibly getting worse. The same is true when we work with poor people. If we treat only the symptoms or if we misdiagnose the underlying problem, we will not improve their situation, and we might actually make their lives worse. And as we shall see later, we might hurt ourselves in the process.

God established four foundational relationships for each person: a relationship with God, with self, with others, and with the rest of creation (see figure 2.1).14 These relationships are the building blocks for all of life. When they are functioning properly, humans experience the fullness of life that God intended, because we are being what God created us to be.

This sustenance is continuing, even in a fallen world. Hence, Christ is actively engaged in sustaining the economic, social, political, and religious systems in which humans live. There is certainly real mystery here, but the central point of Scripture is clear: as humans engage in cultural activity, they are unpacking a creation that Christ created, sustains, and as we shall see later, redeems.

until we embrace our mutual brokenness, our work with low-income people is likely to do far more harm than good.

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.

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.

The goal is not to make the materially poor all over the world into middle-to-upper-class North Americans, a group characterized by high rates of divorce, sexual addiction, substance abuse, and mental illness. Nor is the goal to make sure that the materially poor have enough money. Indeed, America’s welfare system ensured that Alisa Collins and her family had more than enough money to survive, but they felt trapped. 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. One of the many manifestations of these relationships being reconciled is material poverty alleviation:

Do we strive for such reconciliation? Of course, for we are “ministers of reconciliation”! We must do our best to preach the gospel, to find cures for malaria, and to foster affordable housing. 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.”

People and Processes, Not Projects and Products

a proper worldview, which may be defined as the “total set of beliefs or assumptions that comprise the mind-set of an individual and determine what they believe and how they behave.”

Of course, we must always remember that our own worldviews need transformation as well. North Americans Christians have been deeply affected by modernist and now postmodernist worldviews resulting in secularism, materialism, and relativism, all of which have contributed to addictions, mental illnesses, and broken families in our own culture.

What happens when society crams historically oppressed, uneducated, unemployed, and relatively young human beings into high-rise buildings; takes away their leaders; provides them with inferior education, health care, and employment systems; and then pays them not to work? Is it really that surprising that we see out-of-wedlock pregnancies, broken families, violent crimes, and drug trafficking? Worse yet, we end up with nihilism, because these broken systems do serious damage to people’s worldviews. Worldviews affect the systems, and the systems affect the worldviews.

Evangelicals are certainly correct that the Bible never allows one’s circumstances to be an excuse for one’s sin. Period. 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.

evangelical gnosticism: material things solve material poverty, and Jesus solves spiritual poverty. In other words, we communicate “Star Trek Jesus” rather than “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.

When faulty worldviews—whether modernism or evangelical gnosticism—collide with the worldviews of the materially poor themselves, the results can be devastating

all of us have been heavily influenced by the modern worldview, which believes that human reason and effort are able to understand and control the material world without a need for understanding or relying upon God. As a result, 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.

Development is not done to people or for people but with people. The key dynamic in development is promoting an empowering process in which all the people involved—both the “helpers” and the “helped”—become more of what God created them to be,

The Good Samaritan’s handouts were appropriate for the person at point 1, a victim who needed material assistance to stop the bleeding and even prevent death; however, the person at point 3 is not facing an emergency, and handouts of material assistance to such people do not help to restore them to being the productive stewards that they were created to be.

A more developmental approach would have sought greater participation of these men in their own rehabilitation, asking them to exercise stewardship as part of the process of beginning to reconcile their key relationships. We could have involved the men every step along the way, from planning the meal, to shopping for the food, to helping with serving and cleanup. We could have done supper with the men, working and eating side by side, rather than giving supper to the men, engaging in a provider-recipient dynamic that likely confirmed our sense of superiority and their sense of inferiority.

The root issue in all of these considerations is that God, who is a worker, ordained work so that humans could worship Him through their work. Relief efforts applied inappropriately often cause the beneficiaries to abstain from work, thereby limiting their relationship with God through distorted worship or through no worship at all.3

Like all of us, the materially poor are often wrong about how the world works and can benefit from the knowledge of others.

you will also typically find that most existing organizations in your community are focusing on providing relief. Why? There are at least three reasons. First, many service organizations have a material definition of poverty; hence, they believe that handouts of material things are the solution to that poverty. As a result, they often provide relief to people who really need development. Second, relief is easier to do than development. It is much simpler to drop food out of airplanes or to ladle soup out of bowls than it is to develop long-lasting, time-consuming relationships with poor people, which may be emotionally exhausting. Third, it is easier to get donor money for relief than for development. “We fed a thousand people today” sounds better to donors than “We hung out and developed relationships with a dozen people today.”

Think about the materially poor people in North America whom your church or ministry is trying to help. Do these people need relief, rehabilitation, or development? Is your church or ministry pursuing the right strategy for these people? If not, what harm might you be doing to these people and to yourselves? What changes could you make to improve your approach?

many Christian community-development experts have discovered the benefits of using “asset-based community development” (ABCD) as they seek to foster reconciliation of people’s relationships with God, self, others, and creation.

Pouring in outside resources is not sustainable and only exacerbates the feelings of helplessness and inferiority that limits low-income people from being better stewards of their God-given talents and resources.

Some of these needs emanate from their personal sins; some result from unjust social, economic, political, and religious systems; and some come from natural disasters resulting from Adam and Eve’s sin. Indeed, the fall has tainted every last speck of the cosmos. The point of ABCD is not to deny those needs or the deep-seated brokenness that undergirds them. On the contrary, the point of ABCD is to recognize—from the very start—that poverty is rooted in the brokenness of the foundational relationships

it may become clear that the individual or community does not have sufficient assets to address all of the needs. If and when such needs become pressing, it is then appropriate to bring in outside resources to augment local assets. But gauging the appropriate magnitude and timing of these outside resources takes an enormous amount of wisdom. It is crucial that such outside resources do not undermine the willingness or the ability of the poor individual or community to be stewards of their own gifts and resources. When considering bringing in outside resources, we must always ask two questions: (1) Is it too much? (2) Is it too early?

the problem of many poverty-alleviation efforts: the North American need for speed undermines the slow process needed for lasting and effective long-run development.

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) focuses on what is right and good in a community’s past as a means of creating a more positive future.3 Based on a postmodern perspective that says that humans construct their own reality, AI argues that we should facilitate a process in which poor communities narrate what has worked well for them in the past. Once the community has constructed this positive understanding of its history, it can then use this narration to imagine how life can be even better in the future.

Researchers and practitioners have found that meaningful inclusion of poor people in the selection, design, implementation, and evaluation of an intervention increases the likelihood of that intervention’s success.

The crucial thing is to help people to understand their identity as image bearers, to love their neighbors as themselves, to be stewards over God’s creation, and to bring glory to God in all things. One of the many manifestations of such holistic reconciliation is that people exercise dominion over their individual lives and communities, constantly seeking better ways to use their gifts and resources to solve problems and to create bounty in service to God and others.

Secular arguments for participation often rest on two faulty assumptions. First, given the postmodern belief that truth is relative, some argue that poor people must participate in the process because they need to construct their own reality. Who are we outsiders to impose our ideas on poor people? they say. Second, a humanist faith in the inherent goodness of human beings leads some to believe that participation, like democracy, will necessarily produce positive results. Both of these assumptions are wrong from a biblical perspective. The Bible clearly teaches that there is absolute truth and that—to the extent that we know it—we are to speak such truth in love (Eph. 4:15). Moreover, all of us, including poor people, are sinful; participation does not have the capacity to overcome the basic corruption in the human condition. Individuals and groups make bad decisions all the time!

A Participatory Continuum Mode of Participation Type of Involvement of Local People Relationship of Outsiders to Local People Coercion Local people submit to predetermined plans developed by outsiders. DOING TO Compliance Local people are assigned to tasks, often with incentives, by outsiders; the outsiders decide the agenda and direct the process. DOING FOR Consultation Local people’s opinions are asked; local people analyze and decide on a course of action. DOING FOR Cooperation Local people work together with outsiders to determine priorities; responsibility remains with outsiders for directing the process. DOING WITH Co-Learning Local people and outsiders share their knowledge to create appropriate goals and plans, to execute those plans, and to evaluate the results. DOING WITH Community Initiated Local people set their own agenda and mobilize to carry it out without outside initiators and facilitators. RESPOND-ING TO TABLE 6.1

poverty-alleviation efforts often need to address both broken systems and individuals, including a clear articulation of the gospel and a biblical worldview.

Development is a lifelong process, not a two-week product.

a good first step is for the STM trip to be done as part of a long-term, asset-based, development approach being implemented by local ministries. The STM team needs to understand how it fits within the overall strategy of this local ministry and take care not to undermine this ministry’s effectiveness.

Stay away from the “go-help-and-save-them” message and use a “go-as-a-learner” message. We need no more STM brochure covers with sad, dirty faces of children and the words “Will you die to self and go and serve?” Such a message places too much focus on the sacrifice the STM team is making to change people’s lives—a level of change that is simply not realistic in two weeks—and on how helpless the poor people are without the team’s help.

North American production is shifting away from basic manufacturing into services and knowledge-intensive sectors, increasing the demand for highly educated workers in North America. Unfortunately, the job opportunities and wages for blue-collar workers in such sectors are lower than they were in traditional manufacturing jobs. Hence, blue-collar workers in North America are getting squeezed, and this trend is very likely to continue and even accelerate in the coming decades.

a lack of money is not the sole problem in failing schools. Sinful hearts, distorted worldviews, and bad values, many of which may be transmitted via “cultures of poverty” such as ghetto nihilism, significantly contribute to poor student performance. But let us not forget that local, national, and even international forces, including hundreds of years of racial discrimination, contributed to the formation of these ghettos in the first place. Even if there were not any current racial discrimination—and there is—the plague of historic discrimination is perpetuated via the American educational system.

managing wealth develops positive attitudes and self-discipline, requiring people to replace a “live-for-today,” survival mentality with a “live-for-the-future,” investment mentality.

In summary, poor people in North America could benefit from all of the following: (1) the ability to work at jobs with living wages, (2) the capacity to manage their money, (3) the opportunity to accumulate wealth, and (4) a greater supply of quality education, housing, and health care at affordable rates.

Use church-based mentoring teams that can offer love, support, and encouragement, thereby providing a relational approach that seeks to restore people’s dignity (relationship to self), community (relationship to others), stewardship (relationship to the rest of creation), and spiritual intimacy (relationship to God); Are implemented over fairly long periods of time, thereby creating space for “development,” the process of ongoing change and reconciliation, for both the “helpers” and the “helped.”

Jobs for Life network, which mobilizes churches and Christian ministries to help poor people find and keep jobs. A JFL affiliate like Advance coordinates three ministry components: 1. Classroom training for poor people that emphasizes the development of “soft skills” from a biblical perspective. Soft skills are general, nontechnical abilities such as a solid work ethic, the ability to function in a team, and strong communication skills. In contrast, “hard skills” include the technical knowledge needed for specific jobs; for example, an auto mechanic needs to know how an engine operates. JFL develops soft skills using a biblically based curriculum that addresses such issues as career planning, the inherent value of work, good attitudes, personal integrity, respect for authority, conflict resolution, responsibility, punctuality, appropriate dress, etc. 2. Mentors, called “champions,” provide support and encouragement to JFL participants, helping them to overcome obstacles that hinder their ability to complete the class, to get a job, or to cope with life. While one-on-one mentoring is possible, mentoring teams from churches are likely to be able to sustain relationships over longer periods of time, as the mentoring process can be overwhelming. 3. Businesses covenant to provide interviews, job opportunities, and supportive work environments to JFL graduates. This represents a tremendous opportunity for Christian businesspeople to serve the kingdom by helping poor people to ge...

even without the recent explosion in the number of predatory lenders, many poor people—and many people in general—lack the knowledge and discipline to manage their money well. This creates a tremendous opportunity for churches and ministries to provide basic financial education using any number of biblically based curricula that are available. Topics typically covered include Christian stewardship, budgeting, goal setting, saving, debt reduction, record keeping, tithing, taxes, banking, managing credit, and more. A solid financial education curriculum should be part of the tool kit of every church deacon and counselor. Training can be done one-on-one or in group settings, and a team of mentors can provide accountability and relational ministry, walking with trainees across time to foster long-term development.

Because participants are in the program for several years, mentoring teams and program staff have ample opportunity to walk with them in restorative relationships, helping both the poor people and the mentors to have a renewed sense of dignity and hope, to develop new patterns of behavior, and most important to experience the healing of Jesus Christ.

This chapter examines the economic environment facing the poor in the Majority World and suggests three highly strategic ways for churches, missionaries, and ministries to use economic development to impact the lives of the materially poor in the Majority World: (1) Use appropriate forms of MF; (2) Support training in small-business management, household financial stewardship, and related topics; and (3) Pursue “business as missions.” Throughout the discussion, it is important to keep the overall goal in mind: MATERIAL POVERTY ALLEVIATION: 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.

a central feature of development is looking for opportunities to foster the triggers for positive change. Three common triggers for change for individuals or groups are: 1) a recent crisis; 2) the burden of the status quo becoming so overwhelming that they want to pursue change; or 3) the introduction of a new way of doing or seeing things that could improve their lives.

As a group of people who are being transformed by the gospel and who are called to be ministers of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18–20), the local church should be the ideal community for highly relational nurturing of hurting individuals and families.2 But reality often falls far short of the ideal. Typically, the biggest challenge that ministries face is an insufficient number of people who are willing to invest the time and energy that it takes to walk through time with a needy individual or family.