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September 1 - November 14, 2018
If poverty is rooted in broken relationships that result from both individual and systemic brokenness, then highly relational approaches are needed to alleviate poverty. Mobilizing teams of supportive people and their social networks are an essential component of any ministry seeking to overcome a Poverty of Being, a Poverty of Community, a Poverty of Stewardship, and a Poverty of Spiritual Intimacy.
participation typically must be accompanied by something else: early and recognizable success toward the goals that the participants deem to be important.
Development can only occur with people who are willing to change. If people do not believe that they are responsible to take actions to effect positive changes in their lives, it is very difficult to make progress with them. Note, the previous paragraph should not be interpreted to mean that materially poor people are always to blame for the situations in which they find themselves.
If, as we get involved with people, it becomes clear that they are simply unwilling to even consider any changes, then it is not loving to enable them to persist in sin by providing them with handouts of food, clothing, or shelter. Rather, the loving thing to do is to allow them to feel the burden of their choice in hopes that this will trigger positive change. One caveat to this would be if the person is so mentally ill that they do not have the capacity to make responsible choices.
when applied to the plight of the poor, this overarching narrative means helping to restore materially poor people to what God created them to be: people who can fulfill their callings of glorifying God by working and supporting themselves and their families with the fruit of that work.
God wants us to be generous to the materially poor with both our time and our money. We are to “spend [ourselves] in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed” (Isa. 58:10a). But as we do so, we must proceed in a way that does not undermine the ultimate goal of restoring them to what they were created to be.
The Bible does not command mindless “generosity,” but rather the use of wisdom and prudence that keeps the end goal in mind: restoration of people to what they were created to be.
poverty can be the result of structural injustice, natural disasters, personal sin, or some combination thereof. It is crucial that people identify any portion of the problem that is of their own making so that they can begin to address these issues. Second, does the individual or group understand that they have the responsibility to take some actions to improve their situation, even if not all aspects of the situation are within their power to change?
If a life-changing crisis is not at play and the person is unwilling to engage in constructing an action plan, then they, not you, are refusing help.
Christians must engage with the community as a whole—including everything from the police department to the recreation center to the grocery store—if we are to bear witness to Christ’s reconciliation of all things.
God has created a diversity of legitimate institutions in society—families, businesses, governments, schools, etc.—each of which has its proper role to play. No single institution should seek to take on the responsibilities that God has given to other institutions. Families are not businesses, and churches are not governments. Each institution needs to fulfill the role that God has given to it, nothing more and nothing less.
Development is fundamentally a messy process that ultimately depends on the reconciling work of Jesus Christ (Col. 1:19–20) and the power of the Holy Spirit. Development is not something that can be “put into a bottle” and “poured out” whenever and wherever we want it to happen.
At its core, evangelical gnosticism fails to understand who Jesus Christ really is, replacing the biblical Jesus with “Star Trek Jesus,” who beams our souls up out of this world, a world in which He is fundamentally disinterested, a world from which He is fundamentally disconnected. “Star Trek Jesus” has nothing to do with our daily human existence, promising one day to transport only our souls out of here into some disembodied, new, nonhuman existence called heaven; an existence that, quite frankly, doesn’t sound very appealing to most of us, because we are humans and can only imagine what
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You see, in a fallen world, we are all homeless beggars. As Keller explains, each one of us—whether we are materially rich or poor—is longing, like the Prodigal Son, to come home to a feast, a banquet in which all our physical needs are fully satisfied and all our relationships are completely restored, a banquet in which we experience all that it means to be human for the first time. We beggars can all come home to that wonderful feast, not through material resources or superior technology—the gods of modernism—but by embracing “Colossians 1 Jesus,” the Master of the only banquet that can
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The ABCs of Community Ministry: A Curriculum for Congregations
Neither Poverty Nor Riches: A Biblical Theology of Material Possessions
A Guide to Mapping and Mobilizing the Associations in Local Neighborhoods. See especially chapters 3–4.
