Becoming Whole Quotes

“What many people call “psychological problems” are simple issues of idolatry. Perfectionism, workaholism, chronic indecisiveness, the need to control the lives of others—all of these stem from making good things into idols that then drive us into the ground as we try to appease them. Idols dominate our lives. 1 —TIM KELLER, THEOLOGIAN AND PASTOR, 2009”
― Brian Fikkert, Becoming Whole: Why the Opposite of Poverty isn't the American Dream

“To provide at least some partial answers to these questions, we will describe God’s “story of change.” A story of change—often referred to as a “theory of change” in the social service sector—answers two key questions: 1. What is the goal of life? 2. How can this goal be achieved?2 Stories of change are powerful.”
― Brian Fikkert, Becoming Whole: Why the Opposite of Poverty isn't the American Dream

“We were poor on the outside, but also on the inside, because poverty starts in the heart.1 —CELESTIN, A VERY POOR MAN IN RWANDA, 2014”
― Brian Fikkert, Becoming Whole: Why the Opposite of Poverty isn't the American Dream

“The American Dream is the wrong story, for both poor people and ourselves.”
― Brian Fikkert, Becoming Whole: Why the Opposite of Poverty isn't the American Dream

“We believe these disturbing trends reveal a tragic irony in our poverty alleviation efforts. On one hand, many of us can sense that there is something wrong with both Western civilization and the Western church. We can tell they aren’t working, and we don’t like who we’ve become. On the other hand, the unstated assumption behind most of our poverty alleviation efforts is that the goal is to make poor people just like us. We implicitly believe that we have exactly what the poor need, so we try to turn Uganda into the United States and America’s inner cities into its affluent suburbs. Thus, we design our poverty alleviation initiatives—our interventions, operations, staffing, funding, marketing, metrics, messages, and goals—to help poor people pursue the American Dream. But why would we want to do that? We are not okay. You can feel it, and we can feel it. And as we shall see later, as poor people become more like us, they can feel it too.”
― Brian Fikkert, Becoming Whole: Why the Opposite of Poverty isn't the American Dream

“The goal is not to turn Zimbabwe into the United States or to turn decaying neighborhoods into wealthy suburbs. Nor is the goal to reshape the world into the image of Western Christianity. We are not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Rather, the goal is to seek to be as much like the New Jerusalem as possible. And to achieve that goal, we need a different story of change, one that is centered on the gospel, the good news that most of us don’t really understand.”
― Brian Fikkert, Becoming Whole: Why the Opposite of Poverty isn't the American Dream

“You see, the story of poverty alleviation shouldn’t be to turn Uganda into the United States or the inner cities into the suburbs, for all these places are fundamentally broken. Rather, the right story calls for all these places to become more like the New Jerusalem. That’s God’s story. It’s the only story that is actually true, the only story in which we can actually play the roles for which we’ve been created. It’s the only story that actually works.”
― Brian Fikkert, Becoming Whole: Why the Opposite of Poverty isn't the American Dream