Genuine Christian Concern and Charity

How Christians can really help the poor:

It is a given that Christians should be concerned about the poor, about dealing with poverty, and about demonstrating compassion for the needy. Hopefully all believers agree with that. Disagreements arise however as to what is the best way to do this.

Some religious leftists take the socialist approach, believing the state is the one to fix all these problems. Many of them are happy to parrot the line of the secular socialists: ‘We must get the government to become even more involved in helping the poor’.

Others of a more conservative variety recognise that there is a place for the state – but on a much more limited level. They believe the free market, along with the church and voluntary societies, are much more effective – and much more biblical – in really helping the poor. I have often made the case for the latter on this site.

Here I want to highlight three books that have been around for a while now. They all make the case that too often churches and Christians can do more harm than good when it comes to charity and help for the needy. They are:

Corbett, Steve and Brian Fikkert, When Helping Hurts. Moody Press, 2009, 2012.
Corbett, Steve and Brian Fikkert, Helping Without Hurting. Moody Press, 2015.
Lupton, Robert, Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help. HarperOne, 2011.

A few quotes from each one will give you a feel for where they are coming from and might inspire you to grab a copy of each and read them for yourself. While all deal primarily with America and the American church scene, what is said in them certainly applies to many other Western nations.

When Helping Hurts

No single sector can alleviate poverty on its own. Like all human beings, poor people have a range of physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs. Hence, appropriate interventions for poor people include such diverse sectors as economic development, health, education, agriculture, spiritual formation, etc.

 

In summary, while all Christians have a responsibility to help the poor, there is enormous diversity in the ways that each Christian is to fulfill the biblical mandate….

 

… [There is] the exploding short-term mission movement, much of which has focused on ministering to the poor at home and abroad.

 

But our excitement about these developments is seriously tempered by two convictions. First, North American Christians are simply not doing enough. We are the richest people ever to walk the face of the earth. Period. Yet, most of us live as though there is nothing terribly wrong in the world. . . . We do not necessarily need to feel guilty about our wealth. but we do need to get up every morning with a deep sense that something is terribly wrong with the world and yearn and strive to do something about it.

 

Second, many observers, including Steve and I, believe that when North American Christians do attempt to alleviate poverty, the methods used often do considerable harm to both the materially poor and the materially non-poor. Our concern is not just that these methods are wasting human, spiritual, financial, and organizational resources but that these methods are actually exacerbating the very problems they are trying to solve.

 

Fortunately, there is hope, because God is at work. By renewing our commitment, by adjusting our methods, and by repenting daily, we North American Christians can play a powerful role in alleviating poverty at home and abroad.

Helping Without Hurting.

We have to get the diagnosis right. And therein lies one of the fundamental problems with poverty alleviation: being materialistic people, many North Americans tend to think of the disease of poverty as being a lack of material things, such as money, food, clothing, and shelter. As a result, many of us think that the best way to alleviate poverty is simply to give material things to low-income people: money to pay the electric bill, turkeys and toys at Christmas, warm clothing during the winter….

 

As we seek to bring the good news of Christ’s reconciliation to a hurting world, we are immediately confronted with the fact that there are different kinds of material poverty, even though they often look the same on the surface. For example, there is a huge difference between the poverty of a family that cannot pay their rent due to unforeseen health problems and the poverty of a family that cannot pay their rent due to being unwilling to work. The families in both of these situations have a housing problem, but the underlying circumstances that have contributed to their plight are very different and require entirely different responses.

 

In this light, it is sometimes helpful to think of three broad categories of poverty alleviation:

 

-Relief can be defined as the urgent and temporary provision of emergency aid to reduce immediate suffering from a natural or man-made crisis. After a crisis, there is a need to halt the free fall and to “stop the bleeding,” and this is what relief attempts to do….

 

-Rehabilitation begins as soon as the bleeding stops and seeks to restore people to the positive elements of their pre-crisis conditions. The key feature of rehabilitation is a dynamic of working with the person, asking them to take positive actions as they participate in their own recovery.

 

-Development is a process of ongoing change that moves all the people involved — both the materially poor and materially non-poor — closer to being in right relationship with God, self, others, and the rest of creation than they have been in the past. For materially poor people who are able-bodied, development includes their moving toward fulfilling their calling of glorifying God by working and supporting themselves and their families with the fruits of that work. 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. Development is not done to people or for people but with people.

Toxic Charity

What Americans avoid facing is that while we are very generous in charitable giving, much of that money is either wasted or actually harms the people it is targeted to help….

 

Almost 90 percent of American adults are involved personally or financially in the charity industry…

 

But what is happening is that its outcomes are almost entirely unexamined. The food we ship to Haiti, the well we dig in Sudan, the clothes we distribute in inner-city Detroit—all seem like such worthy efforts. Yet those closest to the ground—on the receiving end of this outpouring of generosity—quietly admit that it may be hurting more than helping. How? Dependency. Destroying personal initiative. When we do for those in need what they have the capacity to do for themselves, we disempower them.

 

Africa can serve as a large-scale example of the problem. In the last fifty years, the continent has received $1 trillion in benevolent aid. How effective has this aid been? Country by country, Africans are far worse off today than they were a half century, ago. Overall per-capita income is lower today than in the 1970s. Over half of Africa’s 700 million population lives on less than $1 a day. Life expectancy has stagnated, and adult literacy has plummeted below pre-1980 levels. “Its a kind of curse.” says Dambisa Moyo, an African economist and the author of Dead Aid. Aid. though intended to promote health, becomes “the disease of which it pretends to be the cure.”

 

A similar devastation has been inflicted upon the subsidized poor of our own country (though admittedly not as extreme). For all our efforts to eliminate poverty—our entitlements, our programs, our charities—we have succeeded only in creating a permanent underclass, dismantling their family structures, and eroding their ethic of work. And our poor continue to become poorer.

 

In over forty years working with the urban poor in inner-city Atlanta and around the globe, I have learned that it takes more than high ideals to bring about substantive change in populations of need. The organization I founded, Focused Community Strategies, has worked diligently to sort out, by trial and error, which efforts result in actual transformation and which efforts have results that are ultimately noxious and harmful.

 

Still, I continually witness profoundly broken systems in nonprofit work. Many people legitimately fault the government for decades of failed social programs. and yet frequently we embrace similar forms of disempowering charity through our kindhearted giving. And religiously motivated charity is often the most irresponsible. Our free food and clothing distribution encourages ever-growing handout lines, diminishing the dignity of the poor while increasing their dependency. We converge on inner-city neighborhoods to plant flowers and pick up trash, bruising the pride of residents who have the capacity (and responsibility) to beautify their own environments. We fly off on mission trips to poverty-stricken villages, hearts full of pity and suitcases bulging with giveaway goods, trips that one Nicaraguan leader describes as effective only in “turning my people into beggars.”…

 

The Oath for Compassionate Service

-Never do for the poor what they have (or could have) the capacity to do for themselves.

-Limit one-way giving to emergency situations.

-Strive to empower the poor through employment, lending, and investing, using grants sparingly to reinforce achievements.

-Subordinate self-interests to the needs of those being served.

-Listen closely to those you seek to help, especially to what is not being said – unspoken feelings may contain essential clues to effective service.
|-Above all, do no harm.

Suffice it to say that these brief quotes are backed up by a good amount of detailed documentation and practical application. So I suggest you check these volumes out for all the helpful information they offer on how Christians and churches can ensure that we really help – and not hurt – the poor and needy.

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