When Helping Hurts

Just finished a book recommended to me called When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett & Brian Fikkert. They have a website that explores the ideas they share in this book.

I'll use some future blog posts to highlight some of my takeaways from this book. In general, the book is about poverty alleviation. Trillions of dollars have been spent on poverty aid and yet 40% of the world still lives on less than $2 per day.

Many Christians (myself included) have given to poverty alleviation programs or have invested thousands of dollars to go on short term mission trips without deeply considering the question: does it help?

This book tackles that question. We have seen evidence that government welfare creates a tough cycle to escape and an unhealthy dependency. Are we practicing a form of Christian welfare by giving money only to others without addressing deeper needs?

Many short term mission trips cost a church $25,000+. Is this money well spent? Before reading this book, I would have thought that the cost was worth it for a couple of reasons:

1. Lives and perspectives of those who go are changed and some decide to devote their lives to full-time missions as a result.

2. Those who go on short-term missions become generous givers to the cause of missions in the future.

However, the evidence documented in this book says different. For the most part, short term missions is a poor allocation of resources in alleviating poverty.

How do we define poverty? Those of us that have material comfort are likely to describe it as a lack of money. The poor describe poverty as shame; inferiority; powerlessness; humiliation; fear; depression; social isolation.

Poverty alleviation efforts often communicate the wrong message: that the poor are inferior and need our superiority for what we can give them. In reality, we each need something from the other. We that have resources are not ok. We trust in those resources instead of trusting in God. We need to learn from those who have less what it is like to depend on God for everything.

And those that are poor need from us help to break the cycle of poverty. Together God can fix us. Fikkert and Cobert define poverty alleviation as 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.

Looking forward to fleshing out more thoughts from this book- a thought provoking read.

For His Glory,

Ashley Hodge