Don’t Forget the Poor: A Biblical Approach to Addressing Poverty
For Pentecostals and Charismatics, this creates an even greater embarrassment. Luke records the narrative of Jesus returning to Galilee after His temptations in the wilderness and what He said and did when He was full of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 4:14). He went to the synagogue to teach and explain what was happening in Kingdom terms by quoting Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor …” (v. 18).
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We need to think intelligently about how to fulfil the biblical mandates to serve the poor and to bring the gospel to them. To do that we first need to redefine our concept of who the poor are and to understand what causes their poverty. If we understand the causes, we can begin to address them with our God-given resources.
Accurately Defining Poverty
When we think of the poor, our minds may instinctively jump to street beggars who plead with us to give them money. Or, we may visualize impoverished people continents away and want to send money or short-term mission teams to help them. In our mind’s eye, we may see poor African children with inadequate water, nutrition, and education. We suppose the answer is to build an orphanage or a school. I have tried to address this “edifice complex” by pleading with the international community to change their thinking from putting up buildings and creating new organizations to think in terms of providing community care.2
One item of good news in the world today is that although there are still hundreds of millions of poor people, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has actually been reduced by 50 percent since 2000. This was one of the eight Millennium Development Goals that the United Nations set that year.
The progress in reducing extreme poverty resulted from effective development strategies that increased the number of people who have jobs and can support themselves by their own labor. The best thing that one can give a materially poor person is a job, not a handout. Increasing global trade and creating jobs are all part of the developmental strategies that address the materially poor.
These strategies are complex and require long-term sustained commitment by people who understand that development is not something you do for the poor but with the poor. Bryant Meyers eloquently refers to this as “walking with the poor.”3 When we address those who are materially poor, we need to learn long-term relational skills that enable our “walking with them.”
It is important that we accurately define the nature and causes of poverty because our response to poverty is determined by our understanding. If we believe that poverty is simply the lack of material resources, then our response would instinctively be to provide money and resources for the poor. If we believe that poverty is simply the result of personal sins on the part of individuals, then our response would be to just bring the gospel to them. Marxists believe that poverty results from the exploitation of the masses by the bourgeoisie or property-owning capitalist class. Their answer to poverty is to overthrow this class, so that the workers can take control of the means of production. Our definition of poverty and its causes will determine our approach to help people who suffer from it.
Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert have written one of the best books on alleviating poverty in recent years, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor … and Yourself.4 They correctly identify the cause of poverty as “the result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable. Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meaning”5 (emphasis added). The biblical word shalom or “peace” means much more than the lack of conflict. It represents the well-being that God desires for all people and creation. The lack of shalom results in poverty of relationships and the spirit as well as material lack.
Category: Living the Faith, Summer 2016
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