Adapted from When Helping Hurts.

Are people trapped in material poverty due to their own personal failures or due to the effects of broken systems on their lives? This long-standing debate tends to divide people into camps (and approaches to addressing poverty) that take one or the other view, and more or less reject its opposite.

Many of us learned as children in Sunday school that Adam and Eve’s fall into sin messed up absolutely everything. If everything is broken, then that means both individuals and systems are broken. Christians should be open to the idea that both individuals and systems (or the interplay between them) could be the problem as we try to diagnose the causes of poverty in any particular context and address it in effective ways.

Unfortunately, what too few of us seem to have learned in Sunday school is that, just like the Fall is cosmic in scope, so is Jesus’ redemption, bringing reconciliation to both individuals and systems. As ministers of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18-20), His people need to be concerned with both as well.

How We See the World Matters

When working at the individual level to address material poverty, all of us—whether materially poor or materially well-off—need to understand the nature of how God intends human beings to relate to Him, ourselves, others, and creation. In order to enjoy flourishing in these foundational relationships, we need to examine our worldviews—which may be defined as the “total set of beliefs or assumptions that comprise the mind-set of an individual and determine what they believe and how they behave.”¹

These beliefs and mindsets don’t just operate at the level of thoughts, either. Most of us have internalized much of what we believe from our surrounding cultures without even realizing it. We are conditioned to automatically and subconsciously think, feel, and act the ways that we do as a matter of habit.²

This isn’t just an academic question. Worldviews that stray from the vision of life outlined in Scripture can be a major cause of material poverty. Let’s look at a few examples (with identifying details removed):

Distorted Views of God

A Christian relief and development agency once attempted to improve crop yields for farmers in an impoverished area of South America. The program worked, increasing food output, but the impact on the farmers’ incomes was far less than the organization hoped. The farmers’ deep reverence for a traditional deity who they believed presided over planting and harvesting led them to make costly sacrifices to seek the goddess’ favor before planting and celebrate with a festival to her at the harvest. The larger the harvest, the larger the celebration. In fact, a large percentage of the farmers’ income was being spent on the sacrifices and festivals, contributing to the farmers’ material poverty. By increasing agricultural output without addressing these underlying beliefs and behaviors, the development agency realized it was actually leading the farmers in increasing false worship and failing to address their poverty!

Distorted Views of Self

A woman working to get off public assistance funding felt trapped. Finding and keeping a job was a struggle—everything seemed stacked against her and discouraged her. She felt like a failure with multiple kids, no high school diploma and little confidence. In addition to preventing her from looking for work, this woman’s feelings of inferiority likely contributed to her material poverty in more subtle ways. As one doctor explains, “For many young women (young girls, really), having a child may be the only way of finding someone to love and be loved by.” ³Getting pregnant as a teenager caused this woman to drop out of high school. Without a diploma and with nobody to watch her children, her pregnancy led to long-term patterns of economic struggle for her and her family.

Distorted Views of Others

In neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, living conditions are often harsh, even in otherwise wealthy areas. Utilities and city services are unreliable, and landlords often delay or refuse needed repairs to housing units. The conditions lead many who grow up in these communities to have low views of themselves but also correspondingly low views of other people. It becomes possible to see other human beings as “competitors” for scarce resources or “targets” for meeting other needs through theft or even random acts of violence perpetrated to gain status with a gang.

Such cycles of violence obviously contribute directly to the material poverty of their victims, but the total impact on other neighborhood residents is more subtle and more comprehensive. Living in the context of violence, some children correctly assume that they will not live very long. This can make them very present-oriented and give them little incentive to invest in their futures. And of course, the failure to get a good education contributes to their struggle with material poverty.⁴

Distorted Views of Creation

In many parts of the world, people carry long-standing beliefs that unpredictable spirits control the material world, implying that the creation is chaotic and uncontrollable by humans. This can lead to a fatalism that prevents them from exercising dominion and improving their material well-being. Even in wealthy countries, people in neighborhoods of concentrated, generational poverty can fall into resignation about the status quo. When schools and hospitals are built or economic development programs are enacted in these communities without speaking to the ways God created humans to exercise agency in His world, these resources can go unused, and long-term transformation remains elusive.

Embracing a Biblical Worldview

When a pastor and development worker decided to confront this worldview with one tribe in Central America that refused to store crops safely, allowing rats to eat the harvest and contributing to widespread malnutrition. He asked the farmers, “Who is smarter, you or the rats? Do you have dominion over the rats, or do the rats have dominion over your lives?”⁵ As the farmers began to embrace a biblical view of their calling as image bearers of God given dominion over creation, better food storage facilities were created, children went to school, women learned to read, and farmers began to adopt improved agricultural techniques.

As these examples illustrate, the ways we see the world can be key contributors to poverty, and worldview transformation often plays a key role in poverty alleviation efforts. The whole gospel brings a paradigm shift to all our work in the world—whether we are materially poor or materially wealthy. Western Christians who seek to address poverty need to remember that our own worldviews need transformation as well. We have been deeply affected by materialism, relativism, scientific humanism, and more views, all of which have contributed to economic anxieties, addictions, mental health issues, and broken families in mainstream culture. We’re not OK either. And all of us need transformation by God’s power to become who He created us to be.

1.  Scott D. Allen and Darrow L. Miller, The Forest in the Seed: A Biblical Perspective on Resources and Development (Phoenix: Disciple Nations Alliance, 2006), 15. ↩︎
2.  As James K. A. Smith shows in Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, vol. 1, Cultural Liturgies (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009). ↩︎
3. David Hilfiker, Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 50. ↩︎
4.  See Ruby K. Payne and Bill Ehlig, What Every Church Member Should Know About Poverty (Baytown, Tex.: RFT Publishing, 1999).
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5.  This story is taken from Disciple Nations Alliance, Aturo Cuba’s Ministry among the Pokomchi in Guatemala (Phoenix: Disciple Nations Alliance, 2004), 2. ↩︎