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Living As People of the Resurrection

The work of fighting poverty is a long and difficult road. For every joy and story of transformation, we can all think of sorrows and stories of loss and failure. Walking alongside people through the brokenness of the world is often a one-step-forward-three-steps-back process. It is easy for ministry practitioners and volunteers to grow weary and ministry participants to grow discouraged. Real hope for people and systems in a fallen world seems elusive, and anxiety is poor fuel for sustainable ministry.

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From Knowing to Doing

From Knowing To Doing: How Chalmers Ambassadors Are Helping Ministries Incorporate Helping Without Hurting Principles

Earlier this week Justin Lonas, Director of Foundational Products at the Chalmers Center, hosted a webinar with two of our Ambassadors and two ministries they recently served. During the conversation, Justin shared that the basic premise of the Ambassador program is discipleship. Our purpose in training and sending out Ambassadors is to support churches and organizations as they walk alongside and empower people in their community who are facing the challenges of material poverty.

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Building Your A-Team

Building Your A-Team: How to Recruit, Equip, and Support a Core Team for Your Work Readiness Ministry

Last week, Shay Bassett, Director of the Work Life program at the Chalmers Center hosted a webinar on Building Your A-Team: How to Recruit, Equip, and Support a Core Team for Your Work Readiness Ministry. She shared about why work matters, the barriers people face to finding and keeping sustaining work, and why we need a new story about work.

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agents of reconciliation

Agents of Reconciliation

The New Testament consistently describes Jesus’ work on the cross as “reconciliation” (Col. 1:20. etc.), which means putting things back into right relationship again. The Apostle Paul also teaches that we also have a role in reconciliation.

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Restore savings groups

Stories of Transformation from our Partners in West Africa

For over a decade, Chalmers has worked in West Africa to launch RESTORE savings group ministries that have helped people living in extreme poverty to experience healing, peace, and freedom through restored relationships with God, self, others, and creation. This work allows us to speak from a place of experience and authenticity as we partner…

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Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Learning From Others in Ministry Design

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Learning From Others in Ministry Design

Over the years, I’ve had conversations with hundreds of ministry leaders who reflect on how, in the early years of their work with the materially poor, they did as much harm as good.

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Understanding our vision for poverty alleviation

Understanding Our Vision for Poverty Alleviation

If we want to see an end to material poverty, we need a clear vision of what this looks like. Just as our diagnosis of the causes of poverty shapes the remedies we pursue, so too does our idea of the ultimate goal of poverty alleviation.

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repenting of the prosperity gospel

Repenting of the Health-and-Wealth Gospel: Lessons from Kibera

In the heart of Nairobi, Kenya, lies one of Africa’s largest slums—Kibera. Conditions there are harsh. People live in makeshift structures, surrounded by open ditches filled with human and animal waste. Opportunities for jobs and education are severely limited, as is access to healthcare, food, and clean water.

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living within your limits building partnerships for ministry

Living within Your Limits: Building Partnerships for Ministry

As you begin working on launching or refining a church benevolence or other community development ministry plan, you’ll quickly discover you can’t do it alone. Your church or organization can’t provide everything that everyone is going to need on this journey, nor should it!

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Chess, Hope, and Poverty in Rural South Africa

Hope, Restoration, and Chess in Rural South Africa

Over a decade ago, Ruan and his family moved from Cape Town to the village of Zithulele in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, just miles away from the place Nelson Mandela was raised. His wife had secured a job as a physician at a local hospital and he was looking forward to working in youth ministry.

He read When Helping Hurts soon after his arrival, but over the next five years, he made many of the mistakes he read about. Despite hosting many Bible studies, outreach teams, and events – all of the things he brought with him from westernized Cape Town – they still weren’t seeing transformation in their rural village.

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Worship and Fighting Poverty

Worship and Fighting Poverty

We don’t often connect our work in fighting poverty (and economic life more generally) with our worship of the living God. But we should. When the collection plate is passed around in a church service, pastors often try to connect the dots to how our giving is part of worship. But it doesn’t always register with us.

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Lighthouse

What Does Trauma Have To Do with Financial Health?

How a relational and biblical approach to financial education transforms more than just budgets.

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Epiphany and poverty alleviation

Epiphany and Poverty Alleviation

Epiphany also reminds us that our gifts (assets, skills, experiences, and callings) are rightly offered up as worship to the King of Kings. All the ministry efforts we undertake will fall flat if we seek to serve others for our own sake. We can truly love our neighbors as ourselves when we connect our love and service for others with our worship of the God who created us both and who sustains us all.

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Advent and Poverty Alleviation

The Connections between Advent and Poverty Alleviation

The longing of Advent infuses our work at the Chalmers Center. Our mission is to help God’s people rethink poverty and respond with practical biblical principles so that all are restored to flourishing.

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Savings group in Ghana

Four Lives Transformed through One Savings Group’s Generosity

In many Ghanaian communities, families living in material poverty find themselves forced to send their children to the city to work menial jobs to make ends meet.

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Watermark Health and Chalmers

Flourishing through Holistic Healthcare

Inspired by our book, When Helping Hurts, Watermark Health, a nonprofit affiliated with Watermark Church, has designed its three clinics to instill value and promote dignity among their patients. The majority of their patients are uninsured and from marginalized communities who otherwise lack access to adequate medical resources. Located near a large refugee resettlement area, their original clinic has had patients from 123 countries.

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Helping without Hurting in Holiday Giving: Moving Beyond Handouts

As the holidays approach, many churches and nonprofits undertake large-scale food and resource drives, attempting to tap into the spirit of abundance and generosity that characterizes Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations in North America.

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Tearfund and Chalmers Partner

Tearfund and Chalmers Partner to Ignite Transformation in Burkina Faso

Tearfund first partnered with Chalmers in Burkina Faso in 2018, and since then our partnership has expanded to Côte d’Ivoire and Chad, reaching over 18,500 people.

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