In 1996, Seth Kuehn owned a food vending business at the same time that he was building relationships with pastors from low-income communities around San Antonio, Texas. Seth was struck by how food vendors were regularly disposing of food while these pastors were serving under resourced communities that were hungry.
The Chalmers Center’s Founder and President Brian Fikkert was recently interviewed on the Finish Line Podcast on the topic “When Helping Hurts in How We Give.” The Conversation covered many themes from When Helping Hurts and Becoming Whole—including understanding when to apply relief, rehabilitation, and development in poverty alleviation as well as how to flip…
When you prioritize listening to people you hope to serve, you’ll discover that there is a lot going on in every community already. You’ll see that God really is at work, and people really do have good ideas of what they want for their families and their future.
Through the Chalmers Center’s Restore: Savings curriculum and our network of trainers and partners, thousands of local churches in the Majority World have been equipped to launch savings groups. In church after church, we’ve seen God take the mustard seeds of people’s savings and grow them into a harvest of hope in the midst of deep poverty.
In God’s grand story, churches in the Majority World of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, have a critical role to play. How can we walk together in ways that enhance the dignity of materially poor churches—and the individuals and communities they serve?
When we try to help people, we often start by trying to identify what’s wrong with the low-income individual or community, and then we try to bring in outside resources to fix what’s wrong. What if we started with what’s right with the people and communities we serve?
The best approach to helping someone depends on the situation. In a time of crisis, we should definitely err on the side of generosity. What does this generosity look like during a global pandemic?