Through partnership with Resonate Global Mission and Oasis International, Chalmers released Helping Without Hurting in Africa in 2021. Coauthors Anthony Sytsma and Jonny Kabiswa Kyazze crafted a unique training manual for ministry leaders walking alongside those in material poverty across the African continent.
As we look back on 2025, one theme rises above all others: God is restoring what is broken—through His Church, through His people, and through partners like you. Kellie’s story is proof. Kellie arrived at Lighthouse Ministries in Lakeland, Florida with years of trauma, addiction, and loss weighing her down. But through Faith & Finances, one of Chalmers’ biblically-based poverty alleviation programs, everything changed.
Across the globe, churches and ministries are stepping into hard places—walking with families facing poverty, isolation, and loss of dignity. The Chalmers Center exists to equip God’s people to respond in a way that’s rooted in biblical truth and practical love. By God’s grace, from local churches and ministries to global NGOs, Chalmers has helped shape a movement of Christian economic development that restores relationships and fosters lasting change. This is the story of that influence.
Pastor Rev. Kossi Nayo’s heart for his village in Togo was clear, as he often tended to church members and non-members during times of crisis. Hoping to empower the church to address the poverty of their community, he introduced RESTORE savings groups to his congregation. The groups quickly grew, attracting both church members and those outside the congregation. In time, eight groups were formed and several Muslim women from the community joined, a surprising development given the openly Christian curriculum.
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.
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.
Tabatha shares that when she first connected with Restore OKC, she didn’t believe she was worthy of a job. Her journey through Work Life would soon help to shift that deeply held belief.
Restoring people to sustaining work is a key component of poverty alleviation. One of the most effective ways to work toward this is by starting a holistic work readiness ministry.
In 2022, we kept hearing about the “great resignation” and “quiet quitting.” In 2023, layoffs and inflation are the headlines. No matter the year or the economic cycle, there is great need for work that helps restore people to wholeness. But work isn’t just something we have to deal with in a fallen world. It’s part of God’s good design for our dignity as His image-bearers. This goes all the way back to Genesis 1-2, where God created man and woman and placed them in the garden and told them to to subdue the earth—to exercise their creative potential in His good creation through their work.
Restore OKC is a community development organization in Oklahoma City. They’re “focused on the restoration of health, environment, reconciliation, and equity with neighbors in Northeast Oklahoma City.” For the past 6 years, Restore OKC has been committed to building relationships with the people in their community and working alongside them to bring about transformation.
Based in central Oklahoma, Branch15 was founded in 2013 to serve women in critical, life-controlling situations. Their mission has always been one of healing and restoration in the lives of their clients. Branch15’s main ministry participants have little to no support systems to address crises, which range from substance addiction to sex trafficking to abusive relationships to incarceration.
God’s work in the world unfolds to us in the big story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation, and in the individual stories told in Scripture. From the Garden to Noah to Abraham to Moses to David to the promise of the Messiah to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to the church to the New Creation, we are so often given God’s truths in narrative, not only in didactic lessons or abstract categories.