Weaving Ministry Design Principles into Their DNA

Branch15 is a ministry in Oklahoma City that serves women in critical, life-controlling situations. They provide their clients with transitional housing and robust rehabilitation classes. Through contextualized programs centered around connection, care, authenticity, and empowerment, they fulfill their mission of fostering healing and restoration in the lives of their clients—that every woman who enters Branch15 might experience “fresh starts, pure hope, and amazing grace.”

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Using Your Social Capital To Benefit Others

using your social capital to benefit others

One of the key messages of our book When Helping Hurts and the rest of our trainings and resources at the Chalmers Center is that how we give matters most. This means that we often need to give more, but not just money. Long-term, transformative ministry is highly relational, and that means giving of our time, energy, and networks—in short, our social capital.

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Why Good Intentions Aren’t Enough

Why Good Intentions Aren't Enough

How we diagnose the problem of poverty directly impacts how we will seek to address it. If we treat only the symptoms or if we misdiagnose the underlying problem, we will not improve the situation—and we might actually make the lives of the materially poor worse in the long run.

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Helping People Experience Financial Stability

Helping People Experience Financial Stability

As the Director of Programs for Restoration House in the Knoxville area, Lori Haskell has years of experience working with single moms who find themselves in difficult circumstances, especially when it comes to finances. They want to be financially self-sufficient but often lack the training and support they need to get there.

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Potluck Community: Re-Imagining the Kingdom

Neighbors eating a meal together

This year, we released a new book resource designed to help churches re-disciple their members around the vision of the Kingdom of God. Written by community development practitioner Michael Rhodes and Chattanooga pastor Robby Holt, Practicing the King’s Economy explores practical ways for Christians to live out the Kingdom of God in their work, church, family, and…

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The Church, the Parachurch, and Poverty Alleviation

The Church, the Parachurch, and Poverty Alleviation

One way that the church’s responsibility to care for the poor is carried out in complex modern societies is through a wide range of parachurch ministries. While the parachurch should never undertake tasks that are exclusively given to the church, there is much that these ministries can do very effectively to care for the materially poor.

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Going Beyond the Four Walls of the Church: The Impact of Community Ministry

Going Beyond the Four Walls of the Church

Local churches often make a significant mistake when it comes to helping those in poverty. They sometimes create divisions in their efforts that aren’t really necessary, according to Scripture. When we split up the act of spreading the message of God’s transformative power (evangelism) and the act of serving others or providing practical life skills (service or technical programming), we give the wrong impression that the world is fragmented. We make it seem like God’s work is separate from helping people in need.

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Finding Hope After the Hurricane

Volunteers distributing disaster relief supplies

Pastor Ronnie Garcia wanted to see the gospel flourish in Puerto Rico. But he never imagined that he’d be on the front lines of disaster relief after one of the most catastrophic hurricanes ever to hit U.S. soil.

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The Ministry of Writing Checks

Ministry of writing checks

There’s an idea out there that giving money to a poverty alleviation ministry is a cop out to being personally engaged in the ministry. But those directly involved in on-the-ground development ministries have a different view—that the most relational thing many people can do to help end poverty is actually writing checks to organizations that do effective, asset based, participatory development.

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Equipping Ukrainian Church Leaders with HOPE International

Equipping Ukrainian Church Leaders with HOPE International

Last summer, a team from Chalmers’ long standing partner, HOPE International, visited some of the Ukrainian church partners that they had supported in the early months of the war. While encouraged by incredible stories of life-saving relief work, they also detected challenges that often accompany sustained periods of relief: overextended church leaders, dependency from recipients, and frustration from volunteers. 

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Work and Poverty Alleviation

Work and Poverty Alleviation

Enabling people in material poverty to engage in work that pays a living wage is the most sustainable way for them to no longer be materially poor. But work is so much more than just a means to gaining income that provides for our material needs. It lies close to the heart of what it means to be human.

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Churches Supporting Churches

Kingdom Partners

In some places, there are churches on every corner—but they often stay disconnected. Listen to this episode of Rethink Poverty and hear how one local ministry is working to change that.

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