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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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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Practicing What We Teach

Kelly Kapic

When we try to help people who are materially poor, we often focus on the habits we think they need to change. But what about our own habits? How do our daily practices affect our ministry with the materially poor?

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God’s Kingdom Has a Startling Economic System

Woman working in a restaurant

Every earthly kingdom has its own way of doing things, its own customs and policies regarding food, sex, family, and religion. And every kingdom has an economic policy. But when Jesus welcomes us into his alternate kingdom, something strange happens. We discover a whole new world. And we soon discover that Jesus’s kingdom looks different…

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A Time to Pray, a Time to Give Generously

It is a consistent theme of Scripture that those blessed with power and wealth have a special responsibility to administer justice and mercy for those who are in danger or in need. Leaders should use their influence so that the least among us—the fatherless, the widow, the sojourner, and the poor—have a faithful advocate in the halls of power.

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Recognizing What People In Poverty Need

It’s easy for most of us to conceptualize a fairly simplistic picture of what poverty looks like. In turn, that overview can generate equally simplistic solutions or treatments. For many, we may have an image in our minds of a destitute population lacking necessary materials for survival. On paper, it seems as though simply providing people in poverty with what they seem to need will solve the problem. While this may provide temporary relief to those in need, it is often only a small adjustment to a much larger problem.

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Why Poverty Is More than a Lack of Material Resources

Why poverty is more than a lack of material goods

Adapted from When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor…and Ourselves.

Defining poverty is not simply an academic exercise. The ways we define poverty—either implicitly or explicitly—play a major role in determining the solutions we use in our attempts to alleviate that poverty.

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Why Use Stories to Teach?

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.

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Designing Innovative Solutions to Problems

Designing innovative solutions to problems

Have you ever been working on solving a complex problem and felt stuck? You knew there had to be a way forward but you just couldn’t see it? That’s how designing a poverty alleviation ministry can feel. Take the issue of food insecurity as an example. Most people are familiar with a “soup kitchen” model…

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Holistic Approaches to Development

Material poverty is complex, and not reducible to a single cause. Healthy, sustainable poverty alleviation ministries need to address all five root causes of material poverty—Individual brokenness, Systemic brokenness, false stories of change, broken and destructive formative practices, and demonic forces. Over the last few weeks, we’ve looked at Ministry Design Principles that contribute to the kingdom community and to God’s story of change, and today we continue examining principles that equip us to replace destructive formative practices. We seek to evaluate and replace our existing practices in favor of those that empower and equip our communities.

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