In his excellent book Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City, Tim Keller quotes Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke’s very shocking, but absolutely correct, definition of justice: The righteous are willing to disadvantage themselves to advantage the community; the wicked are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves. Keller expands: Most people think of […]
The Necessity of Distinguishing Relief and Development
In both cases, the goal is to help the person back to self-sufficiency. But the strategies in each case are different — often profoundly so. Relief The goal of relief is to meet pressing, urgent needs that are causing great hardship to a person or group. You don’t worry about things like “dependency” here; you […]
One of the Most Important Sermons Any Christian Can Ever Read
Jonathan Edwards’ The Christian Duty of Charity to the Poor.
Is There a Relationship Between Stewarding the Environment and Ending Extreme Poverty?
Live58 is a movement to end extreme poverty in our generation. This is a helpful connection from the latest email newsletter by the team: When we think of justice, the environment isn’t normally the first thing that comes to mind. Perhaps we think of human rights, or all those crime shows. But when Paul said […]
Poverty Cure: From Aid to Enterprise
I am really impressed with the vision of Poverty Cure: PovertyCure is an international coalition of organizations and individuals committed to entrepreneurial solutions to poverty that challenge the status quo and champion the creative potential of the human person. This vision, rooted in their biblical understanding of poverty and the true solutions to it, is […]
Notes on Carl Henry's The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism
I recently took notes over Carl F.H. Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Written in 1947 (when “fundamentalism” and “evangelicalism” were equivalent terms), Henry’s call was for a theologically informed and socially engaged evangelicalism. Henry was concerned that, through its separatist mentality and tendency to separate social action from the concern of the Christian, modern […]
The Greatest Need in Developing Nations
Peter Drucker: “The greatest need in underdeveloped countries is people who build … an effective organization of skilled and trained people exercising judgment and making responsible decisions.”
The Biblical Call is to Stand Up for Those in Need, Not Give Them Advice
How do you help those in need? Our default tendency seems to be to give advice. To give advice that is actually good is, of course, a good thing (although rare!). But the biblical call is for us to do much more than that. Consider: “Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, […]
Ending Extreme Poverty: The Question is Not "Can We?," But "How Fast?"
Here’s an important press release from Live58.org. I received this back in January but had to put everything that wasn’t urgent on hold while I got my book done. I strongly believe in and love what Live58 is doing, and this is just as relevant now as it was in January: 58: GLOBAL IMPACT TOUR […]
Racism and the Utter Necessity of Understanding the Spirit of the Law
I watched the beginning of John Piper’s Bloodlines documentary the other day, and something Piper said really stands out to me. Segregation was referred to as “separate but equal” — but, as Piper points out, it was really just separate. There was nothing equal about it. It was discrimination, pure and simple. Claiming that you […]