A Biblical Understanding of Poverty
and Poverty Alleviation
What is poverty? While this question seems so simple, it is extremely rare for evangelical Christians to answer this question in the same way that Jesus did! As a result, most Christians lack a biblical foundation for holistic ministry to poor people and fail to see how central such ministry is to the church's mission. At the start of His earthly ministry, Jesus said, "I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent" (Luke 4:43). The kingdom of God is the reconciliation of the entire cosmos through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Colossians 1:19). Jesus and his followers declared the good news of the kingdom through both words and deeds to the blind, the lame, the deaf, the mute, the leper, and the poor (Luke 7:18-23; 9:1-2; 10:9). As His body, bride, and fullness, the church is to continue Christ's work of declaring his kingdom—in both words and deeds—to the "least of these" (Matthew 25:40). Unfortunately, the evangelical world has been paralyzed by a truncated gospel which reduces the reign of Christ to saving souls, thereby undermining the biblical concern—i.e. a kingdom concern—for the whole person. A paradigm shift is needed to enable the church to pursue the whole gospel, for the whole person, and the whole world.
How we answer the question of "what is poverty?" determines the solutions we propose. A misdiagnosis of the problems related to poverty results in remedies that are ineffectual and even harmful. Good intentions are not enough. Unfortunately, evangelical Christians often have faulty assumptions about the root causes of poverty and its solutions. As a result, we often end up hurting poor people—and ourselves—in the process of trying to help them.
In order to help people in poverty we need to have a biblically consistent framework which conceives of poverty as being rooted in the effects of the fall on the four foundational relationships that God established for each person, i.e. relationships with God, self, others, and creation. When defined in this way, all people are fundamentally poor in the sense of not experiencing the fullness that God intended for each of these relationships. For the economically poor, these broken relationships often include shame, a marred identity, social isolation, and a lack of a sense of vocation that contribute to a lack of income. For the economically rich, these broken relationships manifest themselves in pride, selfishness, workaholic tendencies, materialism, etc. that lead to all sorts of individual and social ills. Unfortunately, when the economically rich interact with the economically poor, they tend to do so in such a way that exacerbates the shame of the economically poor and the pride of the economically rich. Hence, embracing our own brokenness is the key to "helping poor people without hurting them…and ourselves."
To learn more, read the newsletter article "Broken But Beautiful" found in Issue #1 of the 2007 edition of our Mandate e-newsletter.
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