WHEN HELPING HURTS
How to alleviate poverty without hurting the poor ... and yourself
By Steve Corbett & Brian Fikkert. Moody. 274 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 0 802 457 066
The renewed emphasis in evangelicalism on social involvement has led to more involvement by Christians and churches in ‘mercy ministries’, helping those in need at home and abroad. Christians are giving their money, time, efforts and skills to such work. In itself, this is admirable, but it raises essential questions about how best to provide help and who it is, precisely, who needs that help and why.
The authors of this book (first published in 2009 but now re-issued in an expanded edition) are both professors at Covenant College in the US. They are profoundly critical of many well-meaning attempts by Christians in the West to ‘help’ the poor and deprived. They recount numerous stories where such help has done more harm than good to the individuals or communities at which it is aimed: expensive equipment donated by Western churches but abandoned by the recipients and never used again after the donor team had left; a single mother on benefits, on the receiving end of financial help from a generous church, but left firmly in the poverty trap from which she desperately wished to escape; short-term mission trips that built homes which the local people felt ashamed to live in, due to cultural misunderstandings. Corbett and Fikkert urge a radical re-think of Western churches’ approaches to helping the needy, based firmly in a biblical understanding of the real nature of human need after the Fall.
