Why are rich people rich? Why are poor people poor? How do we alleviate poverty? Why do we alleviate poverty? You ask the questions and you’re going to get different answers depending on whom you ask.

Western thinking tends to either completely deny the spiritual aspect of our lives, or separates the spiritual parts (worship, going to church, evangelism) from the secular parts of our lives (work, business, politics).  Western secularism removes the need for God in our society altogether, and consequently fails to understand how the spiritual is instrumental in poverty alleviation. Furthermore, it forms in our minds a condescending attitude toward the poor, as explained in the book, “When Helping Hurts”, by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett. Here is a quote from the book.

“The god-complexes of the materially non-poor are also a direct extension of the modern worldview. In a universe without God, the heroes are those who are best able to use their reason to master the material world. In other words, the materially non-poor are the victors in the modern worldview, the gods who have mastered the universe and who can use their superior intelligence and the material possessions they have produced to save mere mortals, namely the materially poor.”

How often have we heard phrases like, “we’re saving the world,” or “we can save Africa”?  The fact is , you could throw money at Africa all day and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if you go into it with the above attitude. Poverty is alleviated slowly and tediously through love for the materially poor as you work with them in relationship with both them and with God. We help the poor because we love them, not because we’re better than them. And we love them even though they’ve never done anything for us, because Christ set the example by loving us before we ever loved Him. We learn from the poor, as we work with them in relationship, that all the problems in life are not simply a matter of “you need to do something about your situation.” Poverty has as much if not more to do with the spiritual and the psychological as it does with the material. We see that people are materially poor while failing to recognize our own poverty in other ways; broken relationships with family, mixed up priorities, keeping up with the Joneses. These are the things that cause divorce, broken families, heart disease, mental illness, all the ways that we are poor in the United States.  We lose so much of the equation if we try to help the materially poor without being tempered by the humility that comes with recognizing our own poverty. And to this end, poverty alleviation is about working together to alleviate our respective poverties with the realization that we are all fallen creatures in need of forgiveness. To fail to recognize this means that we help the poor out of guilt for our own material success rather than love for the materially poor. To this end, many of us just feel the need to “do something”, whether it does any good or not, because helping the poor is about removing our sense of guilt rather than seeing the poor actually thrive. This is probably subconscious for many people, but I hope that by simply writing it, many will recognize this fact. Helping the poor MUST be done out of love for the poor and love for God, or it will at best be temporary.

Below is a link that humorously portrays some of these western attitudes. Till next time…