Many Christian writers have recently taken the Church to task for its anemic response to the problem of extreme poverty. (Anemic? …Yes, less than 2% of the average American church’s budget goes towards helping those who suffer in extreme poverty.) It’s not really much of a stretch to call their message prophetic, for they echo the message of not so recent writers like Isaiah, Amos, James, John, and Paul. And this is important, because in the eyes of a watching world, our actions have an enormous impact on how others see our God.
In his award-winning book The Hole in Our Gospel, Richard Stearns observes that while our local churches are truly the hope of the world (a line borrowed from Bill Hybels), a look at their spending priorities would suggest that she is “AWOL for the greatest humanitarian crisis of all time.”
In his best-selling book Radical Together, David Platt asks a simple but penetrating question of our churches: “Amid all the good things we are doing and planning, are there better ways to align with God’s Word, mobilize God’s people, and marshal God’s resources for God’s glory in a world where millions of people are starving and more than a billion have never even heard of Jesus?”
Perhaps most disturbing is this insight by Mark Labberton, writing in The Dangerous Act of Worship, “Meanwhile our suffering world waits for signs of God on earth… God’s plan is that we, the church, are to be the primary evidence of God’s presence.” How tragic it would be if the poor, and our watching world, were to equate our apparent indifference with God’s! The Church’s reputation, its relevance to the next generation of believers, and Christ’s name among the nations, hangs in the balance – waiting upon our obedience to God’s Word in lending a compassionate hand to the least and last.
The true cost of our churches’ anemic response to the problem of extreme poverty can be measured in deformed discipleship, diminished reputation and relevance, and most of all, a profoundly negative witness to a watching world… a world that is watching to see if God exists, to see if God cares, to see if His children are about hypocrisy and judgmentalism – or compassionate, generous love in action.
The Advocacy page on this site has been prepared especially for those who wish to urge their own churches to a bolder, more faithful engagement with the problem of extreme poverty.
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