Rather than envisioning our relationship with the materially poor as one of bringing “relief” to the helpless or “fixing the problems” of others, the authors advocate an approach to development that “moves all the people involved-both the ‘helpers’ and the ‘helped’-closer to being in right relationship with God, self, others, and the rest of creation” (100).

The truth, they maintain, is that both the financially well-to-do and those in material poverty “are broken and that both.need the blessing of reconciliation” (75). and eureka! Though a rather one-sided “you-can-make-a-difference” commercial may get folks on the bus, it tends to reinforce a narrative which misses a critical point, and one of the major premises of Corbett and Fikkert’s book: “until we embrace our mutual brokenness, our work with low-income people is likely to do far more harm than good” (61). As the mouthpiece for several campaigns around charitable initiatives, I’ve found myself often falling back on a fairly “motivating” messaging strategy: Look at the difference you can make! These folks need what you’ve got! You can change the world! It seems, Corbett and Fikkert suggest, my well-intentioned efforts at filling hungry bellies may have concurrently, though inadvertently, been filling the belly of an additional party: a “god-complex.” They define this complex as “a subtle and unconscious sense of superiority in which believe that they have achieved their wealth through their own efforts and that they have been anointed to decide what is best for low-income people, whom they view as inferior to themselves” (61). I’ve spent most of my life in and around communities desiring to care for the financially underprivileged.

Don’t you just hate it/love it when a book takes a long-standing ministry practice or cultural disposition you’ve unwittingly nurtured and totally applies the ol’ command-option-esc (or control-alt-delete to be P.C.) to completely reset things? A text I’ve been reading for the Kern Reading group at Talbot School of Theology-namely, Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert’s, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor.and Yourself (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2012)-just pulled this on me.

When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett