By LeRoy Lawson
Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa
Dambisa Moyo
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009
Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help
Robert D. Lupton
New York: HarperCollins, 2011
When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself
Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert
Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2009
Grace at the Garbage Dump: Making Sense of Mission in the Twenty-First Century
Jesse A. Zink
Eugene: Cascade Books, 2012
I”m writing this month about poverty.
Maybe you are on your church”s missions committee. Or maybe you are on the way to the mission field, either on a short-term jaunt or with a long-term commitment. Maybe you are a pastor who wants to teach your people about generosity and about living generously in a bigger world and making a difference there. If so, then there”s no maybe about my recommendation: you should read these books.
Shock Therapy
Dambisa Moyo (Dead Aid) is a Zambian woman with a master”s degree from Harvard and a PhD from Oxford University and years serving as a World Bank consultant. Deeply disturbed by Africa”s addiction to foreign aid and the West”s illusion that any problem can be solved if you just throw enough money at it, Moyo hopes her book provides “a blueprint, a roadmap, for Africa to wean itself off aid.” That won”t happen, she knows, without donors willing to break their addiction to being what the Alcoholics Anonymous world calls, disparagingly, enablers.
What this means is that for people (countries) to get well they must get off the dole. They need legitimate work, not handouts. They need our partnership, not our paternalism. They need the dignity of working together to solve their own problems rather than waiting for generous sugar daddies from the West to come to their rescue. In another context, this is called tough love.
One sobering chapter explores what Moyo calls China”s “charm offensive,” the massive amounts of money pouring into Africa from China in roads, pipelines, railways, power plants””each project “part of a well-orchestrated plan for China to be the dominant foreign force in 21st-century Africa.” These are not handouts, not grants, but investments that focus on “trade, agricultural cooperation, debt relief, improved cultural ties, healthcare, training and, yes, some aid (but thankfully only a small component of their strategy).”
But the book is not primarily about China”s growing dominance. It”s about Moyo”s prescribed “shock therapy,” which is what Niall Ferguson calls it in his foreword: “What if one by one, African countries each received a phone call . . . telling them that in exactly five years the aid taps would be shut off””permanently?” What would happen, Moyo believes, is recovery.
Moyo deals primarily with governmental and nonreligious agencies. Her lesson applies equally, though, to churches and mission agencies.
Strong Language
Which introduces Toxic Charity by Robert Lupton. Christians take heed, he says. In the name of Christ we must beware how we dispense money and aid. I only have room to sample his good advice. Here, for example, is his “Oath for Compassionate Service”:
“¢ Never do for the poor what they have (or could have) the capacity to do for themselves.
“¢ Limit one-way giving to emergency situations.
“¢ Strive to empower the poor through employment, lending, and investing, using grants sparingly to reinforce achievements.
“¢ Subordinate self-interests to the needs of those being served.
“¢ Listen closely to those you seek to help, especially to what is not being said””unspoken feelings may contain essential clues to effective service.
“¢ Above all, do no harm.
Lupton is not a fan of short-term mission trips and service projects. They are more about benefiting the travelers than helping the recipients, he believes. Specifically: they do not empower those being served, foster healthy cross-cultural relationships, improve local quality of life, relieve poverty, change the lives of the participants, or increase support for long-term missions work. Instead they deepen dependence, among their other negative effects.
The author concedes that aid (“charity”) makes us feel good. It might even temporarily help in a crisis. But prolonged handouts are poison. Strong language. Convicting.
By the way, Lupton has read Moyo and is convinced she”s right. He summarizes her advice to nongovernmental agencies: “Don”t subsidize poverty. Reinforce productive work. Create producers, not beggars. Invest in self-sufficiency.”
Soul Searching
When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert came out several years ago. I include it because it is held in such continuing high regard.
You can become pretty discouraged when reading in the first two books how many mistakes we have made trying to help a hurting world. Corbett and Fikker, while not denying the evidence of the damage we”ve done, accentuate the positive. We can alleviate poverty without wreaking havoc in the process, they assert.
The authors believe in the local church. You”ll find on these pages echoes of the previous books, but here are specific steps your church can take to do positive gospel work.
Not just steps. There is something more, something preliminary to the work: it”s the searching of the soul. “Until we embrace our mutual brokenness, our work with low-income people is likely to do far more harm than good.” It”s where our poverty of being meets their poverty of means that real ministry takes place. “Reconciliation of relationships is the guiding compass for our poverty-alleviation efforts, profoundly shaping both the goals that we pursue and the methods we use.”
So we start with our spiritual needs, not their physical ones.
Learning Grace
Jesse Zink (Grace at the Garbage Dump), a young, single, highly educated, altruistically motivated Episcopalian missionary heads out to save Africa. It would be good for every would-be missionary to go along with him through the pages of this book. He lands in the midst of South Africa”s poorest with no knowledge of their language, geography, culture, or his job””with little but his sense of superiority and his desire to help. Now that he has come to save them, everything will be just fine.
How long does it take him to get over this illusion? Just until he steps off a bakkie (a small pickup truck) in Itipini, where his own poverty of language””and almost any other kind of skill””forces him to contemplate his uselessness. The needy he has come to rescue are there all right: men and women dying of AIDS, jobless men drowning their failures in drink, runny-nosed and nearly naked children raising themselves, everybody living in 10-by-10 (or smaller) shanties of scraps tacked together to keep out the sun. There is no keeping out the rain.
So much to do. But the biggest lesson young Jesse must learn is that in his new calling in this strange land, his doing isn”t as important as his being. The theological concept of “incarnational” missions (that is, living as an embodiment of the love of Christ amidst the people) cannot remain an intellectual abstraction. As Christ left his home and emptied himself to dwell among us, Jesse Zink also has to do some emptying: to learn to speak Xhosa, unpronounceable clicks and all; to let the children turn him into a climbing post, poking and pinching and pulling his hair till he fears they will pull it out; to assist””even to take his orders from””adults whose ways are not his ways, whose ways he doesn”t even approve of but whose ways are the approved ones anyway.
Be sure you read his last chapter. There he comes in the most personal terms to the conclusions reached in the other three books in this column.
It is among the poorest of the poor that Jesse learns grace. He finds it so fulfilling he asks for another year.
LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary. He also serves as a Christian Standard contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing”s Publishing Committee.
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