I learnt the hard way what NOT to do in poor communities. When I first came to Cambodia 22 years ago, the place was a mess. People were poor. Dirt poor. Frankly, you’d have had to be a heartless zombie not to respond. And the missionaries came flooding in. We were full of compassion and […]
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Got your t-shirts printed? Your passport up to date? Crowd-funding page all set? It’s almost time to go! The Short Term Mission season is almost upon us, and very soon swarms of teams will converge on poor communities around the world. They are ready to paint orphanages and hand out tracts in a language they don’t […]
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Ever get the feeling you’ll be complicit in injustice no matter what you do? I remember finding out that slave-labor was used to build natural-gas pipelines in Burma. Thousands of slaves were involved in clearing the land and in construction work along the 65km pipeline. So, of course I decided to boycott the French and British […]
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Good intentions to alleviate poverty are not good enough. Sometimes our helping hurts the “helped.” I hesitate to write these words, because I know how easily an article like this can be misconstrued, and even used to justify the opposite of generosity. “What’s the point of giving then?” you might be tempted to ask. “It’s […]
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I’m going to wade into this thorny area today, because it’s one of the most common questions I get via email from people: “What do I do when my spouse doesn’t have the same sense of calling to the poor, or mission, or ministry, that I do?” A common scenario is that one partner is gung-ho […]
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This summer, church teams of young and old will don matching t-shirts and board a plane to some far-off place. But whether you are building houses in Mexico or volunteering at an orphanage in Guatemala – there is one item in your backpack that is GUARANTEED to undermine your ability to serve responsibly… The selfie […]
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Today’s guest post comes from Craig Greenfield, whose new book Subversive Jesus: an adventure in justice, mercy and faithfulness in a broken world is out this month. Subversive Jesus is the story of one family’s experiment in putting the most counter-cultural teachings of Christ into practice. When Jesus says invite the poor for a meal, Craig […]
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My neighbors were evicted. I came home to find their worldly belongings – a couple of dirty sheets, a filthy pink pillow and assorted clothing – piled in a puddle outside my front door. They had previously been living crammed together in one of the tiny, windowless rooms that line our alleyway. Apparently our landlord […]
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Would you give an addict a clean needle, so they could stay alive until they found freedom from their addiction? Would you give a prostituted woman condoms, so she could protect herself until she found freedom from prostitution? Clearly, the famous evangelical leader I was speaking with in Cambodia didn’t think we should be helping […]
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Partnering directly with poor churches is a promising way to do mission for affluent churches. Skip the middleman and Go Direct is the mantra of this internet age. I personally like the idea of this approach because of the possibility it holds for real, long-term, mutual relationships to emerge between rich and poor. But if you’ve […]
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