You’re in an African country on a short-term mission trip, interacting with a group of poor persons. One of them becomes sick, and needs $8 to buy penicillin. Should you buy the antibiotic?

You are concerned about a poor area of an American city. Should your first step be to assess the needs of the people?

Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett say the answer to both of those questions is no. In their new book, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself, the authors argue that most attempts to deal with poverty end up exacerbating underlying problems in both the rich giver and the poor receiver. They lay out a biblical understanding of poverty, identify principles for helping the poor, and then apply those principles to domestic and international settings. Along the way, they illustrate both effective and ineffective interventions – including their own errors and mistakes.

In Part I, “Foundational Concepts for Helping Without Hurting,” the authors emphasize the holistic nature of Jesus’ work. As we will sing tomorrow,

He comes to break oppression, to set the captive free;
To take away transgression and rule in equity.
While on earth He preached the Gospel through His words and through His actions. We, His church, are to do the same, until He comes and ends all wrongs. Christ is Lord of all of life – so the Gospel has implications for how we live every moment of every day.

How does this change our understanding of poverty? Poverty, argue the authors, is about much more than a lack of resources. It is about feelings of “shame, inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation, fear, hopelessness, depression, social isolation, and voicelessness” (p. 53). God created us to be in healthy relationship with Himself first of all, giving glory to Him, and then with others, the rest of creation, and ourselves. And these relationships are embedded in an interweaving web of economic, social, political, and religious systems. The Fall has broken all of these relationships, and led to systems that exacerbate this brokenness.

What we normally think of as poverty – the lack of material resources – is only one aspect of the breakdown of our relationship to the rest of creation. Apart from God’s redemption, we all experience breakdowns in all four of those key relationships, and each of those is a type of poverty. Even the rich are poor in some of these senses. Furthermore, those who are materially poor often are suffering from all types of poverty, not just materially.

In particular, one type of poverty we American rich people normally experience is thinking that we are great, we are the helpers, we are the givers, we are the problem-solvers – that we are, in a sense, God. When we then try to help those who are materially poor and suffering from the opposite sense of themselves – shame – we often, even while providing material goods, make our own god-complexes worse while increasing the shame and poor-self-image of those we are helping. In such cases, helping hurts – it hurts both the giver and the receiver.

Fikkert and Corbett’s approach to the issue is masterful. They manage to discuss poverty in a way that is informed by economic research but not limited by it, in a way that acknowledges the impact of economic and political systems on poverty, while also acknowledging individual responsibility. Thus they avoid sounding like Republicans or Democrats, conservative or liberal – they instead sound biblical.

Along the way, the authors discuss the importance of the material and social assets of the poor, microenterprise development, and savings and credit schemes. The last three chapters draw out lessons in three key areas: Short term missions trips – a devastating critique of most, even while laying out principles for healthy trips – domestic poverty alleviation, and international development work.

The book is structured particularly well for small groups to read together. Each chapter begins with questions to ponder and discuss, and then concludes with follow-up, questions for reflection that help the reader apply the chapter’s lessons both to the specific issues brought up in the chapter’s opening questions and more broadly. The website www.whenhelpinghurts.com provides a large number of additional helpful resources.

Should you read this book? If you’ve ever been on a short term mission trip, or think you might – Yes. If you’ve ever wondered whether or not to give to a beggar – Yes. If you’ve ever wondered how to live out James 1:27 – Yes.

In other words: Read this book. There is no better book on the subject.