Does Helping Always Help?

When I started telling people I had decided to enter the ministry, the reactions were varied. My Uncle Charles then offered to pay my way through LAW SCHOOL (make your own suppositions). My mother cried. This was big, since I had only seen her cry once before, when my dad ran over the rose bushes with his new riding mower (with the brake on the OTHER side). My father-in-law, reluctant to let things go, for 27 years has not hesitated to point out to me how valuable a dentist would have been in the family. An older minister gave me a puzzling piece of advice—the rule is that the more you try and help someone, the more they tend to get mad at you. Really? That just doesn’t fit my ministerial profile! But I am learning that there is at least one place where this is true and that is missions. Especially short term missions.

Have you ever done anything to hurt poor people? Most of us would recoil at the thought, even be offended by the implication. Here are the words of John Perkins, pastor, civil rights leader and founder of the Christian Community Development Association. “Have you ever done anything to hurt poor people? Most of you would probably answer no to this question, but the reality is that you may have done considerable harm to poor people in the very process of trying to help them. The federal government made this mistake for decades. Well intentioned welfare programs penalized work, undermined families, and created dependence. The government hurt the very people it was trying to help. Unfortunately, the same is true for many Christian ministries today. By focusing on symptoms rather than on the underlying disease, we are often hurting the very people we are trying to help. Surprisingly, we are also hurting ourselves in the process. As followers of Jesus Christ, we simply must do better.” (When Helping Hurts, Corbett and Fikkert, 2009).

I first started fretting about this several years ago while with my church’s youth group, working way up a cove in rural coal mining Kentucky. We were putting windows in a house trailer. I learned later that week that another team from our church had put windows in that same trailer four years previously. It hit me pretty hard. Groups came and went but nothing changed. The people we helped smiled, we smiled, all in a silent conspiracy. Substantive change is tough, and it takes a ton of effort, grace, imagination and teamwork. There are agencies and churches and people doing their part to help us think differently about missions. The Timothy Project tries to find where God seems to be working in these ways.