“Sometimes helping is not throwing money at a problem”

A couple weeks ago we convened the third gathering of the first Global Connections Leadership Community. At each gathering we try to drill down on topics that are common to each church that helps them make not just incremental but exponential progress in their global missional efforts. This gathering we focused on partnerships and financial accountability. We had a couple of outside presenters and every one of the 60 participants came having read at least one book on the topics to be discussed. Probably the most influential book on the topic of finances is When Helping Hurts–Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor. . .and Yourself by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett. The authors make the distinction between “relief,” “rehabilitation,” and “development.” Relief is needed after some type of disaster where people really need outside resources just to survive. Rehabilitation brings them to the previous status quo, and development helps people become self-sufficient and productive. The worst thing we can do is to continue relief strategies when people really need development. Another lesson is making the distinction between doing things “to” people, “for” people and “with” people. Over the weekend I was reading a Newsweek article on George Clooney’s role as a “celebrity statesman” in Sudan. Like many he learned the hard way about the simplicity and folly of simplistic solutions. “…he quickly learned the dangers of just dropping in on a humanitarian crisis: as a way of giving back to a refugee village where he and his father stayed, he donated money to build a well, huts, and a community center. ‘A year later, the next-door villagers—who wanted water  and needed shelter—ended up killing some of the people  to get to that well and to get to that shelter. It’s devastating. Your response is …to continue to try to help, but we have to be very careful—and sometimes helping is not throwing money at a problem.’” What Clooney experienced is what many western missionaries have experienced. The intuitive response is the absolute wrong response. Jonathan Martin (Giving Wisely?) describes the response of a church working with a  Mexican pastor who is trying to plant a church among people who live in a dump, who himself lives in a shack. The intuitive response is to respond with, “Well, the least we could do is build the pastor a simple concrete slab, 2 room house.”  Jonathan says, “That may be the right response, but what you need to know is that pastor will never have a self-supporting church.” When ever the church needs money, the parishioners will respond, “Just ask your rich gringo friends.” Sometimes the economics of “free” so disrupt a system that the last state becomes worse than the first. One participant of our Leadership Community noted that “all the Haitian doctors have left Haiti to practice elsewhere because they cannot compete with “free.” Shipping tons of free shoes into a country may seem like a great idea, but what does that do to the local shoemakers or shoe stores?