As promised, here comes the first part of the new official sequel to God vs Wealth, creatively called God vs Poverty. While the former video series discussed whether a Christian should be rich or not (and found out that the answer was “not”), this series will look at what the Bible says about poverty reduction. It was filmed when I visited Iris South Africa (with a lot of wonderful children “helping” me with the shooting) and consists of five parts:

1. Loving
2. Giving
3. Working
4. Liberating
5. Praying

In this first part, I argue that poverty reduction must be based on love and that one of the main economic problems in the world is that the rich don’t know the poor. South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world and the reason is of course that the rich separated themselves and refused to get to know the poor. When people from different socio-economic classes become friends, it will be impossible for the wealthy to ignore their needs and problems of the needy. Our generosity should not be excluded to people we know of course, but if we only know people with our own socio-economic status, something is terribly wrong.

So here comes the radical biblical challenge: if you don’t live in an area where there’s poor people, move. If you do not get to serve the poor in your work, change job. If you have people begging on the streets in your town, sit down and talk with them (if they don’t speak your language, use google translate or something). Jesus will not ask us if we asked someone else to feed the hungry and clothe the naked when He comes back (Mt 25). He will ask us.

Related articles

• Breaking the Cycle – Ontario’s Poverty Reduction Strategy – Public Consultations (rexdaleclc.wordpress.com)
• Poverty reduction strategy papers (agri4dd.wordpress.com)
• A Small Glance on Poverty (saurabhsumanr.wordpress.com)
• Why Does God Allow Suffering? (chrisuko.wordpress.com)