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105 pages

English

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Poverty is one of the great challenges of the 21st century. But poverty is not new. And neither is God's deep concern for the poor--it is a theme deeply woven throughout the Bible. Yet sadly, churches and individual Christians have too often been blind to this emphasis, or they have been paralyzed into inaction by feelings of helplessness.In this urgent, provocative book, Ash Barker offers both challenge and hope. Pulling out and reflecting on significant passages from both testaments, he reveals what the Bible says about both the nature of poverty and about how God calls his people to respond. These studies, ideal for either individual or small group use, are interlaced with personal reflections--first-hand accounts from fifteen years of ministry among the poor.

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Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 février 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441203878
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0461€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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A harrowing, deeply personal manifesto on our responsibility to the poor. Humane, grace-filled, and literally reverberating with prophetic vigor, Make Poverty Personal deserves to be read by a wide and grateful audience.
- Alan Hirsch , author of The Forgotten Ways
Ash Barker and the UNOH revolution invite us to hear, smell, and touch Jesus in his most distressing disguises: in the slums, with the poor, in the most abandoned places of empire in which we find ourselves.
- Shane Claiborne , The Simple Way , Philadelphia
An invitation to unlearn so much of conventional church faith and to learn afresh about God s good news for the world. There is a clarity that will let many readers come to grips, perhaps for the first time, with the revolutionary, subversive intention of the Bible.
- Walter Brueggemann , Columbia Theological Seminary
Personal, passionate, authentic, challenging, engaging, relevant. This is no programmatic or utopian vision for ending poverty and injustice in our deeply wounded world. Instead, this is powerful testimony, rooted in the biblical story, in costly discipleship, and in risk-taking involvement to follow Jesus, the servant of God to the poor.
- Charles Ringma , professor emeritus, Regent College, Vancouver, Canada
Here is a searing biblical call to end poverty, coming not from the safety of the snug office of an economist, an academic or a theologian, but from deep inside the bowels of the largest slum in Thailand. Make Poverty Personal is a discomforting, energizing, and ultimately hopeful read.
- Michael Frost , coauthor of The Shaping of Things to Come
Also by Ash Barker:
Making Connections Collective Witness Finding Life: Reflections from a Bangkok Slum Surrender All: A Call to Sub-merge with Christ

Emergent Village resources for communities of faith An Emergent Manifesto of Hope edited by Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones Organic Community Joseph R. Myers Signs of Emergence Kester Brewin Justice in the Burbs Will and Lisa Samson Intuitive Leadership Tim Keel The Great Emergence Phyllis Tickle www.emersionbooks.com
MAKE POVERTY PERSONAL

Taking the Poor as Seriously as the Bible Does

Ash Barker
2009 by Ash Barker
Published by Baker Books a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakerbooks.com
First published 2006 by Urban Neighbours of Hope PO Box 89 Springvale Vic 3171 Australia
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-for example, electronic, photocopy, recording-without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barker, Ash. Make poverty personal : taking the poor as seriously as the Bible does / Ash Barker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 978-0-8010-7189-8 (pbk.) 1. Poverty-Religious aspects-Christianity. 2. Poverty-Biblical teaching. 3. Church work with the poor. I. Title. BV4647.P6B37 2009 261.8 325-dc22
2008031186
Scripture is taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Emergent Village resources for communities of faith
is a partnership between Baker Books and Emergent Village, a growing, generative friendship among missional Christians seeking to love our world in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. The line is intended for professional and lay leaders like you who are meeting the challenges of a changing culture with vision and hope for the future. These books will encourage you and your community to live into God s kingdom here and now.
Ash Barker leads us on an important journey that is both personal and historical. Make Poverty Personal reminds us of the difference between personal and private. This book will inspire communities to put at the forefront of their efforts caring for the poor in ways that come from our normal, everyday lives. This call is to a real-life engagement with those who are in need not only for their benefit,but for ours as well.
Additionally, this book calls us to re-walk, with our words and our lives, the path of caring for the poor-a path walked by those of faith throughout history. Ash does not leave us simply with a call for better intentions, but a way forward for healthy engagement inour world.
This book serves communities of faith today as the kind of encouragement the Apostle Paul received in the early days of the church when he was called to "remember the poor," which was the very thing he was eager to do (Gal. 2:10). This is a book that callssome to a new vision, and others to recommit to the path they have already been walking.
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
1 Beyond Excuses: Moses, the Exodus, and Courage to Face the Nature of Poverty
2 Hebrew Laws and Always Having Poverty
3 Hebrew Poetry and the Awesome Truth
4 Prophetic Ministry-Radical Hope from the Margins
5 The Gospels and Messianic Transformations
6 The Early Church: Standing Against Poverty Together
7 Epistles: Letters from Jail and Other Tough Places of Discipleship
8 Apocalypse Now: Last Things and the Things That Last
Final Challenge: Will We Make Poverty Personal?
Bibliography
Foreword
Oh yes, God is moving in the world.
Across the globe there are signs of a church that is closer to the poor and further from the drums of nationalism and war. We can see an emerging church that looks more like Jesus than the evangelicalism with which many of us grew up. Ash Barker and the Urban Neighbors of Hope (UNOH) revolution invite us to hear, smell, and touch Jesus in his most distressing disguises: in the slums, with the poor, in the most abandoned places of the empire in which we find ourselves. In a world that has found it hard to hear the words of Christian preachers because of the noise and contradictions of their lifestyles, Ash Barker is one of those folks whose life reflects the things he believes. Ash s stories point us towards a new kind of Christianity for which the world longs-a Christianity that looks like Jesus, and whose gospel is actually good news to the poor.
I grew up in a Christianity that tried to scare the hell out of us, literally. It had little hope to offer this world and just tried to pacify folks with the promise that there is life after death . . . while most of us were really asking, Is there life before death?
I remember as a child hearing all the hellfire and damnation sermons. We had a theater group perform a play called Heaven s Gates and Hell s Flames. In this play, actors presented scenes of folks being ripped away from loved ones, only to be sent to the fiery pits of hell, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. We all went forward to repent of all the evil things we had done over our first decade of life, paralyzed by the fear of being left behind. Since those days, I have grown to love the kind of Christianity about which Ash writes-a Christianity that is about loving people out of the hells of this world, not just trying to scare them into heaven.
Have you ever noticed that Jesus didn t spend much time on hell? In fact, there are really only a couple of times he speaks of weeping and gnashing of teeth, of hell and God s judgment, and both of them are about making poverty personal. Both of them have to do with the walls we create between ourselves and our suffering neighbors. One is Matthew 25, where the sheep and the goats are separated; the goats, who did not care for the poor, hungry, homeless, and imprisoned, are sent off to endure an agony akin to that experienced by the ones they neglected on this earth.
Then there is Jesus s parable of the rich man and Lazarus. In this parable, we hear of a wealthy man who builds a gap between himself and the poor man, a gap that becomes an unbridgeable chasm not only from Lazarus, but also from God. He is no doubt a religious man (he calls out for Father Abraham and knows the prophets), and undoubtedly he made a name for himself on earth. Now, however, he is a nameless rich man begging the beggar for a drop of water. Lazarus, on the other hand, who lived a nameless life in the shadows of misery, is seated next to God and is given a name. Lazarus is the only person named in Jesus s parables; his name means the one God rescues.
God is in the business of rescuing people from the hells they experience on earth, and God is asking us to love people out of those hells. God is asking us to taste the salt in the tears of the broken, to hunger for justice with the starving masses of our world, to groan with all of creation in the birth pains of the kingdom of God. God is asking us to make poverty personal.
I am convinced that the tragedy in the church is not that rich folks don t care about poor folks, but that rich folks don t know poor folks. Amid all the campaigns, issues, slogans, and political agendas, perhaps the deepest hunger in the world is: Make Poverty Personal. The prophet Amos cries out that if our faith does not bring justice flowing like a river, then we should cease the clamor of all of our religious festivals and gatherings and songs, for they are noise in God s ears (Amos 5:21-24). And lest we let the liberals off the hook, I ve met plenty of progressive social justice types who have shown that it is very easy to live a life of socially-conscious comfort that is compartmentalized and detached from any true relationships with the poor.
Mother Teresa once said, It is very fashionable to talk about the poor . . . unfortunately it is not as fashionable to talk to the poor. Ash s message is simple-meet Christ in the least of these. Ash s vision is big-it is the vision of the kingdom of God coming on earth. But he realizes that the revol