Video Transcript: When Helping Hurts: Relief, Rehabilitation, Development

Session 8 — When Helping Hurts: Relief, Rehabilitation, Development

Opening: The Danger Side of Helping

Bruce:
All right, we’re here at Session Eight.

Today. We’re going to be talking about something that you’ll likely face as a deacon as you seek to extend the mercy of Jesus Christ to your church members into the community. Can it go bigger and bigger and bigger than that, to eventually the world, there are some dangers that you should be aware of, as far as yourself and the people that you’re helping. And so today, we’re going to be looking first of all at this reality that helping others can be bad for you.

Abigail:
Yeah, this kind of an extension, even last time we talked about the boundaries and the importance of kind of an extension on this. Helping others can be bad for you, right—

Bruce:
—one down, certainly bad for you. That if you let people in that are taking are draining, you are the very draining people that can be bad for you. But there’s another thing that helping others can make you feel really good, and you can develop what some people refer to the god complex.

Abigail:
I’m definitely area that one.

Bruce:
In other words, you just feel so good that you’ve been an agent of God’s help, that you seek to keep things on that level you—

Abigail:
—want to be able to keep helping them. And—

Bruce:
—the converse is that all the studies ever done by people on people who are experiencing financial difficulties or addictions or that sort of thing, is shame. They feel shame. And I’ve got a good friend who’s an alcoholic. He’s been free now for many, many years, but he just talked about how when he came to Christ, marvelously and miraculously, as sometimes happens. Sometimes you hear these stories, and his story was just one of those that God, God was reaching out to you to stay his car died, and I’ll tell it shortly. His car died in a blizzard, and so he ended up the only light on him. Early in the morning, he was on the way to a rescue mission to try to get a breakfast sometime, meal. Spent the night in his car, and he lost his wife and divorced him, and his house is gone. Everything’s gone, and he ends up the only light that’s on this little town that he walks to is the post office, and he comes the back door and pounds on this woman what’s hands him a book that was simply titled God’s Promises, and said, “You need this more than I do.” And so that started him on a path that led to faith in Jesus Christ and the days on staff in a church in this area. It all started with somebody bold enough, but when you talked to him, he talked about the incredible shame of being weak in the face of that addiction. So it can be God Complex for you, but if you feel like I’m really something and I started bubbling up our shame for those who helped—

Book: When Helping Hurts

Bruce:
—now, many years ago. Now, about 10 years ago, this book came out When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself. It’s become a classic, and it’s still being produced because it pointed out these two aspects of that power of you were trying to make a difference, and this is particularly—it can happen within your church, but particularly if you’re in the community, or if you’re in the world. The last church, I was part of an active ministry in Honduras where we’d go down. The goal was to provide clean water and provide latrines, because, you know, the sanitation was considered an issue, health issue, and replace stoves in their houses, because they found that the, you know, the wood stoves—people would use those in their houses, and as a result of develop emphysema and all this other stuff, and so that was part of our ministry, but became aware in that process that it’s possible for this to be a hurting thing, not a helping thing. So that’s what this book addresses.

The authors describe this process that, first of all, relief, and that’s mostly where you’re going to get engaged as a deacon, that something happens. You’ll notice the lightning strike there. It’s not real close, but something happens that brings into a person’s life. And if somebody’s hungry, you can’t have a discussion with them about their need to change. You can’t—feed them.

Abigail:
There’s got to be the initial relief and help. So—

Bruce:
—this is part of—but we can’t stop there. We weren’t really about them, but our goal is for freedom, for people, for development. So then there’s a stage two that you can do, really for a while, but it’s got to start rehabilitation somewhere. I’m not just trying to change this person’s food intake for today, but I’m trying to change their life in the name of Jesus. Help them. Help Jesus change their life. And so we’ve got to have a process of rehabilitation.

And this can be in your own church, that you’re dealing with somebody and that they are just these people who are chronically needing help, chronically needing relief, that you start thinking bigger and say, “Okay, how can we—”

Abigail:
—how can we begin the rehabilitation process? Can we set this person on—

Bruce:
—a new trajectory in their life?” And so we want to move them to rehabilitation, but then development is for the bigger issues. This whole area is hungry, and we’ve got to come in and help farmers figure out how to work within a drought and plant drought resistant crops and that there’s a development—micro loans for people in businesses is a huge help in the world right now that set people up to be succeeding and etc.

The Helper’s Default: Relief vs. Relationship

Bruce:
Now here’s the challenge for you as a deacon, and that is the helper defaults to relief, rather than relationship. In other words, it’s normal for us to say I got to meet this immediate need. I spent a year and a half as an interim pastor in an inner city church, and I all of a sudden, I became aware of all these bankers by the exits of freeways? And so I got to do something to help these people. And so I went to the dollar store near us, and I stocked up on some things of peanuts and drink. And so I’d come and I’d hand that to them. That was nice. It helped alleviate my guilt and and provide support for them, yeah, but it didn’t change their situation at all, right?

Abigail:
It was just a relief, nice thing.

Bruce:
It’s a nice thing, and then I can get the god complex around, right? But, you know, if I’m thinking as a deacon, and this is an issue in my town, I’ve got to start thinking, “Okay, what’s going to start rehabilitation going?” And, you know, there are agencies that are in in your city, in your town, most likely that will be helping, regardless of the situation. But the point here is that we’re so easy—it’s so easy to hand a bag out the door to somebody who’s needed. It’s so easy to bring a meal to somebody who’s hungry. It’s so easy to bring food to an agency that needs food, and all of those things are good and necessary, but they really don’t cost us anything. Change begins to happen when it’s in the context of a relationship,

Abigail:
which relationships are lots of work, right?

Bruce:
And so and so, if I were to get serious about it, you know, I probably would have parked my car and held on and met the person and said, “Hey, you know, I know ministry just down the road.” I think of that when I bring my grandkids to school a couple of times a week, and sometimes at the corner where we get off the freeway, there’s guy there and, you know, and I know there’s a—there’s a place just down the street that ministers the people who are homeless. But I haven’t yet taken that risk of saying, “Hey, let’s get to know each other.” So there’s a default to relief rather than relationship. But it’s relationship that’s going to begin rehabilitation in a person’s life.

Involve the Church; Connect to Community

Bruce:
So how do you do that? You need to involve the church. In other words, you need to do with the person, and what—are they talking about that a little more in just a little bit—in the intro to the book, one of the authors tells a story of being in a town and he is there to build a relief kind of setting, a relief kind of situation. And the person who actually was a witch, and she’d gotten a throat infection, and somebody—or she’d gotten a throat issue, and so somebody in the village she encouraged to cut out her tonsils with a shearing knife. Anyway, so lo and behold, she needed antibiotics, right? A few bucks where they were working, I think, was in Thailand, and so he shelled out the few bucks. He was in that area for a period of time doing some training. And it was later he realized, as a church just on the street that could provide long term care for that person, that maybe could help set her free from her involvement of the enemy. And he said, “I realized, in retrospect, that I—”

Abigail:
—had an opportunity to connect her with the community.

Bruce:
Yeah, and and so, you know, when you’re thinking about as a deacon and you’re thinking within your community, what are the needs? Look for ministries or seek to develop them. If you’ve got a really courageous group of deacons and leaders in your church, to develop ministries that will put people together with those people in need. And Alcoholics Anonymous started with two guys who were alcoholics, and they decided to help each other, since there wasn’t anybody around helping them, and so they developed a system that is used around the world now of helping each other break that addiction to alcohol in the name of Jesus and the—that’s what’s needed in your area. Now, you know, in our area, wow, we are blessed. Goodness, gracious. And what’s really cool is some of the stories that come into Christian Leaders Institute about people who take the training they get here and start ministries, yes—

Abigail:
yeah, that is huge. And that’s where we even have all these soul centers now popping up everywhere where, you know, we call it soul centers, because it’s all about whether they’re doing coaching ministry or it is more of a relief type of feeding, or whatever it is—they are doing that, they found a name their community, they put the training into practice, and they’re living it. Yeah,

Bruce:
so promo again for Christian Leaders Institute. So we need to involve the church. We need to involve God’s people. We need to have people in relationship, and that may be you as a deacon, or it may be people that you recruit, or it may be the ministries that you turn to, but to remember that the goal is wholeness and self sufficiency, not just the relief—we want, rehabilitation and then development of ministry.

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)

Bruce:
Now, having said that, do want to talk just a little bit about a process that’s called asset based community development. I church I serve is—really the last church I served—is really good about coming in and meeting the immediate need. So really good at relief. So they had several different ministries, and I’ve continued to do that today. Fact, I had a conversation with one of the leaders of ministry. We—they have a bed ministry where, this year, they’re providing 200 beds to various homes, because they thought—we found out years ago that if a child does not have a bed that meets federal standards, Child Protective Services take a child out of the home, so kids sleeping in mattresses, on couches, etc. And so they said, “We can do this.” Couple of the engineers got to develop—it’s incredible to watch them work, because it’s an assembly line. And so this year, it’ll be over 200 beds that are going on in the community and and when they go and bring a bed, they don’t just bring the bed, they set it up. They pray with the people. They provide bedding. And, you know, blessings on you. And one of the men that is involved with this has gifted evangelism. He tries to be going along with—the opportunity is there to lead somebody to the Lord, but nothing after that.

So one of the leaders taught me two weeks ago after church, he says, “You know what? He’s—I’ve been thinking, we’re stopping short.” He says, “Um, we don’t go back. We don’t—we don’t try to solve the big problems that got them where they were.” So—says he’s going to start praying for, meeting with a group this weekend to talk about, what could that look like? Person is needed, but how did—

Abigail:
—the rehabilitation beyond just the relief,

Bruce:
right? And there are ministries—asset based community development. Say, “Let’s look at a community and say, Okay, where is an area that needs change, particularly where poverty exists,” and and it’s easy to come in. You know, in our area, it’s two Toronto parks, and this. Area mobile home parks where people are living below the level of poverty in our area. So how do you make a change in those situations?

So this is brief intro to asset based community systems. When God created the world, he created it with economic systems, political systems, social system, religious system, and everybody’s blessed if everything’s working right. But what happened with the fall is that all of that got twisted, damaged, and as a result, there are places that need not just relief—lot of places that need relief, and people who need relief—but they need development. It’s called asset based community development.

Now here are some of the principles they work on: that everyone has gifts, and so when we’re looking at changing our system, we got to start the fact that everybody—doesn’t matter who they are—God’s in them, they’ve got some abilities, they’ve got some Resources. Relationships build a community. How do we create relationships?

I met with one of the people who’s written books on this subject once because we were looking at an area within our community that we wanted to bring change to. And I just looked at him—he’s living in a very poor area of Holland, Michigan, and he kind of semi retired, and as a result, moved into the community. It’s poor—old house—needed fixing up, and he started fixing up. I didn’t just start moving in and fixing up his house. He started going to all the neighbors.“And so what’s the major problems in this community?” And so they started identifying some and they started helping each other fix up their houses and take care of things. And they started, “Okay, you know, this person’s in need of food,” or, you know, “they lost their job,” and it was building relationships that built the community and the citizens at the core of that, leaders, right, not just him coming in saying, okay, everything—yeah, and those of us who’ve got complex do that—people in their communities, principle—always care about something, and they need motivation to act. They need people who are listening to them, asking questions rather than giving answers. And they need ministry that goes from the inside out, not the outside in. The outside in is okay. “This community has got problems. We’re going to fix it.” We’ve got some massive events that were done back in the 1960s in the US with housing and stuff, where we created new housing projects and then put people in them, and didn’t change the system that they came from. And as a result, you know, they have a very negative connotation when you talk about “the projects” in a lot of communities. And institutions often aren’t equipped. They’ve reached a limit, so institutions have to become servants.

And here’s the end—the end story is okay: so local institutions connect with churches and businesses and parks and individuals and young people in the community and schools and etc, that when all of this—there are resources that can be applied to change communities. And it’s fascinating, because every time I run into this guy, you know, he’s got some new story, and the community is changing, and a lot of crime in that area, so they worked with the local law enforcement to, “How can they provide citizen help for those who are able?” They just changed the whole idea of the community—

I think of that—I, you know, I am. We live in Michigan, and I’ve been a Detroit Lions fan for years and years and years, and they were perennial losers, as the only team in the NFL has never gone to the Super Bowl, right? They are this year because of coach prophecy, but a coach came along who believed in his players, began to get new players in that would help, and they developed a new attitude in the community, right? My friend is at working. You know, there are signs up, “You’re now entering this community,” because it’s a beautiful, thriving community, and it started with him just going door to door, saying, building relationship. “What can we do about it? What do you have that can distribute—contribute—to the change around here?” And yeah, it’s happening. It’s happening in a variety of places.

Look Broadly; Empower, Coach, Develop

Bruce:
And so when you as a deacon, look at the community, look broadly, more broadly than just at the me.

Abigail:
Be right. Make sure you don’t get the relief. Make sure the rehabilitation begins. You know, just another thing to quick mention is this idea of the asking those questions and really trying to empower people themselves. One other plug I’ll make is, you know, I’ve seen a lot of people who have come here to CLI and they have done the coaching, even if they don’t want to be a coach, because the principles of coaching is you empower the person to make the changes—they commit to the goal. You’re not giving someone advice, you’re helping them reach within themselves, because they know what they do need. They just need to kind of have that backing, that motivation, that agent change, and I think again, deacons could really utilize a lot of coaching to help them be that agent of rehabilitation and development versus just the relief, the relief, the relief. So I just throw that out there and come across,

Bruce:
put that on your list for the future to say, “Hi, here’s one area where I can improve myself and my skills,” right? That God can use more powerfully through me and maybe through my body of deacons, to bring people to a sense of wholeness. Eventually, we want to see them all come to Jesus, but bring the community in which you live to a higher place because you’ve been involved and it counts your people and CO relationship, not just relief. So enough. See you next time.