My friend, Brian, recently returned from a missions trip to Kenya. He led a group of youth as they supported their Kenyan partner church ministry for two weeks. The Kenyan ministry’s focus was HIV positive mothers in its very poor slum community. They provided food, money, prayer and helped their children—demonstrating the love of Christ in word and deed. Brian and the youth group dove in. They spread the news of the church’s ministry into the neighboring communities.

A week into the trip, Brian had a stirring, even haunting, realization. This Kenyan ministry had become “the cocaine of its community.” He shared candidly with me that these mothers were completely dependent upon the charity, and indirectly on Brian’s church which funded it. Instead of working, these capable women would sit every day at the door of the charity, waiting for the free distributions. As a result, their children saw their moms time-and-again not as providers, but as placid receivers. Continue Reading…

This past week has been encouraging regarding relationships I have with neighbors on my block. Four years ago, my husband and I intentionally (and we think, obediently) moved into a tougher inner city neighborhood. We’ve formed some really great relationships with adults and kids, but haven’t really “done” anything to write home about. No one’s professed new faith in Jesus. No one’s drastically improved in school. No one’s changed their status from unemployed to employed. And no one has gotten off of government funding. To sum it all up, no one’s really that drastically different at all…not even us. Continue Reading…

The following email was written by a HOPE staff member to encourage her brothers and sisters serving with HOPE around the world.

A few weeks ago my husband and I attended a class on Tim Keller’s book, The Prodigal God. (Keller defines “prodigal” as “recklessly extravagant” or “having spent everything”—so true of our God who runs after us and sent His only Son to die for us.) Keller argues that both sons in the Luke 15 story of the prodigal are lost—not just the younger, irresponsible brother. He goes further, though, and says that the older brother is actually in a more spiritually dangerous position. Keller writes:

Although the sons are both wrong and both loved, the story does not end on the same note for each. Why does Jesus construct the story so that one of them is saved, restored to a right relationship with the father, and one of them is not? (At least, not before the story ends.) It may be that Jesus is trying to say that while both forms of the self-salvation project are equally wrong, each one is not equally dangerous. One of the ironies of the parable is now revealed. The younger son’s flight from the father was crashingly obvious. He left the father literally, physically, and morally. Though the older son stayed at home, he was actually more distant and alienated from the father than his brother, because he was blind to his true condition. He would have been horribly offended by the suggestion that he was rebelling against the father’s authority and love, but he was, deeply.  Continue Reading…