The full title of this book by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett is When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself. As the authors write, “One of the major premises of this book is that until we embrace our mutual brokenness, our work with low-income people is likely to do far more harm than good.”

Absolutely true.

There is much to love about the message of this book. I appreciate the focus on cultural awareness, on the risk of creating dependency, and on the value of building relationships. The authors do a great job of showing how we are all broken and in some kind of poverty, and then how we can create unhealthy relationships that perpetuate that poverty. The book speaks boldly to the poorly conceived steps a lot of North American churches, groups and individuals have taken to alleviate poverty.

But the book isn’t perfect. It is too quick to minimize developmental aid that is done in a secular context, despite the fact that some of the most successful efforts to combat poverty are not Christian in nature. Look, I love Jesus and believe that a Christ centered response is more lasting and holistic. That should be abundantly evident in my work with PathLight and any number of other organizations. But a starving child or an unemployed man can see their economic status altered by more means than just a Christian response. Think Grameen Bank, for instance.

To be fair, the authors talk of spiritual poverty as much as they talk about material poverty. It’s an important distinction and I applaud them for developing the idea so well. But I did find their writing often confused the two, or at least confused me as the reader. They’d comment about something related to material poverty and I’d find myself disagreeing … only to later ponder if what they really meant was spiritual poverty, in which case I’d agree with them. An example might be a statement about the importance of working with local churches to alleviate poverty, which sounds idealistic and inaccurate if we’re talking about material poverty but clearly true if we’re talking about spiritual poverty. So the book meanders a bit that way and it can be frustrating.

My criticism aside, this book has a lot of great things to say. I wish everybody would read it before embarking on an overseas mission. It’s going to be especially popular with folks who focus on evangelism first and social work second because it places such a huge emphasis on spiritual transformation. My caution is that you can’t dichotomize the goals that way … in my humble opinion, both deserve to be integrated into one priority.