Michigan Camp Meeting 2016: The Harvest is Great

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Poverty Cure: Powerful Principles to Help the Poor

Dan Rachor

Poverty Cure: Powerful Principles to Help the Poor- Part 1

Father in Heaven, I thank You that these dear people have come here because they have an interest in being used of you for the betterment of other people's lives.

We ask for your wisdom, your leading, your guiding.

We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, so just so you know, I want to be clear, the name of this is Poverty Cure.

Now, this is not to enrich you for coming here.

So, if that's what you had in mind, you walked 4 miles to get here.

There's no free lunches here or anything like that.

But, poverty cure, I'm really very excited about this seminar.

I've been interested in this topic for a long time, ever since I went to Romania like 25 years ago, but the whole thing really reignited in my mind about I don't know, a year and a half ago when I went to the Philippines.

I guess there's 2 things that you should know about that.

Number 1, I really don't know what I'm talking about.

The big problem is sometimes I forget and I think I know what I'm talking about.

So if that happens, you'll be gracious to me, okay?

That being said, In all seriousness, I have had the privilege to do a lot of study, and it's just like the Bible, I guess.

The more you study, the more you realize there's more to learn.

I do want to say that some of what I say in this seminar will definitely cut across current practice.

You may disagree with what I say, that's great.

As long as we're not, You don't throw tomatoes at me or something like that, okay?

So I'm gonna just start here with a story as I intend to do most of these sessions here.

This is, you know, not the best, these first several slides.

The other ones are gonna be clearer for you.

Alina, I met her in an orphanage in Romania, as I mentioned, 25 years ago.

She was basically as a baby, was abandoned by her mother into an orphanage in Bucharest, where she stayed until she was about 8 years old, something like this, and then her grandmother found her and took her into her home and Kept her for several years until it was found out that she was HIV, Alina, at which point her grandmother abandoned her.

She was about 12 at that time, maybe 10 at that time.

And so she was in another orphanage in a city called Folkshan in Romania, and that's where I met her.

And she was 1 of the most incredible human beings, really, I ever met.

This was really, you know, we all kind of live in a bubble, right?

I mean, when I first met this girl and we spent some time with her, I mean, there was 150 orphans there, but she was among the more intelligent.

Probably I had an interpreter, but she was certainly an intelligent girl.

And I just went home and I just cried for a long, long time in the apartment there where I was staying, the pastor's apartment.

And she, to be frank, and I suspected that then, and I think she was kind of the fundraiser for the orphanage because she was such an incredible young lady and I think I think they showcased her a little bit.

She was 1 of the first ones they introduced me to, a rich American.

So the last time I saw Alina was in the hospital, and the next time I came to Romania, the doctor who I'd become good friends with, told me that she was gone.

She told me that she'd been adopted by some wealthy people in England.

And I don't know if I ever believed that story.

I tend to believe she had died, but that's what she told me.

Maybe she was trying to be, save me from hurt feelings or whatever.

But what I do know is that she was such an incredible, I mean, this girl was so positive.

And we had interpreted, I mean, we had gotten her a Romanian Bible that she could read and so on and so forth and she never heard the name of Jesus until we had met her there, even though it is an Orthodox country.

But she was such an incredible girl that in her absence, when she was no longer there, and this is in like, this is like 2 years after the dictator fell.

And I mean, it took a long time just to get, you know, permission to cross the street.

I mean, the government was not exactly computerized at that time.

And, but somehow through all the bureaucracy, this girl was such an incredible, positive, beautiful, young, aged girl, that they actually named that orphanage after her.

And through the bureaucracy and everything actually got new signs.

And so Alina made a very deep impression on my heart.

So, we'll dedicate this session to Alina.

Now, My theme today is called A Mind for the Poor.

In other words, we all here, I think, came here because we have a concern for, and I mean poverty, a stronger word than poor, but the basic theme today is it takes more than a heart that feels for them.

We'll talk a little bit about unintended consequences.

And I should say that although the principles that I share here will apply anywhere and everywhere, I think the first 2 sessions or so, maybe, anyway, is more of an international emphasis, although everything applies locally.

And as we go further in, it'll be more local.

So, here's where we start and where everything starts, the book of Genesis.

This is not, I'm not sharing this because it's, it's, you know, a clever thing to do or I feel obligated to do it.

This is a central theme that runs through all 5 of our sessions, and that is that every human being is created in the image of God.

And we'll see some practical applications to that today and as we go on through this seminar.

And that, by the way, just a little bit of context here, I think I have 2 slides to this effect.

This is from a book called When Helping Hurts, which by the way I have a bibliography and I will hand it out sometime here today.

Anyway, nearly 3000000000 people are living on less than 2 dollars a day.

And over a billion of them dwell in desperate poverty.

So the author here doesn't seem to feel that less than 2 dollars a day is desperate poverty.

So we've got 3000000000 on less than 2 dollars a day and a billion of them, far worse off than that.

And it goes on to say, they are starving in slums, sold into slavery, Orphaned due to AIDS, dying of preventable diseases.

There are Christian brothers and sisters.

Others of them have never even heard of Jesus.

So they're without hope, without God in this world.

And from the book, Ministry of Healing, it said there that there are multitudes struggling with poverty, compelled to labor hard for small wages, and able to secure but the barest necessities of life.

Toil and deprivation with no hope of better things make their burden very heavy." Okay, And I think we're aware of that.

But just a little context here in the beginning.

There's going to be a lot of information through this next 5 days.

And if you're really, really interested in this topic, I think there'll be helpful information.

There's a trying to help you understand what's going on in the poverty alleviation world.

And then of course, the principles that apply to each 1 of us as we take our part as the Lord leads each 1 of us.

She goes on to say, when pain and sickness are added, which of course so often is the case, the burden is almost insupportable, careworn and oppressed.

So just for those of you who came in a little bit late, I do have a handout that has each 1 of these slides.

We didn't make quite enough, but I'll make sure you get them tomorrow so you don't have to frantically write if you're doing that, okay?

I'm sorry you don't have them to take notes on, but every slide I'll hand out tomorrow.

So, Mark Twain, he said that all generalizations are false, including this 1.

Poverty Cure: Powerful Principles to Help the Poor- Part 2

Father in Heaven, we thank You for life today, for Your mercy, just Your wonderful goodness to each 1 of us.

We pray for Your presence, for Your Spirit of truth to be with us as we continue our study here today.

Alright, so we didn't quite finish what I had planned to cover yesterday, by the way.

I've had a couple people ask me already, so Shelly is making extra copies of the handouts from yesterday.

And also, the handouts for today will come with her at that time, okay?

Most of you have the handout from yesterday.

I just went back a few slides here because we didn't get really, we weren't able to finish.

So we're just going to finish yesterday's and here we go.

So we were talking about Paternalism, which I think we defined actually.

Paternalism is behavior which limits some person or group's liberty or autonomy for what is presumed to be that person's or group's own good.

So it's sort of a control with at least the appearance of doing so to help the person.

Now, as I said yesterday, if it's a five-year-old, that's probably a good thing, right?

You're talking about a group of adults, it's probably not such a good thing.

So, and we just mentioned briefly that there's several different ways.

Resource, spiritual, and knowledge paternalism.

The tendency to see solutions in material terms.

Pouring financial and other material resources into situations where it's probably not the most appropriate.

In other words, handouts instead of investments.

And again, by the way, my dear wife is here this morning.

I will, if I'm going too fast or too slow or too much information or whatever it is, she'll tell me about it.

Anyway, we went over this yesterday, Joanna.

That's why I'm going fast, a little bit fast.

Assuming the materially poor are inferior to us spiritually.

And then now as paternalism, which I'm gonna spend a few minutes on, we, After all, we're Americans, we have money, whatever the we is, we're Seventh Day Adventists, whatever it is, we have all the best ideas about how to do things, okay?

Paternalism instead of partnerships, to put it very briefly.

Now, we're going to talk about this in a minute.

This is from A worker for the Lord in Africa making the statement, sometimes we believe that people living in communities with high rates of poverty aren't as smart or capable as we are, and we need to, quote, save them.

Entering a community with this attitude can result in a condescending attitude that hinders relationships.

And then this gentleman here who is a lawyer and a, what do you call it, a journalist in Africa speaking about, this is speaking specifically about, you're actually going to get a copy of this whole article.

Here he's speaking specifically about, well I'm trying to get my word here, anyway, the aid, well What was it, a few years ago they had these concerts to raise money for Africa.

This is an article, and I want you to see the whole thing because it's very revealing about the attitudes of those in Africa at least.

I could give you several sources with the same disappointment being expressed.

Here he says, this is just a little part of the article, maybe a sentence or 2, 1 sentence actually, they, they, that is the celebrities, and the Americans, or the Western people, they still believe us to be like children that they must save.

As if we don't realize ourselves what the source of our problem is.

They still believe us to be like children that we, we must save, because we know.

So this is, and when you see this article, you'll see it's a very strong, a very strong reaction to 1 of the celebrity concerts raising money for Africa.

And this, if I'm not able to share with you, I'll at least share with you some sources of the strong reaction among thinking people, leaders really, not political leaders unfortunately, necessarily, but leaders, thought leaders in Africa, toward, and We'll see that in a video clip here in a little bit too.

Okay, now here the book Education, page 16.

This goes back to our beginning theme yesterday where we saw that every human being is created in God's image, right?

Well, here it says that every human being created in the image of God is endowed with a power akin to that of the Creator.

So we shouldn't swoop in and give people the solution to their problems because we know more.

A poor person, a poverty-stricken person, no matter how poverty-stricken, they are endowed with a power just like their Creator.

And so, yes, we have resources and opportunities that they haven't had the privilege to have, but it doesn't mean, in fact, it probably means we understand less their situation than they would.

And so, to partner with them, to draw out from them their own thoughts, dreams, ideas regarding their situation.

So, partnership, not parenting them, but partnering with them.

Rather than go in and you got the resource and the money and do what you want to do with it, as you give it to people and find out what the real issues are that you might partner with them and the money is dispersed and given in a proper manner at the post.

I read 1 account where the people from the West, I don't remember what organization, but where they were coming in and telling these farmers in 1 of the developing countries that they should be varying their crops from year to year and so on.

They said, you should be planting this, this year and this next year.

We know about that, saving the soil and so on.

These people understood there were other crops too, but what they knew is that they had to have a crop every year or they'd starve.

Therefore, they were planting the crop which had the highest degree of possibility every year of giving them a harvest.

We know that they should be, you know, having a variety for the sake of their soil.

But what we don't know is that they know.

So it would have been nice to go in and listen, to learn, to go as a learner.

And, of course, people have been oppressed and everything else.

They may need help to hone these tools, to use these tools in their lives.

We should allow them to let us know where their help, what they need.

Poverty Cure: Powerful Principles to Help the Poor- Part 3

You would provide Your wisdom and Your trueness to whatever information is presented here today.

We ask for Your presence, Your sweet Spirit to be in this class.

We pray these things in Jesus' name, Amen.

Yeah, I sort of wish I could shut this door, but I'm told I should not shut this door for security reasons, I guess.

How many of you read the New York Times article, All Rock, No Action?

All right, about, almost half of you did.

Hate to punish those who read it, but I'm just going to spend a teeny bit of time on this, okay?

So anyway, he starts out making reference to Live 8, that extraordinary media event that some people of good intentions in the West just orchestrated.

He said it would have left us Africans indifferent if we hadn't realized that it was an insult, an insult excuse me, both to us and to common sense.

He says we have nothing against those who this month in the stadium, a street, a park in Berlin, London, Moscow, Philadelphia, gathered crowds and played guitar and talked about global poverty and aid for Africa.

But we are troubled to think that they are so misguided about what Africa's real problem is, and dismayed by their willingness to propose solutions on our behalf.

We Africans know what the problem is, and no 1 else should speak in our name.

Africa has men of letters and science, great thinkers, and stifled geniuses who at the risk of torture rise up to declare the truth and demand liberty." So you take that paragraph there.

I'm simply saying that, for example, the World Bank in their charter, written into their charter is the idea that we will ignore the government of whatever country we're in.

Well, you can see where they would have good motives for doing that.

Unfortunately, oftentimes, I'll just say too many times, it has had the effect of propping up dictators.

So it's kind of beyond us, it's kind of complicated.

I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to do much about that problem, but it's a part of what we're talking about.

And this is what this man is talking about.

He says, don't insult Africa, this continent so rich yet so badly led.

Instead insult its leaders who have ruined everything.

Our anger is all the greater because despite all the precedents for life, despite all the evidence of genocide, we didn't hear anyone at Live 8 raise a cry for democracy in Africa.

Don't the organizers of the concerts realize that Africa lives under the oppression of rulers, like, and he mentions the name here, who just eliminated term limits in Uganda so he can be president indefinitely, and Omar Bongo who has become immensely rich in his 3 decades of running Gabon.

Don't they know what is happening in Cameroon, Chad, Togo, and the Central African Republic.

Don't they understand that fighting poverty is fruitless if dictatorships remain in place?" And he says that, "...neither debt relief, nor huge amounts of food aid, nor an invasion of experts will change anything.

These will merely prop up the continent's dictators.

It's up to each nation to liberate itself and to help itself.

When there is a problem in the United States, in Britain, in France, the citizens vote to change their leaders.

In those times when it wasn't possible to freely vote to change those leaders, the people revolted.

In Africa, our leaders have led us into misery, and we need to rid ourselves of these cancers.

We would have preferred for the musicians in Philadelphia and London to have marched and sung for a political revolution.

Instead, they mourned a corpse while forgetting to denounce the murderer.

What is at issue is an Africa where dictators kill, steal, and usurp power, yet are treated like heroes at meetings of the African Union.

What is at issue is rulers like François Boulzis, The coup leader running the Central African Republic, mentions another name here, who just succeeded his father as president of Togo, free to trample universal suffrage and muzzle their people with no danger that they'll lose their seats at the United Nation.

Who here wants a concert against poverty when an African is born, lives, and dies without ever being able to vote freely?

But the truth is that it was not for us, for Africa, that the musicians at Live Aid were singing.

It was to amuse the crowds and to clear their own consciences and whether they realize it or not, to reinforce dictatorships.

They still believe us to be like children that they must save, as if we don't realize ourselves what the source of the problem is.

So that's a cry from an intellectual leader in Africa.

But that whole thing illustrates, as I said yesterday, paternalism, and it also illustrates, well, yeah, I mean, it's just throwing money at the problem without really understanding the problem.

So that's a principle that is taking place for whole nations, but it's also in our own dealing with individuals.

Just throwing money at a problem that we don't really Haven't taken the time to understand get me and Okay, so we're gonna finish up talking about aid for just a little bit here and then we're going to move on to something more positive.

But I have just a little bit more video to show.

The first 8 minutes is just a clear example how aid can hurt in the long term.

Handouts are on the way, but because I didn't finish yesterday, I think I'm skipping my Bible portion today.

Pretty much what's in the handout is my Bible portion.

So yeah, after that, I have a short thing about NGOs and then another talk by an African economist, professor, intellectual leader, very short, and then we'll be about done with that.

This raw material will continue to become actual street lights, solar street lights.

We wanted to be part of something special.

Because both of us grew up in Haiti, so we know what the situation is.

You have plenty of sunshine, So is there a way that you can harvest energy from the sun and to resolve the energy problem?

So this is something that is completely different and something completely new.

So these are some friends from Haiti that started a solar lighting business from scratch.

Ended up being able to hire a number of fathers from shanty towns, changed their lives, and we see what happened.

At the beginning, almost everybody thought those guys were really crazy.

They didn't have anything to do, spending their time making some experiment on solar panels and getting light bulbs.

And even now, we come with the product and say, this is a Haitian-made product.

Most of the people, they don't believe us.

At the beginning, having a $500 sutra was great news because we had money for next week.

Series

Poverty Cure: Powerful Principles to Help the Poor

Poverty Cure: Powerful Principles to Help the Poor- Part 4

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Seminars

Hope for the Hopeless

42m

Plenary Sessions

AMEN 2022 Mission Program

50m

Reasons for Hope: The Case for Faith in a Secular Age

Reasons for Hope: The Case for Faith in a Secular Age - Part 2

1h 4m

Facebook Marketing

Facebook Marketing - Part 4: How to Create Facebook Ads that Actually Work 2

54m

Becoming a Man

1h 12m

Finding Your Life-long Friend

1h 16m

Morning Devotional

The Faithfulness of God

23m

Stealing Lucifer's Playground

1. Snapchat, Selfies, and Salvation

1h 2m

Community Services

Improving Interviewing Skills

1h 8m

Evangelism

Devotional Life as Fuel for Evangelism

46m

Identity: From Culture to Christ

1h 4m

Breakout Sessions B

Harnessing Our Lay People in Health Education

48m

Sound Doctrine