Brian Fikkert

The Bible envisions the global church as one body with no national or geographic boundaries. This one body is called to steward all of its resources — spiritual, human, technological, theological, org...

Researchers have found that more than half a million people in Japan stay at home for at least six months at a time without having any contact with the outside world.

Researchers have found that when prisoners are placed in solitary confinement with little human contact and minimal sensory stimulation, severe psychological and physical issues often ensue: depressio...

Researchers have found that more than half a million people in Japan stay at home for at least six months at a time without having any contact with the outside world.

Harvard Professor Robert Putnam once lamented that Americans were “bowling alone;” increasingly, we’re also eating alone, as nobody is home for dinner.

We are not bringing Christ to poor communities. He has been active in these communities since the creation of the world, sustaining them, Hebrews 1:3 says, by His powerful Word. Hence, a significant p...

Poverty is rooted in broken relationships, so the solution to poverty is rooted in the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection to put all things in right relationship again.

The causes of poverty are extremely complex, and the solutions usually are unclear. To make matters worse, even followers of Jesus Christ do not have a shared understanding of what success in poverty ...

Both the Old and New Testaments indicate that caring for the poor is one of the primary indicators of saving faith (Isa. 58:1–12; 1 John 3:17–18). Doing nothing is simply not an option for a follower ...

The claim here is not that the poor are inherently more righteous or sanctified than the rich. There is no place in the Bible that indicates that poverty is a desirable state or that material things a...

For some people the brokenness in these foundational relationships results in material poverty, that is their not having sufficient money to provide for the basic physical needs of themselves and thei...

As the center of Christianity shifts from the West (North America and Western Europe) to the Global South, grinding poverty is on the front doorstep — and in the front pews — of the church of Jesus Ch...

We have conducted the previous exercise in dozens of middle-to-upper-class, predominantly Caucasian, North American churches. In the vast majority of cases, these audiences describe poverty differentl...

Consider the following summary of an interview conducted by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two of the world’s leading researchers on poverty: In a village in Indonesia we met Ibu Emptat, the wif...

What is the solution? I once asked the former head of a major Christian relief and development organization what he had learned in his decades of experience in the field of poverty alleviation. …he sa...

What makes people happy? People have sought the answer to this question for thousands of years, but in the past two decades there has been an explosion of scientific research on this topic. In his pre...

I had just finished presenting much of the material in this chapter [on the role of the Church helping the poor] to an audience in Africa. A very tall and muscular African man in the audience approach...

The way to a person’s heart is to capture their imagination (mind), move their emotions (affections), and challenge their actions (will).

The last ten years, Americans have reported a steady decline in overall life satisfaction, despite the fact that average income per capita increased by 5.5 percent. We got richer, but became less happ...