poverty on Vulnerability

The vast majority of violence oppressing the poor is not driven by the overwhelming power of the perpetrators—it’s driven by the utter vulnerability of the victims. Give the poor a strong, consistent ...

I was teaching an English class in a high-rise apartment complex full of low-income families in Minneapolis—mostly immigrant and refugees from East Africa. The tenants’ association paid for me to come...

Extreme poverty anywhere is a threat to human security everywhere.

The lower classes of society are “not only disproportionately vulnerable to injustice, but usually disproportionately actual victims of injustice. Injustice is not equally distributed. One has to deci...

Talk to any poor person or vulnerable person and they can give you a long list of the services they have received. (editor’s note: one assumes in the West) They are well serviced, but you often have t...

[The poor have] a feeling of powerlessness and an inability to make themselves heard.

Here then from both James and Paul is a central witness drawn from all of Scripture: God has sovereignly chosen to work in the world by beginning with the weak who are on the ‘outside,’ not the powerf...

Poverty is the absence of linkages, the absence of connections with others.

The marginalized and downtrodden receive special insights. They are the ones who can see the pain and the injustice that are killing the world. It is to these voices that we must turn

I am mended by my sickness, enriched by my poverty and strengthened by my weakness…. What fools are we, then, to frown upon our afflictions! These, how crabbed soever, are our best friends. They are n...

God welcomes all who come to him. In weakness or strength. With much, or with little. Seek the Lord, while he can be found Call on him while he is near And be confident that Jesus will look upon you w...

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...

A true prayer is an inventory of needs, a catalog of necessities, an exposure of secret wounds, a revelation of hidden poverty.

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...

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

Poverty is the result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable. Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meanings.

Almighty God, we take pride in our self-sufficiency while we look down on the weak who cannot provide for themselves. We praise others for their efforts, yet we demand perfection from our own families...

In his excellent book, Just Courage , founder and CEO of the International Justice Mission, Gary Haugen articulates some of the realities behind the systemic oppression of the poor around the world...

All: Gracious God, we have become callous to those in need, holding back compassion yet unsparing with judgment. We defend our motivations, rather than using all you have given us to love and care for...

We were poor on the outside, but also on the inside, because poverty starts in the heart.

Poverty is no sin

Failures are divided into two classes — those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

At first to be ‘poor’ meant to be in literal, material need. But gradually, because the needy had no refuge but God, ‘poverty’ came to have spiritual overtones and to be identified with humble depende...

In his book Prayer , Phillip Yancey shares the testimony of a man named “John” who has spent the past 25 years working in street ministry, primarily with the homeless population of his city: I he...

The Spirit wants to make you threatening to all the forces of injustice and apathy and complacency that keep our world from flourishing.

Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit.

The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.

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 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...