Helping Without Hurting In Short-Term Missions by Steve Corbett

Helping Without Hurting In Short-Term Missions by Steve Corbett

Good intentions are not enough.

We need a different framework for thinking about poverty. Rather than simply defining it as a lack of material things, we need to get to the very roots of the issue: broken relationships with God, self, others, and the rest of creation.

What does that mean for a short-term mission trip to a low-income community?

Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions: Participant's Guide aims to train and debrief team members, preparing them to do short-term missions without doing long-term harm. It takes the core ideas from When Helping Hurts and applies them to short-term missions, provides practical examples and guidelines for team members, and creates interaction and reflection through questions and journaling.

With eight units, six of which are built around free, online video content, this book equips teams to avoid harming materially poor communities and to translate their experience into lasting engagement with missions and poverty alleviation. In conjunction with the separately available Leader's Guide, it is an ideal resource for churches, Christian colleges, mission agencies, and missionaries.

Dr. Brian Fikkert is the Founder and Executive Director of Covenant College's Chalmers Center for Economic Development, as well as an Economics and Community Development Professor. Dr. Fikkert is a Ph.D. holder. Yale University, with a degree in economics, concentrating in Third World economic development and international economics. Dr. Fikkert has worked with the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the US Agency for International Development as a consultant. He was a professor at the University of Maryland in a research fellow at the Center for Institutional Transformation and the Informal Sector before coming to Covenant College. Dr. Fikkert being a sought-after speaker who has authored a number of scholarly and popular works, the most recent of which is When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor...and Yourself.