Imagen del autor
6 Obras 1,219 Miembros 14 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Robert D. Lupton is founder and president of FCS Urban Ministries (Focused Community Strategies) and the author of Theirs Is the Kingdom; Compassion, Justice, and the Christian Life; and the widely circulated "Urban Perspectives." To learn more, visit www.fcsministries.org.

Obras de Robert D. Lupton

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Fecha de nacimiento
1944-02-17
Género
male
Nacionalidad
USA
Lugares de residencia
Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Miembros

Reseñas

1.5 stars

A full two-thirds of this book is a fictional retelling of the Book of Nehemiah, with plenty of embellishment. I don't like it when anyone adds to the biblical narrative in this way.

The other third is a combination of Lupton's thoughts on community development and anecdotes from his own work. He appeared wishy-washy on a few important theological issues and a bit arrogant, and didn't have much to say that is of actual use, in my opinion.

There are better (and more updated) books on this topic available.… (más)
 
Denunciada
RachelRachelRachel | Nov 21, 2023 |
Entrepreneurship as a missionary activity is a revolutionary concept that Robert Lupton proposes in this book. He's not talking about the fair trade charities that don't make a profit, but instead, ethically-run corporations that create real jobs and compete in the same marketplace on the same level playing field as every other corporation, including the unethical and unjust ones.

I belong to the minority group that is the least employed and lowest paid in the US. It's legal to pay us less than the minimum wage; it's even legal to pay us 25 cents an hour. My people would be in such a better place if the laws against discriminating against us were enforced, if the minimum wage were required for us, and if the minimum wage was a living wage that would enable you to own a small home/condo, have good medical care, eat healthy food, afford hobbies, and have access to transportation. I can't even imagine how glorious it would be if I weren't actively discriminated against, even by institutions that are required to prove their minority and protected groups hiring numbers.

I have never heard a sermon encouraging every business owner (and boss who is responsible for determining wages) to pay a just wage and treat their employees with justice. I have never heard a preacher say, "What you do to the least of your employees, you do to Jesus. If they can't afford to pay rent on the tiniest apartment on your wages, you are casting Jesus on the street. If you choose to only hire beautiful people, you choose to leave Jesus unemployed. If you don't offer potential employees on-the-job training, you cast aside the Jesus who never got a bachelor's degree, MBA, or doctoral degree." Imagine how different it would be if preachers had the spines to preach these sermons to their affluent congregations!

As a member of the minority group that is targeted the most by eugenicists, I appreciate that Robert says that pretty much everyone has the ability to contribute something to their community. His suggestions of neighborhood watch, phone-chain participants, and praying for prayer requests are all good, though I believe that he could do better. Assistive technology can enable people with ALS, quadriplegia, cerebral palsy, and similar challenges to do many electronic jobs. They can become authors, build websites, do electronic monitoring of video feeds, scroll through spy images looking for anomalies that indicate military activity, do wildlife counts based upon satellite images or drone images, collate and compile information, and many other things. Just because someone works slower than an able-bodied person doesn't mean that you should hire the able-bodied person. For one, employee turnover is ridiculously high for able-bodied people. Disabled people will stick with a job and employer for a very long time, lessening the HR/talent search costs dramatically. Another reason is that disabled people tend to be more thorough in their work and will do anything to be able to keep a good job.

Another topic covered in this book is gentrification which enables the impoverished locals to stay and improve their lives....and not get shoved out of the way to another, more distant ghetto, torn away from all that is familiar. His proven plan for redeveloping a whole neighborhood gets 2 thumbs up from me.

The author ends by considering the thought that American Christians might not want the poor to prosper. Christians worry that the poor might become wealthy, materialistic, and selfish if they cease to be poor. Only wealthy, materialistic, and selfish people will project their own faults on others like this! Robert says that the alleviation of poverty worldwide is possible. Extreme poverty has been halved worldwide in the last few decades. This is entirely due to China and India creating massive numbers of new jobs for their poorest citizens. All it takes to eliminate poverty for a person is creating for them a good-paying job [one that enables them to pay all of their necessary expenses with room for savings]. So simple and yet so few are willing to do it!

I'd give this book 10 out of 5 stars if I could.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
ChristinasBookshelf | 2 reseñas más. | Feb 8, 2023 |
The primary takeaway for this book:
"1. Never do for the poor what they have (or could have) the capacity to do for themselves.
2. Limit one-way giving to emergency situations.
3. Strive to empower the poor through employment, lending, and investing, using grants sparingly to reinforce achievements.
4. Subordinate self-interests to the needs of those being served.
5. Listen closely to those you seek to help, especially to what is not being said--unspoken feelings may contain essential clues to effective service.
6. Above all, do no harm."

There is a lot of charity being done by Americans that is net-damage to the world. When Americans give away for free shoddy Chinese-slave-made goods to people who sometimes don't need them and if they do need them would rather own better-quality local-made products that would work better, it's a lose-lose-lose situation all around.

As someone who has been a beneficiary of well-meaning charity that ended up harming me more, I really wish that churches and charities would evaluate their efforts based on the long-term effects.

For me, I look at all of the thousands of dollars that were directed to completely ineffective marriage counseling that told me to shove my ex-husband's sins under the carpet and ignore them and focus on bettering myself as a wife so that my goodness would motivate him to do better. (And they would blame me fully [and let him off the hook] for not being good enough as the cause of him not doing better. They didn't see any fault in him yelling at me, insulting me, blaming me for his own sins, using massive quantities of porn, abusing alcohol, using drugs, abusing our children, etc.) What would have made the biggest difference is if they would have beaten him over the head constantly with Ephesians 5:25 instead of beating me over the head with Ephesians 5:22 with Ephesians 5:21 completely ignored. Any pastor could have spent a few hours a week going over Ephesians 5:25 and Ephesians 5:21 and intensively held him accountable for his own actions and his entitlement mindset. And that would have been so much cheaper and better for himself, myself, our children, our churches, our community, and our government since the finances of all of the above have been harmed by this. But nooooo, because 99% of evangelical pastors and people helpers have a mindset of authoritarianism, patriarchalism, male supremacy, and entitlement to power, they don't want to hold other men to God's standard because they don't want God to hold them to God's standard. They gotta all drop the bar for being considered a godly man down into the gutter where any man can trip over it, fall over it clumsily, and somehow be considered godly when really they are demonic. They don't want to listen to the voices of millions of women because that would mean that they would have to admit that they were really, really, really wrong. My ex-husband is still mired in the pit though much, much deeper in the pit that he began digging 25 years ago. But I digress.

This book and my lived experience agree, for certain.

The "bad" with this book: this book is 95% an argument that nearly every charity and church and government is hurting people with almost all of their attempts to help. It doesn't provide much guidance for how to do things right. That's the job of the sequel Charity Detox: what charity would look like if we cared about results.

If you already know for certain that your charitable efforts are hurting more than they are helping, you can skip this book and get the sequel. That book is much more DIY on how to create a charity that doesn't hurt people.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
ChristinasBookshelf | 7 reseñas más. | Feb 8, 2023 |

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Estadísticas

Obras
6
Miembros
1,219
Popularidad
#21,068
Valoración
3.8
Reseñas
14
ISBNs
19

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