God’s work in the world raised to the nth power
Monday, March 1, 2010
Don’t miss this column by Nicholas Kristof in praise of World Vision. “Evangelicals have become the new internationalists.” He quotes Richard Stearns, head of World Vision in the US and author of the new book The Hole in the Gospel:
“In one striking passage, Mr. Stearns quotes the prophet Ezekiel as saying that the great sin of the people of Sodom wasn’t so much that they were promiscuous or gay as that they were ‘arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.’” (Ezekiel 16:49.)
Mr. Kristof has been defending the relief work of evangelical organizations (as distinguished from well-meaning but ignorant and inexperienced “rescuers”) for years in his column in The New York Times, where disdain for Christianity is more typical.
He writes further:
“Some liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice (it’s a myth that this started with President George W. Bush) of channeling American aid through faith-based organizations. That change would be a catastrophe. In Haiti, more than half of food distributions go through religious groups like World Vision that have indispensable networks on the ground. We mustn’t make Haitians the casualties in our cultural wars.
“A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals. They’re also less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda.
If secular liberals can give up some of their snootiness, and if evangelicals can retire some of their sanctimony, then we all might succeed together in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity, like illiteracy, human trafficking and maternal mortality.”
Do read this, and let’s support World Vision even more! Here is the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28kristof.html
