True Compassion: Effective Work with the Poor

Concern for the poor is an essential part of being a Christian. Yet, Christians often don’t know how to effectively engage people who are in poverty, often coming from social and ethnic backgrounds very different from them. The temptation is to substitute reason with emotion and to offer transactional systems of care instead of the arduous task of encounter. Our presentation will offer a number of examples of organizations across the United States attempting to recapture the essence of effective compassion, revive the principles that attended the birth of systems of care in early American life while adapting these ideas to the present conditions of our society.