Helping Without Hurting: In Church Benevolence, by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, succinctly answers the question of how to put principles of When Helping Hurts into practice. A short book with an easy to follow layout, this volume refreshes the theory and hammers out the details of how to implement a truly helpful benevolence program.

“Human touch is so important,” says Jocelyn Brisson, shelter manager at Watered Gardens Rescue Mission in southwest Missouri. While many of us sorely feel the lack of human contact during the pandemic, most homeless individuals have experienced this relational loss for years...

TCI's Savannah Aleckson and Nathan Mayo discuss the "what and why" of the True Charity Initiative with Katrina Hine of KNEO Radio in Neosho, Missouri.

Some have suggested it was originally used as a reference to people who lived in the geographic panhandle of a state. Others suggest it derived from the Spanish “pan,” meaning bread, and still others simply tie it to the tin pan extended by a beggar on a sidewalk. One outdated dictionary defined panhandler by distinguishing the person as “able-bodied” in contrast to other beggars who aren’t. More interesting is that panhandlers don’t use the term. They don’t “panhandle." They...

Imagine that you spend months crafting a relational, empowering program at your ministry. You carefully craft a series of questions for clients designed to find their talents and abilities. The person responsible for asking the questions changes out several times and one day you decide to sit in on the process. What was designed as an exercise in personal connection has become quite the opposite – an adversarial bureaucratic process that demeans your client. This happens more often that we know. It’s not enough to design your programs well, or implement them well in a trial run; you must maintain their effectiveness over time.