MAKE CARING PERSONAL

In his book The Hole In Our Gospel, Richard Stearns tells about a simple behavioral experiment conducted in 2006 by three researchers:

A test group of ordinary people was divided into three subgroups. The first read the story and saw a photo of a poor, starving seven-year-old African girl named Rokia. The second group was given a statistical portrait of seventeen million Africans in four countries who were desperately hungry because of crop failures and food shortages. They were told about yet another four million who were homeless. In other words, group two read about hunger and suffering on a massive scale. The third group was given the story about the little girl Rokia but was also given the statistical information given to group two. Finally, participants in all three groups were asked to donate money to relieve the suffering. Amazingly, the group that heard only Rokia’s story gave the most money. The group that was given the statistics about twenty-one million suffering people gave the least, and the group that received both pieces of information was only slightly more generous than the statistics-only group. The story of one child was more compelling than the suffering of millions.

People will depersonalize a large group of people and thus respond to them with far less compassion than they will when a person’s life circumstances become personal to them. When we realize this, we can better understand some of the appalling realities of our world and how the unthinkable becomes possible. Does this allow, for instance, for the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide? Might this explain slavery — and how Christian people tolerated and defended it for so long?

As Christians we need to see beyond the mass scale of such tragedies and personalize such things as poverty by understanding that the lives of people are affected — not just large numbers of nameless people.

This is how Jesus saw people. Matthew 9:36 says, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

So, as we discover “The Hole In Our Gospel” through the current sermon series, I encourage you to make poverty and disease and helplessness personal. Many of you are doing so by helping with our food pantry or ministering to “the least of these” in other ways. Get to know someone who is hungry, thirsty, a stranger, in need of clothes, sick, or in prison and care for them. God has rescued us from the helplessness of sin and calls us to care for people who need to be rescued. Make caring personal.