A friend sent me this link to a website that promotes what looks to be a wonderful project. http://www.girleffect.org/video.  It’s worth watching.

The video has a lot of great ideas that ring true from my experience as a missionary in the developing world. Women are often the key in raising the standard of living for a community. This program certainly has it right. What disturbed me was the pitch: help a girl, save the world.

God’s concern for the poor and the powerless is crystal clear in the Old and New Testaments. The end of the age of decay announced by Jesus in Luke 4 bring hope to the hopeless, sight to the blind, release to the captives. Christians are given the privilege of bearing witness to this release and participating in it.

What I kvetch about is the portrayal that the world is saved if every girl gets to have what Paris Hilton has. Poverty is a symptom of our communal lostness but better development doesn’t equal the undoing of the age of decay.

Think about the most wealthy, the most affluent community you have intimate personal knowledge of. Has the kingdom arrived there? The affluence there may well be just as much a symptom of lostness as the poverty in the worst slum. No one preaching social transformation through community development will usually disagree with that yet the carrot they dangle and the promises they make can’t point to any community that has arrived.

In the US I think more girls graduate from college than boys. That’s great. Has the kingdom of God already arrived here?

Any world saving effort motivated by a swelled sense of our capacity to save ourselves will always result in disappointment. We should give money to educate girls (and boys) and do good community development, but turning a slum into a suburb won’t satisfy our heart’s yearning for complete transformation. The affluent commit suicide at rates far higher than the developing world’s poor.

Let’s work and share and give but let’s not fool ourselves about what we can accomplish. Let’s seek nothing less than the end of the age of decay proclaimed in word and deeds to girls.