Bryant Myers Quotes

Remember that the poor are people with names,” writes Bryant Myers, author of Walking with the Poor. “[They are] people with whom and among whom God has been working before we even knew they were there.

The net result of the fall on the economic, political, and religious systems is that they become the places where people learn to play god in the lives of the poor and the marginalized. When fallen human beings play god in the lives of others, the results are patterns of domination and oppression that mar the image and potential productivity of the poor while alienating the non-poor from their true identity and vocation as well.

Poverty is about relationships that don't work, that isolate, that abandon or devalue. Transformation must be about restoring relationships, just and right relationships with God, with self, with community, with the “other,” and with the environment.

To declare that the mission of the church is solely about spiritual things ignores the incarnation.

But the coming of the kingdom of God in its fullness awaits the second coming of Christ at the end of history. So the kingdom of God both is, and is coming.

Both the poor and the non-poor need to recover their true identity and their true vocation. Everyone is poor in God's world, and everyone is in need of transformation.

One of the best gifts that we have for the poor and the non-poor is the living word of God. We need to share it with them and let the living word speak for itself.

Activists are quick to pick up on the preaching, the healing, and the casting out stuff. They too often overlook that Christ's call was first and foremost “to be with” Christ. Being must precede doing.

If there is to be any human transformation that is sustainable, it will be because of the action of the Holy Spirit, not the effectiveness of our development technology or the cleverness of our participatory processes

Deneulin and Bano drive home the point that for these religious traditions “there is no separation between religion and development. Development is what adherents to a religion do because of who they are and what they believe in” (2009, 4-5).

The poor are poor largely because they live in networks of relationships that do not work for their well-being. Their relationships with others are often oppressive and disempowering as a result of the non-poor “playing god” in the lives of the poor.

Capitalism today asks for faith in a god called “the hidden hand” and seems to have forgotten the goal of the original story. Adam Smith, capitalism's original storyteller, “wrote that the ultimate goal of business is not to make a profit. Profit is just the means. The goal is general welfare” (Wink 1992, 68).

The truth must be discovered about the way the poor contribute to their own poverty, and the truth must be discovered about how poverty is created by the god-complexes of the non-poor, inadequacies of worldview, and deception by the principalities and powers. Only in repenting in the face of God's truth can relationships be restored so that life, justice, and peace (shalom) can be restored. Thus, in a Christian process of change, every development action and process must be tested for its contribution to truth and justice.

Adam Smith, capitalism's original storyteller, “wrote that the ultimate goal of business is not to make a profit. Profit is just the means. The goal is general welfare” (Wink 1992, 68). Instead, the view of capitalism in play today tends to reduce people to economic beings driven by utilitarian self-interest toward the goal of accumulating wealth. What