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Guest Post: Chris Marlow of HELP End Local Poverty
This month’s guest blog post is by a dear friend to Austin New Church and Restore Austin – Chris Marlow. Chris is the founder of HELP End Local Povery. HELP is a global tribe dedicated to ending extreme poverty by rescuing orphans, restoring their hope and renewing their communities. Being that April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, we’ve asked Chris to write a blog concerning those children who are most abused – orphans:
The global orphan crisis seems to have captured the hearts and minds of people inside the church, and also outside the
church. It is deeply encouraging, as many have chosen not to ignore or look away from this crisis.The more conversations I have, the more people want to understand how we got here. And by “here,” I mean the orphan crisis. How, in a world of such deep wealth, intelligence and connectedness, did we come to a place where millions of kids are suffering, alone!
Let’s take a look at some possible factors:
War
When you research the global orphan crisis, war becomes an obvious target. When men and women die, kids are left behind to fend for themselves. Even when good Samaritans, or extended family take in these orphans, they also suffer. Therefore, you can track a chain-reaction destabilizing effect on war-torn countries, that last for decades. It’s truly crippling!
Extreme Poverty
Poverty is quite hard to process. We live in a world where 1 billion people don’t have access to clean water. Now think about this for a second; How can a people-group function, if they don’t have a clean water-source? Of course there are other issues, such as, political uprisings, famines, and natural disasters that causes economic collapse. For instance, Zimbabwe is a country that for years could not afford to keep the power grid working, they could not pay for food to be imported into the country, and they had civil uprising, which caused a collapse in their farming structures. All these issues lead to extreme poverty.
Disease
The fact remains, that diseases such as aids, and malaria wreck havoc on people-groups that don’t have access to proper medicine. A child in Africa dies every 30 seconds because of malaria. There are some 15 million aids-orphans around the globe, that have lost parents to this crisis. Again, it’s easy to see how this would effect a society, foe generations.
Lack of concern
However, the biggest reason that there are some 144 million orphans in the world today, is a simple lack of compassion. There is simply to much wealth and intelligence to assume we can’t do anything about this crisis. And above all that, in general the church (for decades) failed to respond on a mass-scale. Christians, like myself, simply ignored the plight of the orphan. More than war, or extreme poverty, or disease, (as bad as all of those things are) the biggest reason, in my opinion, is the lack of concern by the masses.
Hope
With that being said, we now live in a generation that refuses to ignore this issue. We’re also not scared to tackle the problem. There is hope that we can turn the tide, we can make a difference, and we will fight no matter what. It’s hard for people to understand extreme poverty, it’s next to impossible to comprehend war, and we still struggle with diseases. However, this is where EVERYONE can help. We can simply just care, and also, get our friends to care. When that happens, we can become intentional, and focus on solutions that can change the scope of extreme poverty. Scriptures like Isaiah 1:17, Isaiah 58, Luke 4:16-22, Acts 11:27-30 , Gal 2:9-10, and James 1:27 are being taken seriously, again!
My hope and passion is that the church will lead the way, and fight for the orphan. That we will unite, sacrifice, and take action to make a change, to show the world the character and nature of God through His people, the church.
We can end this crisis, we can crash into eternity doing something to cause impact, and we will rescue orphans, restore their hope and renew their communities.
Chris, thank you, and the team at HELP! We look forward to the partnership between HELP, Restore Austin, and Austin New Church!
