Christian Aid works wherever the need is greatest, irrespective of religion. It supports local organisations, which are best placed to understand local needs, as well as giving help on the ground through 16 overseas offices. Christian Aid believes in strengthening people to find their own solutions to the problems they face. It strives for a new world transformed by an end to poverty and campaigns to change the rules that keep people poor. This charity is more constructive and is helping to end the problem of poverty.
By giving poor people skills, training and basic equipment, they can learn how to support themselves for the rest of their lives, even passing on those skills to others. If they were simply given money or high technology equipment to use, once the money runs out or the equipment fails, they would be back in the same situation, making them in need of ever further aid. This should not be the desired result.
St Paul states that, ‘if a man will not work, he will not eat.’ This is clear that he believes that a person has to do something to receive a reward or that if no energy is put into something then, there will be no food. Perhaps he was pointing out that we need to earn our living and being given our living is wrong.
Another issue to consider is whether poor people themselves actually want donations. Most poor people are uncomfortable even humiliated to be accepting aid. They are often desperate to get by standing on their own feet. They want control of their own lives. Most do not like being felt sorry for and prefer to manage on their own at the first given opportunity.
On the other hand, those who support the statement in question would argue that charity often does make people lazy and over dependent on the support provided by charities. They hold the view that it is clear that no amount of charity can ever fully solve the problems faced and charity only makes matters worse by giving them a example of what they are missing. Also, they believe that recipients of charity can often lose any motivation to work or improve things for themselves. Why work when your needs are being provided by others?
Such advocates believe that charities are making the situation worse for the poor by giving their governments’ an excuse not to take more responsibility in solving the problems. They contend that whilst charities keep providing resources, their governments’ are able to abandon their responsibility to their own people.
We can surmise that Jesus is signifying in the Parable of the Talents that Charity does not necessarily have to be a Christian obligation. The Parable tells us that the third servant used his talents badly and is punished as a result. This implies that just because one has talents i.e. monies/resources, this does not mean that those talents have to be used in one particular way. Talents are useful in the right hands.
An important factor to bear in mind is that Jesus does not appear in the ‘Parable of the Talents’ to condone simply giving aid to people in the form of money – the people in the country must use their talents. The third servant in the parable represents the poor people i.e. they need to use their talents to do things for themselves rather than accept handouts from charities.
It is worth remembering that we have seen the negative effects of ‘charity’ on poor countries before. For example in Bangladesh, for many years, the country flooded. Many crops and homes were destroyed. However, due to what became a regular annual problem, charities started to anticipate the disaster and relief became almost automatic. The Bangladeshi government and its people came to ‘assume’ this help and discarded progressive thoughts of improving the cause of the problem, thinking that all their problems were solved each year by the charity that was forthcoming. Arguably, without the aid, it would have been more likely that the Bangladeshis would have tried harder to solve the cause of the problem. This situation has moved on in more recent times, and now much of the aid is focused on providing longer term solution for the people most affected. E.g. building of levees, irrigation systems, re-forestation etc.
After considering the different points of view and the supporting evidence, I think that charity, if used well, can be very advantageous to small communities. It can give poor people a chance to work and improve their circumstances. As in the example set by CAFOD in South America it can give people the ability to work themselves away from poverty by offering them some measure of self sufficiency. It can provide incentives to work rather than take the easy option of being lazy.
