The Church Among the Poor
I’ve said it before, but Jayakumar Christian is one of my enduring heroes. His now out-of-print book, God of the Empty-Handed, transformed the way I think about the interplay between poverty, power, and the kingdom of God. Then I met him in person, and I learned even more about the stewardship of power on account of his humility and graciousness in a time and place that, to my mind, would have warranted the opposite.
While Jayakumar isn’t a household name by any stretch, a lot of folks were introduced to him by Andy Crouch in the pages of Playing God. Indeed, the title itself comes from this humble hero of ours. “The poor are poor,” Jayakumar told Andy, “because someone else is trying to play God in their lives.”
I thought some of you might be interested in this talk Jayakumar gave earlier this year at the International Society for Urban Mission Summit in Kuala Lumpur, which covers a lot of the material found in his book—and in Andy’s, for that matter!