In yesterday’s post, we went old school with praise for Jane Addams and Hull House as a branch of the TG family tree. The core idea we were lauding was Addams’ focus on identification, immersion, and partnership, not pity, as a transformational driver.

Today we go new school with a ten-pack of Partnership-Beats-Pity resources: a reading list for development professionals interested in coaching champions to bear burdens with, not for, the subjects of our causes, helping impact the things that they care about that arise from the heart of God.

1. Opening Doors: Pathways to Diverse Donors, by Diana S. Newman. Check out this post from last week for my lavish praise of this 2002 work. I love it so much I can almost even forgive Newman for using the d-word in the title.
2. If Jesus Were Mayor, by Bob Moffitt. We’ve talked about this marvelous tome in past posts (namely here and here), but never in light of Moffitt’s brilliant discussion of ways to give and get involved with churches overseas that lead to partnership rather than dependence.
3. A Model For Making Disciples, by D. Michael Henderson. We’ve swooned over this title in past posts here and here, but, again, never in light of Henderson’s pointing out how John Wesley’s Class Meeting discipleship model arose to meet a fundraising need, and how that need was met in a way that put rich and poor contributors on equal footing and even gave the poorest of the poor the opportunity to lead the richest of the rich.
4. When Charity Destroys Dignity, by Glenn J. Schwartz. The book’s subtitle is ‘Overcoming Unhealthy Dependency in the Christian Movement’. Some of the chapter titles are ‘What Should Wealthy Churches do with their Money?’, ‘Historical Development of the Syndrome of Dependency’, and ‘What can Missionaries do to Avoid or Break the Dependency Syndrome?’ Weird capitalization, sure. But a rich, rich work.
5. Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day, by Collins, Morduch, Rutherford, and Ruthven. Read this book and your pity for the poor will be overcome by admiration and astonishment. The book doesn’t address the topic, but I’ve always felt that matching gifts–where the poor provide  financial gifts of proportional sacrifice for joint projects with affluent Western champions–is TG of the highest order. (Note that I said ‘of proportional financial sacrifice’. There’s amazement aplenty waiting to happen when champions see what kind of a ‘proportional gift’ they would need to make to match a 15 cent gift from someone from half the nations on the globe.)
6. Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa, by Dambisa Moyo. As we were saying in yesterday’s post, when our mindset is ‘help the less fortunate’, it is truly jaw-droppingly astonishing how badly that kind of help can backfire.
7. Missions and Money, by Jonathan J. Bonk. The subtitle, Affluence as a Missionary Problem, is sheer genius. Most missionaries are convinced that Low Support Account Balances are the primary Missionary Problem. The best sections of the book are the ones labeled ‘Old Testament Teaching That the Wealthy Find Reassuring’, ‘New Testament Teaching That the Wealthy Find Reassuring’, ‘Old Testament Teaching That the Wealthy Find Troubling’, and ‘New Testament Teaching That the Wealthy Find Troubling’. Why isn’t this written down anywhere else?
8. The Ethics of Giving and Receiving: Am I My Foolish Brother’s Keeper?, edited by May and Soens. Lots of great essays in this book. Make sure especially to check out Roy Menninger’s ‘Observations on the Psychology of Giving and Receiving Money’. (That’s a great question for champions to ask, by the way: What are the possible responses that can be made to this donation by the end recipient, not the charity?)
9. www.vulnerablemission.com. This is the web home of the The Alliance For Vulnerable Mission, dedicated to the premise ‘That there should be some missionaries from the West whose ministries are conducted in the language of the people being reached, without use of outside financial subsidy.’
10. Why am I concerned about dependency, a blog post by my dear bro and kindred spirit Glenn Penner, CEO of VOM/Canada. Glenn makes a fascinating connection between persecution and dependency and then notes how it’s the latter, not the former, that really gives him the willies.

The Bible itself sure belongs on the top of this list. Make sure to keep a weather eye out for the partnership-beats-pity theme therein–and hit the comments section at the bottom of this page to let me know what you find.