If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. Deuteronomy 15:7
“When we join our commitment to place to our management of money, it follows that monetary investment and expenditure should be focused locally to serve the neighborhood economy. It is crucial to “keep the money at home.” Such a commitment tilts against unrestrained engagement with big-box stores and merchandising chains (notably those online) that intend to move the money out of the neighborhood. (An easy case to cite is the choice of a local bookstore over against the “convenience” of Amazon; extracting money from the local economy is characteristically “convenient”!) Keeping money local is an important ingredient in mature materiality.”
Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 26.
Let me explain the significance of this from India and why I wish people would stop sending money over here with maybe two exceptions.
First, I hear story after story of India ministry workers who say, why raise funds locally when it’s easier just to ask an American to make a gift. Secondly, Americans send money overseas thinking trying to solve problems, and they hinder the people here from doing the work of putting to use what they have.
Then I hear American’s complaining that they don’t like the trajectory of the morality of their local society. All the more reason to give where you live.
So what should cross-border giving look like? If you give to help them build capacity, it turns dependency to discipleship. I am all for that.
Or supporting workers like GTP to go into hard places not with handouts but with help in the form of training and coaching, to teach them to use what they have and not just call America when they have a need.
I am neither saying to cancel your Amazon subscription nor to quit giving overseas. I am saying to understand the impact of your buying and your giving on the world in which we live.
Our giving and living decisions shape the local society. What do you want your world to look like?