Lesson video

Hello, I'm miss Kendrick.

And welcome to this lesson on Christian responses to worldwide poverty.

In this lesson we're going to be looking at what is poverty.

What do we mean by extreme poverty.

We're going to look at causes of poverty and some Christian responses as well.

So what we're going to do is just make sure we've got everything that we need.

Make sure you've got pen or pencil, a different pen or pencil so that you can add corrections to your work, and some paper to write down your answers as well.

But before we write anything down, I want to start with a thought experiment.

So I would like you to imagine that the whole world population was represented by just 100 people.

I want you to think about, how many people do you think would have a university degree out of that hundred? How many would be able to read and write or have safe drinking water, or have an internet connection? So pause for a moment.

I want you to think about how many people out of a hundred would have those things if we reduced the whole world's population down to a hundred people.

I wonder what you've thought.

Now, if we look at this statistically, this is the result we get.

So, seven people out of that hundred would have a university degree.

86 people would be able to read and write.

91 people would have safe drinking water, and 40 would have an internet connection.

And actually, these numbers are much better than they were 10 or 15 years ago.

So what we have seen is that the levels of world poverty have been changing.

And in many ways, things have been getting a lot better, or at least they have been over the last 10 or 15 years.

Long may that continue.

But what we can see here is that there's still a lot of people who do not have all of the things that they need.

My second question is this.

I wonder how long you've ever gone without running water.

Perhaps when you've been camping, you've had to go and collect water from a tap, but you still then technically had running water, or perhaps you've had your water cutoff for some reason, maybe there's been a leak in the streets, or there's been something wrong with the water mains, or maybe you've been travelling or been abroad and you've not been able to get water out of a tap.

Now I have my water cut off before because of a leak, and it's amazing how easy it is to forget that you don't have that thing that you normally have.

I go around and I think, okay, I know there was going to be cut off, I'll pull myself a couple glasses of water and I'll be fine.

And then last the water is turned off, I go, Oh, I'm just going to go to the tap and wash my hands.

Oh, there's no water.

Oh, I'll just do the washing up.

Oh, there's no water.

Oh, maybe I'll do some washing.

Put the clothes on.

Oh, there's no water.

And the thing is, this is because we are so used to having running water and clean water that we're able to make use of whenever we want, that we forget that we have that privilege.

And this is one way that we can start to understand what privilege is.

Privilege is when a person has a benefit that is not enjoyed by other people or it's above and beyond the advantage of the most.

And it's really important for people to be aware of their privilege because it helps people to understand where they come from, and it helps people understand the difficulties that other people might face, that they may not face themselves.

And one thing to be aware of when we think about this and we think about privilege, is that we might be quite aware of the different levels of privilege in the UK, for example, and who might be considered very wealthy and who might be considered very poor within the UK.

But we also need to be aware that when we start to look internationally, that starts to look very different as well.

People who are considered poor in the UK might be considered very wealthy in another country.

For example, if you have a computer in your home, you're better off than 50% of the world.

And many people in the UK have more than one computer in their home.

And so that just goes to show how we're so used to having things like computers.

I mean, you're watching me on some sort of device right now, a phone, a smartphone is very much like a computer, if you're watching me on a phone.

But lots and lots of people in the world don't even have that at all.

And so we need to think about, what do we mean when we talk about poverty? So when we think about poverty, we can think about money.

Can't we? And global poverty lines are used to measure the financial dimension of poverty.

And this threshold of living under $1.

90 a day, and those people who are under that threshold are considered to live in extreme poverty.

And people who live on slightly more money, but still not very much like $3.

20 or $5.

50 per day are still considered to be living in poverty, but perhaps not as extreme as those people on a $1.

90 a day.

But money is not the only factor when it comes to poverty.

It's not the only measure.

Other dimensions include a lack of access to work, health, nutrition, education, sanitation, and housing.

So what I'm going to get you to do now quickly is pause the video, so you can write down the definitions of poverty.

Okay? Let's look at some causes of poverty.

So currently more than 2 million people in the world don't have access to clean water at home.

While 800 million people suffer from hunger.

Now you might think that surely poverty is a cause of hunger rather than hunger being a cause of poverty.

But what we can see here is a bit of a cycle.

Because if somebody isn't able to get food and isn't able to get water, then they're also often unable to work and that can stop them from escaping extreme poverty.

These can be for several reasons.

If a person doesn't get enough food, they might simply not have the strength or the energy to work.

Whilst a lack of clean water might mean that they continue to get preventable illnesses like diarrhoea and things like that, which again, will prevent them from working.

And when people have to travel long distances to collect water each day, then that means that I have far less time to work.

And often children do these jobs as well, which means that children aren't able to go to school and get an education.

So lots and lots of things contribute to people not being able to get clean water and food, but a lack of water and food do lead to people being unable to work as well.

Our next example is greed.

We live in a world where there is huge inequality.

So for example, the richest 1% of people have more than twice the wealth as 6.

9 billion people.

And that's absolutely huge, isn't it? That some people have so much more than others.

And in many occasions, you can really see this disparity in society with people who are incredibly wealthy, living nearby people who are incredibly poor.

But you also see some pretty poor business practises, which do not give workers a fair wage for the jobs that they do.

And this is where we get things like the fair trade movement, because those workers often have very little choice but to work for that company, because they're the only people around who'll employ them, but they're not getting fair wage for their work.

And so greed can be a huge contributing factor to your poverty.

Next, we have lack of infrastructure.

So infrastructure means things like the society you live in like roads and buildings and schools and hospitals and electricity, and things like that.

Now, if there's a lack of infrastructure, then people are, again, often unable to really succeed in their work and make money.

So for example, if somebody lives somewhere very rural and very isolated, and there's a lack of infrastructure, meaning that the roads are very poor, then that means they're going to struggle to travel distances to markets to sell any goods they have.

It's going to mean they're going to struggle to get hold of farming equipment that they might need to grow their crops.

So lack of infrastructure is a cause of poverty as well.

So what I'm going to get you to do now is a matching task.

I want you to match the cause of the poverty to the explanation, and I want you to get them written down as well so you can refer to them later.

This is an opportunity for you to quickly check your answers and make sure you've matched those things up correctly.

So pause the video, if you need to.

And we're going to look at a few more causes of poverty.

So we've got climate change, inequality and poor education.

And just to be aware, all of these different causes are going to overlap a little bit.

And you'll see why as I explain.

So climate change.

That might be a bit of a surprising cause of poverty in your mind.

But the problem is that when we're seeing effects of climate change, like extreme weather or unpredictable weather, people's crops are affected.

So people might be unable to grow food reliably.

So that could lead to poverty because they've got nothing to sell and nothing to eat.

And it also affects housing and infrastructure.

So if there's an increased number of natural disasters, things like hurricanes and tornadoes, then many, many people lose their homes.

And it's often that it's the poor people who suffer most because their homes cannot withstand the natural disasters that are the result of climate change.

So for example, the Charity Christian Aid says that climate change is actually a social justice issue.

Because they say the people who suffer most due to climate change will be those who are in poverty.

So inequality is also a contributing factor to poverty.

And again, this is for several reasons.

So it could be due to skilled workers being underpaid, and that might be due to their race or gender or religion.

It could be that they've got unequal access to education.

So for example, worldwide girls are often denied education and are not able to get the same education that boys would, and also worldwide men own 50% more of the world's wealth than women.

The 22 richest men have more wealth than all of the women in Africa.

And the unpaid care works done by women is estimated at a about $10.

8 trillion a year, which is three times the size of the tech industry.

So again, we can see that might be due to gender equity, that lots of women get caught in poverty because of that inequality.

And finally, we've got poor education.

So where some people aren't able to access education, maybe through inequality, or maybe because of other reasons, it means that they are much less able to change their situation.

They have less social mobility because they don't have the same freedom that people who have good education would, to decide what jobs they're going to go into.

And this makes people much more vulnerable.

Also in some areas where people do not have access to good healthcare education, it's much more likely to lead to people experiencing illness as well.

So we can see, again, three more causes of poverty, which really overlap with some of the others we looked at before.

So again, what you're going to do, is you're going to match the cause of poverty to the explanation.

Make sure you're writing this out so you can refer to it later.

Again, we have an opportunity for you to check your answers.

So pause the video to make sure you've matched those things up correctly.

And now I've got a question for you to answer, and I want you to see if you can do it from memory without looking at your notes.

So why do many Christians believe they have a responsibility to respond to worldwide poverty? Why not just care for people in your local community? Why care about people who might live on the other side of the world? Well, we're going to look at a couple of Bible verses to show Christian motivation to responding to poverty.

And if you've been doing other lessons in this unit, then some of them will be familiar to you.

So firstly, we've got, "I tell you, whenever you did this "for one of the least important of these followers of mine, "you did it for me." Now, this quotation comes from the Parable of The Sheep and the Goats told by Jesus and it's main focus is on judgement.

So many Christians believe they will be judged on whether or not they've helped people in poverty, or whether they have left people to suffer.

Our second quotation is, "For God loved he world so much "that he gave his only son, "that everyone who believes in him may not die "but have eternal life." So the focus of this quotation for this topic is that God loved the world so much, that God had a sacrificial love for humans.

Many Christians would say that because God loves all people, then they should show love to all people, and that all people are valuable because of the belief that Jesus died for all people's sins.

So for many Christians, this will be motivation for them to help others across the world.

So what I'm going to get you to do is copy down these verses, and I want you to see if you can explain why they are motivation for Christians to respond to worldwide poverty.

Make sure you've got down your answer.

So if you need to pause video again to do that, then please do it now.

So one more teaching that is going to be real motivation for Christians.

So I'll read out to you and then I'm going to explain it.

"Christ is like a single body, which has many parts.

"It is still one body, "even though it's made up of different parts.

"In the same way, all of us, whether Jews or Gentiles, "whether slaves or free, "have been baptised into one body by the same spirit." Now, remember Christians believe that the church is like one community.

The community of believers across the whole world.

Now, I wonder if you can remember the last time you stubbed your toe.

Stubbing your toe is incredibly painful.

We've all been there.

It's horrible moment.

Isn't it? And your whole world is suddenly enveloped in pain, just because of your tiny little toe knocking into something in a way that it shouldn't.

And you might roll it around on the floor, you might cry out, you might get, "Oh my goodness, it really hurts." You might breathe deeply.

You might get hot.

You might have a flush because it really, really hurts.

And so your whole body might respond to that pain.

I think if you'd stubbed your toe really badly, and somebody said to you, "It's just your toe.

"It's just a small part of your body, just ignore it." You would think they were insane cause you're completely enveloped in pain.

And this is the thing.

This teaching is talking about the body of Christ being completely united.

There is the idea that if one part of the body suffers, then the whole body suffers, and that this body is made up of all different types of people.

Here it says, "Whether Jews or Gentiles, whether slaves or free." It's saying they are all part of one body.

Now this is obviously a bit more focused on other Christians, but Christians would say that they want to help all people who are suffering and sharing the suffering with all people, and act to help them.

So we've got here just as a summary.

If one part of the body suffers, all the other parts suffer with it, if one part is praised, all the other parts share it's happiness.

And a second motivation as well for Christians, there is a lot of Christian teachings by the way about helping people, and this is the story of the Good Samaritan.

I wonder how well you know the story.

You might know the title of it, but you might not necessarily know what happens.

I'm going to tell it to you very, very briefly.

Now, the reason why Jesus tells this story, and it's another parable, it's a story he makes up, is because somebody asks him, "Well, what are the greatest commandments?" And he says, "To love the Lord your God with all of your heart, "with all of your soul and with all of your strength "and to love your neighbour as yourself." And the person asking him says, "Well, who is my neighbour?" And so Jesus tells the story of a Jewish man who is travelling and he's beset by robbers who take all his possessions, they strip him naked and they beat him and they leave him to die.

And so whilst he's lying on the side of the road, several of his countrymen, other Jews walk past, but they don't help him.

They walk on by, they cross over the road and they avoid him, until a Samaritan comes by.

Now, the Samaritans were enemies of the Jews, like serious enemies.

If Jewish people had about or so was Samaritan they would spit because they hated them so much.

And so the listeners to this story would probably be thinking, well, that Samaritan, he's probably going to come finish him off and kill him.

Isn't he? But instead, the Samaritan picks up the man, dresses his wounds, gives him some food, takes him to an inn and pays the innkeeper to look up to him and says that if there are any more costs, then I will pay them when I return.

And Jesus says, who was the man's neighbour? And the person that was asking the question, he doesn't even want to say the Samaritan.

He just says, "The one who helps him." And the point Jesus is making here is that all people are your neighbours, including your enemies.

And so, again, there's this expectation that anybody's in need, regardless of whether they're in another country on the other side of the world, then there's an expectation that Christians help them.

So I've just got a couple more questions for you to answer, firstly, about why do Christians want helped people all over the world in terms of the idea of them being one body and also on the story of the good Samaritan.

So we're about to look at a couple of examples of Christian charities that will help people in poverty worldwide.

But before we do, we need to understand couple of terms, which are short term and long term aid.

So short term aid deals with the immediate issues of poverty.

So let's say that there's a natural disaster and all of these people have suddenly lost their homes and they've got no food, no clean drinking water, then some charities will come and deliver short term aid.

And that might be temporary shelters, disaster relief would be part of it, it might be money, it might be medical supplies, food and water.

And then we also have longterm aid.

So longterm aid aims to overcome the causes of poverty.

So think of short term aid as a quick fix.

Something that's going to solve an immediate problem, and longterm aid that's going to try and get rid of the problem long term.

So examples of longterm aid might be building a school, building a well, giving farm tools and fishing equipment so people can make a living, or counselling international debt.

So notice that's different to giving money.

Now I'm not going to go into huge detail about international debt, but countries loan one another money, and a lot of countries that are in poverty or have high levels of poverty are in debt to more wealthy countries.

And actually the money they have to pay back is often more than the money they receive in international aid.

So some charities such as Christian AIDS have campaigned for this international debt to be counselled so that these countries no longer have to pay that money every single year.

So that's what international debt is.

So your next task is going to be to get down the definitions of short term and long term aid and to get a couple of examples as well.

So I'm going to tell you about the examples of two Christian charities.

And there are a lot of different charities that we could talk about, but I'm just saying to stick with two and quite well known ones, and tell you some information about them.

You might want to make some notes or some talking, and you've got some examples of some things they do here as well.

So we have Christian Aid, which you may have heard of.

Again, they're very well known to charity.

So more for more than 60 years, Christian Aid has fought poverty, strengthened the poor and tried to turn hope into action.

In the 1980s, they provided support in many countries, including Lebanon, Mozambique and Ethiopia.

And in the 1990s, that banking on the poor campaign alerted people to the need to cancel third world debt.

As they need the new millennium, or as we will need the new millennium, they were able to announce that world leaders had promised to deliver over a hundred billion in debt relief after their intense campaigning, as part of the Jubilee 2000 coalition.

The challenges that Christian Aid focuses on, now we're in the 21st century and have included the war on terror, climate change, and the increasing number of natural disasters.

And the fact that almost 1/2 of the world's population has lived on less than $2 a day, and so they're saying that their work is more needed than ever.

So their essential purpose is to expose what they call the scandal of poverty to help impractical ways.

So they're going to work in lots of different areas, one of which is health.

So they've had a real focus on helping to combat HIV and malaria, to respond to emergencies.

So for example, those people who are the victims of war or people who are experiencing famine, they will go with that sort of short term response to these issues.

And they're also going to combat things like gender and equality.

So they have a real focus on unequal distribution of power and unfair abuses of power.

And they say, these are at the heart of poverty where rich people often abuse the poor and the vulnerable.

So Christian Aid works to root out the causes of inequality and of other causes of poverty as well.

The second charity we're looking at is, we can just call it CAFOD for short, but it stands for the Catholic Agency for Overseas Developments.

So surprise, surprise.

It's a Roman Catholic Charity.

And they are an international aid agency, again, working to alleviate poverty and suffering.

And they're inspired by values of hope, dignity, solidarity, partnership, sustainability, and stewardship.

They want to care for the environment and care for people.

So they draw that inspiration from the Bible and Catholic social teaching, and they will work to try and make the world a better place free from poverty and injustice.

So they will do things to help to improve food availability and farming.

So this is long term aid with a focus on healthcare and education, but they will also do disaster relief as well.

So what we can see is that both of these charities, provide short term and long term aid to try and alleviate poverty.

So we're going to do some quick-fire questions to see how much you've taken in.

So what does CAFOD stand for? It's Catholic Agency For Overseas Development.

What areas do Christian Aid work in? So both short term and long term aid.

And just reminder actually, as I've got evangelism on there, remember an evangelism is sharing your faith and encouraging other people to become Christians.

That is not a key aim of Christian Aid.

I'm sure that many would say that.

It would be great if people did convert, but that is not what they're aiming for, and they are helping all people regardless of whether or not they are Christian or religious.

What is the definition of short term aid? So short term aid deals with the immediate issues of poverty.

Christian Aid only helps other Christians.

True or false? This is false.

CAFOD only helps Roman Catholics.

True or false? That is false.

Which charity focuses on fighting gender inequality, or at least it has that as one of their specific aims? So that is Christian Aid.

And what we're going to do now is pause and have an opportunity to answer some questions on these charities.

Thank you so much for taking part in this lesson.

I hope that you found it really helpful to learn a bit more about worldwide poverty and issues that many people face.

Remember for this lesson, one of the important things you need to be able to do is refer to those quotations as motivation for Christians to help others, and be able to use those charities and the work they do as examples of how Christians might respond.

So Christians might support those charities financially, they might volunteer for them, they might do events and things to raise money, lots and lots of different ways in which Christians will support these charities as well.

Thank you so much for your hard work.

Now you can completely exit quiz.