"You'll Always Have the Poor..."

It is inevitable that whenever I talk to a church group about helping the poor someone will always bring up Jesus’ words, “you’ll always have the poor…..”I respond to that in three points:1. Jesus has just been anointed with a very expensive perfume to which Judas objects because he was a thief and wanted access to the money. Jesus’ full response was, in paraphrase, “Yes, but I am here now so worship me now. You will always have time to help the poor but I won’t always be here on earth”.2. Jesus also said one day we would answer the question as to what we did to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the sick and imprisoned, and give drink to the thirsty because whatever we do for those people we do for Him.3. The task of helping the poor is overwhelming but we can’t use Jesus’ words, “you’ll always have the poor…..”, as an excuse to bury our heads in the sand or throw up our hands in frustration.Now there are a myriad of ways we can help. We can write a check to our church or some other organization. We can donate food, our old coats/clothes, etc. We can travel the world digging wells, helping the sick, serving food, etc. All of these are great things and we should by all means continue to do them to some degree. The problem is that you will likely run out of time, resources, and money before you run out of poor people to serve. If you’ve engaged in mission you know this to be true and you know the burden it leaves you carrying.One of the reasons Kingdom Growers was established was because we felt the need to fulfill Matthew 25 (feed the hungry, clothe the naked, etc.) but we just couldn’t see a viable way to do so. We knew that we had limited resources and that poverty was much bigger than our bank accounts. Our goal is rather than sending money, our unwanted stuff, or something that doesn’t solve the problem we would help the poor engage in trade. Now this is not something new but we believe we look at it differently. We realized early on that if we produced a product that the market really didn’t want but had a mission tied to it we could probably get people to buy it once. We call that the “sympathy buy”. However, if we brought a product to market that was something most people did want, maybe were already buying, and we made it so that it was better than their expectation then we wouldn’t have to rely on the sympathy buy. You would buy and keep coming back for more because it was good.That’s what we are doing here at Kingdom Growers. We are working with the impoverished and helping them grow a higher quality product. We get them human needs funding so that they can sit on their high quality product and don’t have to take the first low ball offer that comes along. We take their product to a broader market than they have access to which in most cases is no market at all. We ask people to buy it once and give it a try knowing they’ll be back for more because it’s a great product. Finally, we reinvest the proceeds to pay back the human needs funding, grow the amount of people we are helping, and increasing our market presence to sell more product.E.