A Gospel of Poverty

"However much observers might attack the prosperity churches--and they rarely lack ammunition to do so--the promise of material blessings does raise provocative questions about more mainstream Christian theologies. Few mainline churches in Europe or North America would dream of promising health and wealth, which they would regard as a vulgarization of the faith.

At the same time, though, they do not pursue their critique to what would seem to the logical course, of offering their congregations an enticing message of 'sickness and poverty.' Rather, they fully agree with the prosperity churches that health and wealth are desirable goals, but that realistically, such blessings can only be obtained through secular means, through hard work, thrift, wise investment, and access to good medicine.

Health-and-wealth churches assuredly exaggerate the potential role of prayer and godly behavior in securing material prosperity, but they might well respond by asking if Euro-American mainline churches allow any serious belief whatever that prayer can shape one's material conditions. Are Christian critics of 'prosperity' arguing that faith and prayer are absolutely unconnected from material realities?

Whey then do most or all incorporate prayers for well-being into their services and liturgies? In such matters, ordinary African or Asian believers are not too far from the mindset of the biblical worlds they read about, in which there is a strong presumption that God will reward his faithful, in this world as well as the next...

For a Northern world that enjoys health and wealth to a degree scarcely imagined by any previous society, it is perilously easy to despise believers who associated divine favor with full stomachs or access to the most meager forms of schooling or health care; who seek miracles in order to flourish, or even survive. The Prosperity Gospel is an inevitable by-product of a church containing so many of the very poorest."

Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Reading the Bible in the Global South, pp. 96-97