The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns

On Sunday mornings when I was a kid, my mom would make breakfast and I would plunk down in front of the TV to watch The Three Stooges...but some mornings they would be preempted by some sort of special program, what we now call infomercials.

I remember in particular when the TV station would air the ones about starving children all over the world. I hated those, because there I was, a kid myself, eating a plateful of food while looking at another kid with a bloated belly somewhere in the world, eating cornmeal mush with his or her fingers, with flies landing on them. I would then start to feel two conflicting feelings: anger and nausea. Anger that my morning ritual was being disrupted; anger that these other kids should be able to eat what I was eating. Nausea because I couldn’t look at the hollow eyes of these kids without feeling sick; nausea because I felt guilty for knowing I would scrape scraps off my plate that these children would love to have.

When I requested The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns, I knew I would get some “behind the scenes” info on World Vision, the world help organization of which he is the president...I didn’t realize I would be convicted to my core of just how little Western Christianity seems to care. Oh, our churches will have food drives to make baskets during Thanksgiving & Christmas; we’ll even have a weekend of “awareness” where our youth groups will “camp out” in cardboard boxes to see “what it’s like” to be homeless. But when many larger churches will spend tens of millions of dollars on an addition to their physical facility, while donating only a couple of thousand dollars to the effort to relieve suffering from many factors in another country...need I say more?

This book is incredible in its scope - Rich Stearns will, on one hand, give us statistics that will astound us, and then on the other hand, tell us a story that should move us to action. In particular, he points out that the citizens of the 10 wealthiest countries are 75 times richer than the citizens of the 10 poorest countries. In 1820, that disparity was 4 times richer rather than 75 times richer.
Also, he tells of how he, after only 6 months at the helm of World Vision, went to the village of Rakai in Uganda and met 3 brothers, the oldest being named Richard. They has lost both parents to AIDS, and their graves were literally right outside the hut the boys lived in.

Rich goes on to tell his story of how he left being CEO of very prestigious company to take the wheel of World Vision; he tells of the pain of his selfishness of NOT wanting to do it, but came to the conclusion that God was calling him to do it. He gives us ample information to be able to do something; to get involved...in something. I have a feeling that Rich would want us to help ANY organization, not just his own, in an effort to fill the Hole on Our Gospel, the hole being that the Gospel is less about us being comfortable in our pews every weekend for a couple of hours, and more about alleviating the hunger pangs of people who are in need...who are in need for no other reason than they were born in a poverty stricken country.

So, read this book...underline in it, make notes, read it and do something. For God’s glory and the sake of people in need, do something.

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