Poverty was not part of God’s design for creation. Old Testament laws actively worked against the emergence of class distinction and poverty. The New Testament Church shared all things in common as each had need. The new heavens and new earth described in Scripture does not include infant mortality, boys and girls driven by desperation into the sex industry or child labor, slum communities, or hunger.

Why, then, is poverty tolerated here and now?

Let’s talk about how to activate the economics of the Kingdom of God on earth, just as it is in heaven.

Scott Bessenecker is Associate Director for Missions for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He is author of The New Friars: The Emerging Movement Serving the World's Poor . How to Inherit the Earth: Submitting Ourselves to a Servant Savior, and editor of Quest for Hope in the Slum Community. He has just finished a book on the relatively un-American concepts of meekness, obedience and submission for InterVarsity Press due out in October 2010 and claims to possess the world's largest international cigarette collection owned by an Evangelical non-smoker. Scott will oversee three Poverty Tracks for Urbana 09 (International Poverty, Domestic Poverty and Advocacy). He and his wife, Janine, have three kids - Hannah, Philip and Laura, and live in Madison, WI.