Alvin C. Bibbs, Crazy Enough to Care: Changing Your World Through Compassion, Justice and Racial Reconciliation. IVP Books, 2009.
Referenced in: Strategies for Social Ministry
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
This is an excellent 12-lesson small group study curriculum that helps awaken perspectives and practices for social justice. As the title suggests, it divides social ministry into three dimensions:
- Compassion – stepping into and alleviating the pain and suffering of people near them in everyday life and around the world.
- Justice – calling out and righting the wrongs that result from the sins of discrimination, exclusivity, oppression, neglect of the poor, and socioeconomic corruption that leads to poverty.
- Racial reconciliation – authentic and deliberate attempts to bring creation back to its original design by restoring racial harmony and unity among people from different races in a godly fashion.
It includes learning exercises and suggests action-based learning experiences whereby participants “get out of the house” and “learn by experience.”
From the Publisher
Nothing confronts a person’s faith quite like injustice, pain, suffering. We see these things in our world, in our neighborhoods, and we don’t know what to do with ourselves. We’ve got to do something, but where to begin? What to do? How to do it?
Crazy Enough to Care will take you and your friends on a journey, uncovering the things that make compassion impractical in contemporary society, addressing the fears that crop up as we consider reaching out to people we know and people we don’t know, and offering opportunities to practice compassion together. Give Alvin Bibbs and his team of experts twelve sessions, and you and your group will find yourselves changing the world by caring for others.
About the Author
Alvin Bibbs is founder and director of the Obsidian Consulting Group and former executive director of multicultural church relations for the Willow Creek Association. From 1984 to 1992, Alvin was executive director of LaSalle Street Young Life. In this role he ministered to the youth and families in the Cabrini-Green housing development project in Chicago, where he grew up. He also served as chaplain to the Chicago Cubs for seven seasons.