Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation

In the final chapter Rhee suggests some motifs that may stimulate discussion of appropriate Christian responses to disparities of status in a global economy today: sufficiency, resistance to materialism, simplicity and renunciation, the formation of alternate communities. In several developing countries, she points out, Pentecostal movements promising wealth in this world as well as the next have provided alternative social networks for impoverished people and imbued them with an entrepreneurial spirit that turns "the pious poor" into "the pious rich."