Doing Good Without Giving Up
Ben Lowe
Inter-Varsity Press, September 2014, 208 pages, paperback and ebook.
Formerly with A Rocha USA, Ben Lowe is now on staff at the Evangelical Environmental Network and serves as the National Spokesperson for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action.
Ben says, I wrote Doing Good Without Giving Up: Sustaining Social Action in a World That’s Hard to Change to share what God has been teaching me, how he has sustained me and others in our various callings, and where our faith and hope come from.
The book’s premise is straightforward. Change is still possible and remarkable things will continue to be accomplished. But there are two things we need to get right.
First, we need to learn how to persevere. This is a weakness in our instant era where we expect things to happen easily and quickly. Significant and lasting progress, however, is usually hard, slow, and incremental. But it can happen, and it’s worth it if we don’t give up.
Second, as CS Lewis put it, we don’t get second things by placing them first; we get second things by keeping first things first. We all want change in the world. But our first calling as Christians is to faithfulness. And faithfulness, the Bible says, is what leads to fruitfulness: ‘I am the vine; you are the branches,’ Jesus taught. ‘If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5). Read more at the Planetwise blog