New Friars considers some of the similarities amongst groups of young people who are choosing to move into the poorest places of the world as missionaries, bringing hope and aid to people in need.
This book was not what I expected. I was surprised to see a quite lengthy discussion of the causes of poverty in this book, identifying slum poverty as "intractable poverty."
I was a bit disappointed to see that Scott Bessenecker felt he needed so much time to justify to us the economic, social, historical, and biblical reasons for caring for the poor before actually describing how people were doing it.
Regardless, there were some good descriptions of the trials of incarnational living abroad....the dificulty of leaving family and friends, living without modern conveniences, getting married later in life.
However, knowing my experiences from this summer, I know that these movements to live incarnationally.....driven by the spirit of God....are not all youth movements, but drawn from a diverse spectrum of people. I'd liked to have seen some discussion of the differences of life in Bangkok's slums for single, young Dave versus the married couple with kids from Klong Toey.
I felt left with a lot of questions regarding what daily life was like....or if that was even relevant.
This was a good attempt though at starting to characterize a new Christian approach to social change, a dissatisfaction with political options and full-fledged life support towards loving and living amongst the needy.
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