If you weren’t able to attend last week’s Acton Lecture Series event here at Acton’s Grand Rapids office, we’ve got you covered. we’re pleased to present video of Rudy Carrasco’s lecture, entitled “Business as Mission 2.0,” below.

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There are only a few days left to register for the AU Online session, Private Charity: A Practitioner’s View! This online session will take place on March 27 and feature highly-rated Acton lecturer and current U.S. Regional Facilitator for Partners Worldwide, Rudy Carrasco. In a lecture that blends the theoretical with real-life encounters and stories, Rudy shows how using local knowledge and resources unavailable and unsuited to public agencies is vital for effective charity.

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There’s a story that I heard, of a miner, a family down in– it was in the Appalachia area and the church there really thought that they were doing a great deal because they would go in, they said they would pick the poorest families and they would take them Christmas gifts and turkeys and that sort of thing. So they did. They went to this family and they presented them with all the gifts and gave them to them and all the children had gifts; they had a hot meal on the table. The church was so pleased with what they had done, and then they left. And the husband just broke down and cried because he said, “You mean in this community, we are thought of as the poorest family in the community?” The shame that came with that, with the charity that had been given so lovingly out of the best of intentions, but it absolutely shamed him and it destroyed his life. I heard it from his son. He said, “It destroyed my father because he said he was so shamed in front of the rest of the community because they didn’t think that he was a person of worth that they had to take care of his family for him.”

C. Neal Johnson, from an Interview Oct. 8 at a Partners Worldwide Conference in Grand Rapids.

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