Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor ... and Yourself (Chicago, IL: Moody, 2014). Two evangelical scholars — one a community development specialist and the other an economist — explain why mistaken understandings of poverty lead to counterproductive efforts to help the poor.

Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, Helping Without Hurting in Church Benevolence: A Practical Guide to Walking with Low-Income People (Chicago, IL: Moody, 2015).
Building on the insights of When Helping Hurts, the authors outline best practices for benevolence ministry through the local church.

Beth Grant, Courageous Compassion: Confronting Social Injustice God’s Way (Springfield, MO: My Healthy Church, 2014). A veteran Assemblies of God missionary and leader in the fight against sex trafficking offers a Pentecostal framework for how the gospel helps people confront social injustice.

Ruby Payne, A Framework for Understanding Poverty: A Cognitive Approach, 5th ed. (Highlands, TX: aha! Process, 2013). In this groundbreaking study, a veteran educator explains how members of different socioeconomic classes think differently and why this must be factored into how we help the poor.

Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2015). Mixing anecdotes and statistics, a Harvard political scientist shows what economic inequality looks like in America today ... and why there are no quick or easy fixes.

Ron Sider, Good News and Good Works: A Theology for the Whole Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999). A leading evangelical theologian and activist makes a biblical case for why Kingdom work includes both evangelism and social action.