“Writers,” said David Brooks in a recent interview, “are beggars who tell other beggars where they found bread.” Brooks, a best-selling author, American political pundit, and staff writer for The Atlantic, called this his “favorite saying about writers.”

But wait up. I’ve heard a version of that phrase before, and I don’t remember it being about writers. Isn’t it about preachers, or missionaries, or just gospel-sharers in general? A quick internet search led me to the original:

Evangelism . . . is one beggar telling another beggar where to get food.

I was glad to find the actual quotation but was even more glad to find out its source. It wasn’t Elizabeth Elliot or Billy Graham or some other Christian from my American neighborhood. Instead, it was an evangelist and theologian from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), D. T. Niles. Here is what Niles wrote in 1951 in That They May Have Life:

Evangelism is witness. It is one beggar telling another beggar where to get food. The Christian does not offer out of his bounty. He has no bounty. He is simply guest at his Master’s table and, as evangelist, he calls others too. The evangelistic relation is to be “alongside of” not “over-against.” The Christian stands alongside the non-Christian and points to the Gospel, the holy action of God. It is not his knowledge of God that he shares, it is to God Himself that he points.

It’s a great reminder to me that Christian wisdom doesn’t always flow from the West to the rest of the world—though it is so easy for me to get locked into a bubble of influence made up of people like me, where we are the givers of wisdom, and they are the receivers.

No, we are all beggars. . . .

Read the rest of my post at A Life Overseas.

[photo: “Bread,” by St. Blaize, used under a Creative Commons license]