For 15 years I have of volunteered for a group that helps people get out of poverty and thrive. I’ve learned much from the many creative and courageous people I’ve been allied with. I wish I’d had Brian Humphreys’ book when I started.

The Wages of Peace draws on Humphreys’ experience as a community economic development professional and director of the School of Global Studies at Northwest University in Kirkland, Wash. Writing in an engaging, accessible style, he hopes the book “will equip more of us to engage with productive empathy as we work to love our neighbors by building more thriving, sustainable, peaceful communities.”

He calls his approach economic peacemaking, which includes bringing together “the businesses that offer ­living-wage jobs and the workforce that needs preparation in order to compete for those jobs.” 

While his thinking is applicable in a general way, Humphreys comes from a clear Christian perspective — and one that is balanced. He notes that “peacemaking is neither driving toward divisiveness nor maintaining silence and preserving the status quo.” Our faith calls us to accept “some seeming contradictions, some doubts and much counter intuitiveness.” Such a realist approach is summed up with his statement that while we cannot attain heaven on Earth, “the best we can hope for is a dirty-mirror reflection of that heavenly kingdom.”

Humphreys offers rereadings of some key biblical passages to address certain topics. For example, the story of the widow’s mite (Mark 12:41-44) is not just a story about how faithful this woman was; “it is a scathing rebuke of the religious community.” A similar rebuke can be made about the dearth of affordable housing in the United States. Matthew Desmond in ­Evicted, the best book I know of about the housing crisis, writes, “The rent eats first.” Humphreys notes that when people have to use most of their income for shelter, they cut back on food, which puts a huge burden on food pantries, implying that addressing the need for affordable housing will also address food scarcity.

Another text is Exodus 32, the story of the golden calf, which Humphreys uses to address greed and income inequality. As we have seen in recent decades, “excessive tax cuts and deregulation lead to greater wealth inequality, an increased sense of entitlement among the wealthy and increased scarcity for working families.”

In the chapter “The Planks in Our Eyes,” Humphreys draws on Matthew 7:1-5 to address how judgmental we often are. He writes: “We suppress wages, lay off workers, cut benefits, cut hours for hourly workers and demand more hours from salaried workers. Then we dare to complain about crime, fatigue and hopelessness, which were always going to result from these decisions.” 

The heart of economic peacemaking, Humphreys writes, is to “build relationships, listen and pay attention,” while the strategies are “common sense, ‘aha’ projects when you least expect them but are ready to see them.” A holistic framework involves addressing social determinants of health, the living conditions that affect people’s quality of life. He outlines five domains for such determinants: economic stability, neighborhood and built environment, health and well-being, education, and social equity. 

In the domain of health and well- being, he says, “our best long-term investment, far and away, is supporting children and youth.” On education, “across the globe, one of the best and most helpfully disruptive investments is to educate young girls in particular.” 

In the end, however, these economic peacemaking strategies aren’t as critical as how we partner with the community to implement them: “Each family and community will have a different vision for what it means to be peacefully thriving.”

Beyond local work, Humphreys emphasizes, we need to work at changing policies: “In many ways, we are not helping people thrive in this economy but assisting families to survive this unequal economic system.” 

This work requires resilience, and Humphreys offers tips. He tells stories of people who have nearly burned out doing this hard work. One of these represents the many young people who have left the church because of its members’ ideologies that exclude many people. These exiles add to the growing category of borderline agnostics who love Jesus but can’t stand Christians.

For those who want to follow Jesus’ way of holistic peace, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.