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Rodolpho Carrasco spends much of his life building bridges. The son of Mexican immigrants, he is married to an African American. He began his college education at Biola University and completed it at Stanford. He is as likely to be invited to the White House as to a Sojourners planning meeting, to an emerging church consultation as to a conference at the free-market-oriented Acton Institute. He is a disciple of John Perkins, who called a generation of evangelicals to "relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution" in America's cities. Like his mentor, he has a restless mind and a passionate heart, both of which he has put at the service of some of America's poorest citizens as executive director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena, California. His answer to our question—How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?—probes the challenges faced by his generation of advocates for justice as they, and those they serve, come of age.

Sixteen years ago, I took my undergraduate degree and headed straight to the 'hood. Since then, I've lived one block from the corner of Howard and Navarro, an area that once had the highest daytime crime rate in Southern California. I've lived through the 1992 Rodney King riots, the 1996 welfare-reform bill, and the rise of compassionate conservatism. And I've lived through a small revolution in how Christians think about justice.

Not so long ago, evangelical Christians who served the poor often found themselves on the defensive among fellow believers. Now it's the rare church that doesn't engage in works of mercy and justice. Watching this evangelical wave of concern and action, I've been greatly encouraged. Yet as I listen to my fellow justice-impassioned Christ-followers, whether they are newbies or grizzled veterans, I often hear only part of the message of justice.

There is no shortage of protest across the political spectrum. Some promote fair trade over free trade and argue for turning the minimum wage into a living wage; they seek to strengthen immigrant rights and oppose racism. Others object to activist judges, family-hostile state laws and school curricula, and porous borders. But increasingly, all these concerns are framed in terms of concern for the most vulnerable members of society. These issues rouse people out of their living rooms, out of the pews, and into society to work for change.

While I celebrate this development, I worry that we are perilously weak at walking alongside the poor, at investing directly into the lives of individuals to give them what they truly need—not what we believe they need or what our policy statements tell us they need. I've found that it's relatively easy to raise a voice in protest, but unfathomably hard to invest in a life.

Growing up, I had to learn how to manage money, how to be a good employee, how to act in someone else's house, how to study, and how to delay gratification. As an orphan in a poor East Los Angeles neighborhood, learning these things was a matter of life and death.

My mother died when I was 6. My father had already left us. My sister, 20 years old at the time, became mother, father, grandma, and grandpa for my other two siblings and me. She drilled those basic life skills into me. Alongside her were members of a small Baptist church who taught us the Scriptures, teachers who saw the potential in the Carrasco kids, and employers who held us accountable for our behavior on the job.

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February 2006, Vol. 50, No. 2