Extreme poverty.  If the modern world is truly a “global village,” that means everyone on earth is our neighbor—and Jesus was very clear about how we are to treat our neighbors. We have a responsibility to help them out of difficult circumstances.

While issues such as health care, education, the environment, equality for women and protection for endangered children are all major global concerns with their own particular challenges, they are also, in part, fueled by a common force: poverty.

“Since 1990, nearly 1.1 billion people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty,” says the World Bank.

It notes that “in areas ranging from child survival to primary school enrollment, the improvements to people’s lives have advanced with a momentum that few could have imagined when the World Bank was founded more than 70 years ago.”

The trend is certainly going in the right direction. But that still leaves 1 in 10 of the world’s population—about the equivalent of every person living in Indianapolis—below that coffee-cup-poverty-zone indicator.