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development ministries around the world. He develops a solid, scripturally based framework, or theoretical structure that challenges the spiritual/natural dualism which pervades our Western worldview and that offers a consistent biblical worldview in its place.
Myers's focus on relationships and stories is particularly helpful in developing a holistic view of ministry. This approach brings people together and builds bridges of understanding and communication, whereas abstract analytical categories often separate them. Relationships and stories also help us see that the kingdom of God is central to God's plan for the universe, for peoples and for individuals.
The book is written for those involved in Christian development programs and challenges them to move toward holistic ministries.
Too often in church planting we have relegated God's transforming work to spiritual realities and assigned earthly matters to science and technology.
Jayakumar Christian's understanding of the nature of poverty as relationships that do not work for well-being and the cause of poverty as being fundamentally spiritual.
The first is his formulation of the Western worldview in terms of two separated realms—material and spiritual—with a gap between the two, the “excluded middle.” Linking this with the thinking of Lesslie Newbigin provides the explanation for many of the dichotomies with which Western Christians struggle: faith and reason, evangelism and development, church and state, and values and facts. These dichotomies are major hindrances to finding a genuinely holistic Christian approach to human transformation.
In his Ph.D. work Jayakumar offered the idea that poverty is experienced most fundamentally by the poor as a marring of their identity and that this is caused both by the grind of being poor and also by being captive to the god-complexes of the non-poor.
She prayed for a lost and hopeless son for many years before God finally relented and dragged me into his kingdom at the age of thirty-one. I am deeply grateful that she is alive to see the book that summarizes why she and God went to all that trouble.
The purpose of this book is to describe a proposal for understanding the principles and practice of transformational development (positive material, social, and spiritual change) from a Christian perspective.
Throughout this book I will struggle to overcome problems presented by the persistent and insistent belief in the West that the spiritual and physical domains of life are separate and unrelated.
It was a time full of argument and sometimes divisive discussions among evangelicals as to whether or not Bible-believing Christians ought to do development. Some were deeply concerned that including social action in the Christian agenda blunted the church's commitment to evangelism. Evangelism must be primary, went the argument. The modern assumption that the spiritual and the material were unrelated areas of life had infected Christian mission thinking.
by which we meant that development and Christian witness should be held together in a creative tension.
In these early days we simplistically and incorrectly understood this to mean that Christian witness was something one added to the development program mix to make it complete, just another sector, a wedge in the development pie.
I left World Vision to become a professor of international development in the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary five years ago.
I use the term transformational development to reflect my concern for seeking positive change in the whole of human life materially, socially, psychologically and spiritually.
I understand Christian witness to include the declaration of the gospel by life, word, and deed.
First, poverty is reduced to a merely material condition having to do with the absence of things like money, water, food, housing and the lack of just social systems, also materially defined and understood. Second, development is reduced correspondingly to a material series of responses designed to overcome these needs.
Sadly, the church has also succumbed to this modern worldview and has allowed itself to be relegated to the spiritual world, while the state and other human institutions assume responsibility for what happens in everyday life.
We suffer from what Hiebert calls “the excluded middle.”
We fail to hear the community's story about the unseen world, and we fail to have answers that, in their minds, adequately take this world into account.
The biblical worldview is holistic in the sense that the physical world is never understood as being disconnected or separate from the spiritual world and the rule of the God who created it. Moreover, Christ—the creator, sustainer, and redeemer of the creation—is both in us and interceding for us at the right hand of God the Father. The fact that the Word became flesh explodes the claim that the spiritual and physical can be separated meaningfully.
Words clarify the meaning of deeds. Deeds verify the meaning of words. Most critically, signs announce the presence and power of One who is radically other and who is both the true source of all good deeds and the author of the only words that bring life in its fullest.
The stage is currently dominated by the predominantly modern frame of Jeffrey Sachs and his End of Poverty (2005), the more postmodern frame of William Easterly and his White Man's Burden (2006), and the more eclectic and pragmatic package of solutions offered by Paul Collier in The Bottom Billion (2007).
These offerings provide approaches for the eradication of poverty that are secular and materialistic, resting on the assumption that human beings can save themselves.
The way we understand the nature of poverty and what causes poverty is very important, because it tends to determine how we respond to poverty.
absence of access to power, resources, and choices became part of our understanding of poverty.
Later in the 1990s Amartya Sen argued that poverty is more the result of a lack of freedom than the lack of money.
Weighing in from a Christian perspective, Jayakumar Christian, building on Chambers and Friedmann, describes poverty as a system of disempowerment that creates oppressive relationships and whose fundamental causes are spiritual.
Drawing heavily on Jayakumar Christian, I propose that the nature of poverty is fundamentally relational and that its cause is fundamentally spiritual.
The poor are poor largely because they live in networks of relationships that do not work for their well-being.
The Christian view of salvation points to the cross and the resurrection as the only framework that can truly bring us home.
Of particular note was a paper by Wayne Bragg, then of the Wheaton Hunger Center, in which he proposed the phrase transformational development as a holistic biblical alternative to Western modernization.
Because poverty is fundamentally relational, I then articulate the twin goals of transformational development as changed people and just and peaceful relationships. By “changed people” I mean people who have discovered their true identity as children of God and who have recovered their true vocation as faithful and productive stewards of gifts from God for the well-being of all.
Both the poor and the non-poor need to recover their true identity and their true vocation. Everyone is poor in God's world, and everyone is in need of transformation.
The chapter then focuses on one of the major development research and planning tools of the 1980s and 1990s: Participatory Learning and Action (PLA). The tools in the PLA toolkit “put the stick in the hands of the community” so that the research, analysis, and planning method itself becomes potentially transformational.
It begins by pointing out that the goals of Christian witness are the same as the goals for transformational development: changed people and changed relationships. The only difference is that primary emphasis of Christian witness is on people's relationship with God.
This section goes on to present an organic or integrated understanding of the gospel as being with Jesus so that we may witness by deed, word, and sign.
It goes on to remind us of the importance of carrying out our Christian witness with a crucified mind, not a crusading mind.
The idea of development in terms of helping a nation escape from poverty dates to the immediate aftermath of World War II.
Almost everyone lived and worked at home, and work was not something one did for a wage but rather something the family did to stay alive.
Then, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, a stunning historical shift introduced a radically new trajectory of global wealth and human well-being (Figure 2-1). Figure 2-1: Global GDP estimates. (Adapted from Maddison 2003)
“The great chariot of society, which for so long had run down the gentle slope of tradition, now found itself powered by an internal combustion system,” namely, the market system and its “hidden hand”
As we are all aware, this change was accompanied by the Industrial Revolution, which itself was driven by a flood of technological inventions that extended human physical power dramatically.
For the first time in human history the amount of work a person could do was not limited to the strength of his or her back.
Some even began looking for a third way, as exemplified by E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful (1973) and his attempt to formulate what he called Buddhist economics.
Sen had also studied the relationship between famines and democracy. There has never been a major famine in a functioning democracy (Sen 1999, 16). This discovery led to Development as Freedom, in which Sen announced his conclusion that poverty is better understood as being the result of deprivation of human freedom.
Freedom is both the goal and the means to human development. The goal of development is to create the environment and conditions within which all people have the freedom to seek the better human future they desire. Freedom is the means of development in two ways. First, the poor themselves must be the actors if their capability is to be increased. Second, we must support the poor in removing impediments to their being actors and making choices, things that Sen calls “unfreedoms.”
For this work Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in development economics.
Well-being is a full stomach, time for prayer, and a bamboo platform to sleep on. —A POOR WOMAN IN BANGLADESH (NARAYAN-PARKER ET AL. 2000, 234)
Working with the advice of Robert Chambers, a team of researchers was sent out to listen to over sixty thousand of the world's poorest people.
