Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development

by Bryant L. Myers

The poor deserved better than gifted amateurs with their hearts in the right place.

The transformational journey is about finding and enjoying life as it should be, as it was intended to be.

In this book I suggest that the goals for this journey of transformation are to recover our true identity as human beings created in the image of God and to discover our true vocation as productive stewards, faithfully caring for the world and all the people in it.

understand Christian witness to include the declaration of the gospel by life, word, and deed.

We are the sixty-seventh book of the Bible.

There is no such thing as not witnessing. Christian development promoters are witnessing all the time. The only question is to whom or to what? Their deeds, both what they do and how they do it, declare in whom or in what they place their faith and also demonstrate the moral content of that faith.

The result is a tragic pair of reductions. 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.

Simply being Christian does not heal our dichotomous understanding of our world.

Modernity's separation of the physical and spiritual realms is part of the explanation for how we have come to understand Christian witness, and specifically evangelism, as being unrelated to community development.

So evangelism (restoring people's relationship with God) is spiritual work, while social action (restoring just economic, social, and political relationships among people) is not.

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.

When we separate the spiritual from the physical, not only do we separate evangelism from development, but we separate gospel-as-word from the gospel-as-deed, and provide no home for gospel-as-sign. in the spiritual realm, the critical question is, Whose God is the true God? and the answer is an idea.

Christian witness is reduced to words and speaking.

Development technology, without accompanying words to interpret its good deeds, can result in glory being given to clever or “magical” soil scientists and hydrologists, rather than to God.

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.

Christians who separate the physical and spiritual realms tend to be God-centered in their spiritual lives and human-centered when they think and act in the physical world. For our spiritual work, we turn to the church and our bibles; for development work, we turn to the social sciences.

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.

Their relationships with others are often oppressive and disempowering as a result of the non-poor “playing god” in the lives of the poor.

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.

Sen calls these “functionings.” Functions are the basic stuff of human life, such as having enough to eat, living in adequate housing, breathing clean air, and drinking clean water, as well as higher-value ideals such as possessing self-respect, having enhanced dignity, participating in community life, and feeling safe. The human rights tradition insists that all human beings have the right to function in this way. So does the biblical account.

Human beings are intended to develop, not just to survive.

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.”

Sen's view and the Christian view part ways with the further Christian understanding that the freedom that God grants to human beings—including freedom not to believe in God if that is our choice—is not the unlimited freedom of the autonomous Western self. It is a freedom to give up some of our freedom because we can better love God and our neighbor when we do. This perspective on human freedom and agency represents a point at which the Christian development community has something to offer to the larger development community.

But the conversation quickly moved beyond these more obvious material desires. Many of the expressions of well-being were relational; social well-being seems central to human well-being for the poor

If we resist the kind of lazy, formulaic thinking that reduces every problem to the same set of general principles; if we listen to poor people themselves and force ourselves to understand the logic of their choices; if we accept the possibility of error and subject every idea, including the most apparently commonsensical ones, to rigorous empirical testing, then we will be able not only to construct a toolbox of effective policies but also to better understand why the poor live the way they do.

Finally, the good news is that the number of non-poor in the world is also the highest in history. The not-so-good news is that they are struggling with obesity, consumerism, and a deteriorating natural environment.

We Christians need to be willing to come out of our self-imposed exile, stop being apologetic about being Christians, and begin to contribute the material that our faith tradition has to offer, which is considerable.

Since God is at work in God's world redeeming and restoring it, this means that development, understood from a Christian perspective, is a theological act every bit as much as it is a technical or problem-solving act.

There are seven key themes that emerge consistently in Catholic social teaching: 1. Truth about God and about humanity 2. Charity and justice 3. Human dignity 4. Common good 5. Subsidiarity 6. Solidarity 7. option for the poor

Science and technology, the siblings of capitalism and globalization, also continue to demand our faith and allegiance. Theses “isms” are gods that we are often quick to worship. Koyama tells us that these gods “are fascinating because they claim to give us our identity and security more directly and quickly than our crucified Lord…. The selling point of these gods is directness and security…. They give us instant service” (Koyama 1985, 259). Yet at the end of the twentieth century the authority of these modern stories is fraying in the face of broken promises.

Capitalism today asks for faith in a god called “the hidden hand” and seems to have forgotten the goal of the original story. Adam Smith, capitalism's original storyteller, “wrote that the ultimate goal of business is not to make a profit. Profit is just the means. The goal is general welfare” (Wink 1992, 68). Instead, the view of capitalism in play today tends to reduce people to economic beings driven by utilitarian self-interest toward the goal of accumulating wealth. What is wealth for? What are we for if we do not have wealth? Who are we if we do not have wealth? No answer.

The biblical story also puts our stories in their place. We learn that it is not my story, or your story, or our story that is the main story, the story that gives all other stories their true meaning. Meaning and a moral frame only comes from the story of God's project in history. To pursue human transformation as Christians means understanding where humanity is coming from, where it is going, and how it can get there. To do the work for transformation, we have to embrace the whole of the biblical story, the story that makes sense and gives direction to the stories of the communities where we work, as well as to our own stories.

But the biblical story is also a very unusual story. We are told the beginning, the middle, and the final chapter of the story. But the piece between Jesus and his work on the cross and the final chapter when Jesus comes again is still being written.

Because God is still doing things in our world, we must begin our theology with the storyteller.

We must be Christians, think in a Christian way, and do Christian work. Doing transformational development is acting out who we truly are. If there is no dichotomy between being and doing in God, then there can be none in us.

Development cannot be reduced to simply empowering individuals with new choices.

Remembering that we are not God, and so cannot create out of nothing, we are empowered by God to create out of everything that God created in nature as long as we remember that the purpose of our creating is to enable the well-being of all human beings and natural world.

Human and cultural diversity is a gift of God and an asset for supporting human well-being.

Without art, music, ritual, and other aesthetic practices, worship would be impoverished, as would be human life.

Sharing resources: The land and natural resources are gifts to all humankind, not to only a few. While this does not mean there can be no private ownership, Wright argues that “the right of all to use is prior to the right to own.” Responsibility to work: Work is part of being fruitful. God is productive, and thus it is in our nature to be productive, too. Thus work is a vocation and a responsibility. The implication for development is straight forward. Every human being has a responsibility to work and to enable or allow others to work so that they can fulfill their purpose. Expectation of growth: “Be fruitful and increase” applies to the number of human beings and to the means of supporting them. God has provided abundantly in creation so that this can be done, and God has given humankind the ingenuity and adaptability necessary to create this necessary increase. This should give us pause when we too quickly and uncritically blame poverty on population growth. New babies are not simply empty stomachs or economic sink holes. They are also creative human minds and spirits, endowed with creative and productive potential. They, too, can be fruitful (Cromartie 1995, 282). Shared produce: Being productive is also accompanied by the idea of being able to consume or enjoy the end-product of one's work. This is part of the biblical image of the better human future (Is 65:21-22). “We are as responsible to God for what we do with what we produce as we are for what he has given us”

Sometimes we evangelicals focus too much what some call original sin and forget that God's original good continues as well.

This malfunctioning of social systems as a result of sin led theologian Andrew Sung Park to argue that we need a theology of sin that does not just talk about sin and sinners, but also about the impact of sin on those who are being sinned against.

Park uses the Korean idea of han, which emerged as part of Minjung theology in the 1970s, to refer to the deep wounding of the heart and spirit that results from being systematically and systemically sinned against.

Park reminds us that Jesus came both to die for sinners and to care for and liberate the oppressed—the sinned against (Luke 4:18-19).

He encourages us not only to talk about sin and salvation, but also to be concerned with the need for a gospel response to the ...

“Human misery is caused by institutions, but these institutions are maintained by human beings. We are made evil by our institutions, yes; but our institutions are also made evil by us”

The doctrine of the fall affirms the radical nature of evil and frees us from any illusion that we or our social institutions are perfectible apart from the redeeming work of Jesus Christ and the full coming of the kingdom of God. This should save us from any temptation toward an optimistic belief in the ability of government or the free market or our own efforts at human transformation to change the reality of the poor in and of themselves.

The cost of discipleship is very high for those with wealth and power

The Christ of God was very much the Christ of the powerless and despised on the geographical and social margins of Israel.

Poverty is about relationships that don't work, that isolate, that abandon or devalue. Transformation must be about restoring relationships, just and right relationships with God, with self, with community, with the “other,” and with the environment.