Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development

by Bryant L. Myers

Any work of human transformation that does not announce this incredibly good news is fatally impoverished. The cross and the resurrection are the very best news that we have.

Again this seems a strange choice: handing over the work of saving the world to people who, while redeemed, are yet flawed and struggling with sin. Yet, this is what Jesus chose to do. The church, the community of faith, is the bearer of the biblical story, the “cracked pot” that is to continue announcing the good news of the unchanging person and the unshakable kingdom until Christ comes again.

This has two important things to say to development workers. First, God brings the kingdom; it is neither our task nor that of our transformational development. We must not put the weight of building the kingdom on our shoulders; we cannot carry it, nor are we expected to. Second, the sign of the kingdom is the church, the community of faith, not the development worker or the development agency. Somehow development workers must understand themselves as part of the church, not just an NGo or some “para-church” organization vaguely or disinterestedly related to the church.

Every Christian community has the responsibility to read the biblical story in light of its own story for the purpose of shaping its vision of mission and repenting of its errors.

this means that church planting cannot be the final objective of mission, only the beginning. A church full of life and love, working for the good of the community in which God has placed it, is the proper end of mission. Transformational development that does not work toward such a church is neither sustainable nor Christian.

Human well-being or flourishing are no longer aspirations; they just are. While this triumphant vision should guide us, it should also instill a sense of awe and humility in us. This end comes only at great cost, since Christ died and the saints suffered. There is a cross on the way to this triumphal end.

To declare that the mission of the church is solely about spiritual things ignores the incarnation.

God emptied himself of God's prerogatives. Are we willing to empty ourselves of ours?

Transformational development, by itself, will not save. The charitable and transforming acts of Christians will never mediate salvation. But, having said this, it is also wrong to act as if God's redemptive work takes place only inside one's spirit or in heaven in the sweet by-and-by. This disembodied, wholly spiritualized view of redemption is not biblical. God is working to redeem and restore the whole of creation, human beings, all living things, and the creation itself.

To work for human transformation as a Christian means working for the redemption of people, their social systems, and the environment that sustains their life—a whole gospel for all of life. This is the kingdom of God.

we must avoid uncritically demonizing social structures and their power. While social structures can impoverish and oppress, they can also empower and care for people in ways that allow people to flourish. voting in a transparent and honest election empowers. Having a voice at a village meeting with local government officials is empowering. Protection against criminals and having courts that work fairly and protect property rights are empowering too.

The misuse of power and the price paid by the powerless seem to be an immutable part of human history. But the first and last stories of Scripture suggest that Christians may not accept this fatalistic view. Our mission calls for more than just an announcement that sin and evil is at work in the social structures of this world. We have power—by virtue of being made in the image of God—and thus are empowered as human agents by God and by virtue of having been adopted into the only kingdom that stands the test of time. The question is how we will use the power we have.

Weak and meek social power, a coming upside-down kingdom that is not yet here, a triumphal resurrection that is preceded by torture and death on a cross—this is a hard road, and we need not only think about this theologically but also determine if we have the courage to live it. I am still on the fence.

Loving God and loving neighbor must be the foundational theme for a Christian understanding of transformational development.

there is never hate; the enemy is never demonized or declared hopeless. The offer of grace is always there.

While shalom and abundant life are ideals that we will not see this side of the second coming, the vision of a shalom that leads to life in its fullness is a powerful image that must inform and shape our understanding of any better human future.

God's redeeming work does not separate individuals from the families, communities and larger social systems of which they are a part. people come first, of course. Changed people, transformed by the gospel and reconciled to God, is the beginning of any transformation. Transforming social systems alone cannot accomplish this: “No arrangement of social cooperation, in which power controls power and anarchy is tamed, will produce human beings free from the lust for power”

The Great Commission calls for making the nations into disciples, not just people.

Being must precede doing.

In our eagerness to be with and for the poor, we must not forget the biblical story is everyone's story, poor and non-poor alike. Both are made in the image of God, both experienced the consequences of the fall, and both are the focus of God's redemptive work. The hope of the gospel and the transformative promise of the kingdom are for both. The only difference is social location. The poor are on the periphery of the social system while the non-poor, even when living in poor communities, occupy places of preference, prestige, and power.

Referring to people by a label is always dangerous. We may forget that the poor are not an abstraction, but rather a group of human beings who have names, who are made in the image of God for whom Jesus died.

Whenever we reduce the poor from people with names to abstractions, we add to their poverty and impoverish ourselves. Our point of departure for a Christian understanding of poverty is to remember that the poor are people with names, people to whom God has given gifts, and people with whom and among whom God has been working before we even arrived.

At the end of the day, people are the cause of poverty, and it is people who must change for things to change.

The way the poor remember their history shapes the day-to-day life of the poor today. In this way the past can become a limitation on the future. This is exacerbated by the fact that history is usually written by the non-poor, and they do it in a way that legitimizes their role, often writing the poor out of the story.

Poorly thought through development interventions can exacerbate this distorted view the poor have of their own history. Paulo Freire has exposed the negative contribution that educational systems can have when they teach the poor to understand their world and their past through the narratives of the powerful.

Poverty is a result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable. Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meanings. It is interesting to note that this view is consistent with the Hebraic worldview, in which relationships are the highest good, while alienation is the lowest.

“The rulers of the earth do not know that they too are held in thrall by the Delusional System. They do not know whom they serve” (Wink 1992, 97). Poverty cannot be addressed fully unless these delusions on the part of the non-poor are exposed and their respective webs of lies confronted by God's truth. “The church has no more important task than to expose these delusional assumptions as the Dragon's game”

There is another sense in which the poverty of the non-poor is the mirror image of the poverty of the poor. It seems as if having too much is as bad for us as having too little. Too little food makes us weak and susceptible to disease; too much food makes us overweight and susceptible to heart disease and cancer. The water in the Third World is dirty and unhealthy; the water in the West is bad for our health because it is increasingly polluted with chemicals. The poor have inadequate housing; the non-poor are often slaves to their houses. Octavio Paz observed that the rich have too few fiestas and are poor, while the poor have too many fiestas and are also poor

At the beginning of the twenty-first century the four horseman of modernity—capitalism, globalization, science, and technology—still offer to save the poor.

capitalism “carries within itself the limits of its own horizon, since it has no possible escape from its own golden calves and shatters on the ultimate unsatisfaction

The wisdom of the cross offers a different basis for hope. The cross teaches us that salvation does not come from right thinking or right technique, but by divine action making right what we cannot make right ourselves.

Life sustenance or the meeting of human basic needs. • Equity, meaning equitable distribution of material goods and opportunities. • Justice within all social relationships, including democratic participation. • Dignity and self-worth in the sense of feeling fully human and knowing we are made in the image of God. • Freedom from external control or oppression; a sense of being liberated in Christ. • Participation in a meaningful way in our own transformation. • Reciprocity between the poor and the non-poor; each have something to learn from the other. • Cultural fit that respects the best in local cultures and that treats them as creative. • Ecological soundness.

This process, according to Korten, should be driven by three principles: sustainability, justice, and inclusiveness.

This kingdom frame is inclusive of the physical, social, mental, and spiritual manifestations of poverty, and so all are legitimate areas of focus for transformational development that is truly Christian.

Life abundant is about living, not simply having.

The key to moving toward this better future of shalom and abundant life is the discovery that the community's story, and our story, can in fact become part of this larger story, the story of God's redemptive and restorative work in the world. Getting to a sustainable better future requires becoming part of the work that God is already doing.

Any Christian vision of a better human future must include a vibrant, growing, living Christian community that is eagerly and joyfully serving God and its community. it is impossible to imagine a transforming community without a transforming church in its midst.

Both identity and vocation are critical from a biblical perspective. We must know who we are and the purpose for which we were created. Therefore, restoring identity and recovering vocation must be the focus of a biblical understanding of human transformation.

The poor suffer from a marred or diminished identity and a degraded understanding of their vocation. The non-poor, on the other hand, suffer from an inflated sense of identity and of vocation.

People, not money or programs, transform their world.

We need to understand that helping people in this way means taking actions that are inherently a political, economic, and social. increasing individual human freedom or agency in the absence of work to increase Sen's instrumental freedoms is naive. Not all governments, and certainly not most of the non-poor, those who benefit from things as they are, will welcome this kind of transformation. Transforming things can be acceptable; transforming people is often less so.

God did not come into the life of the community with the arrival of the development agency. God has been active in the story of the community since the beginning of time.

We need to transform our metaphor for our relationship with nature from one of being masters of nature to the idea of being stewards or caretakers of God's creation. Christians knew this once. In the Celtic tradition of the sixth and seventh centuries, “we find a holy intimacy of human, natural and divine…. We see everywhere…an abandonment to spiritual work and simultaneously a cultivation of the earth”

Starting with the end in mind is not enough, however. The process by which we get there matters, too. This is because God has imposed some limitations on our choices. some means are better than others. some means actually help us live the future before it gets here. some means have to be given to us; we cannot get them for ourselves. Therefore, we also have to answer the question: What process of change should we choose?

Affirming the role of God

Affirming the agency of human beings

Focusing on relationships

Keeping the end in mind

Recognizing pervasive evil