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February 1 - March 9, 2020
Seeking truth, justice, and righteousness
Seeking beauty, art, and celebration
Addressing causes
Expressing a bias toward peace
Affirming the role of the church
It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind him was not a book or a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community…. He committed the entire work of salvation to that community…. The church does not depend for its existence upon our understanding of it or faith in it.
SUSTAINABILITY
we must recognize that even the poorest community already has some level of sustainability. if the community were not sustainable before the development agency came, it would not exist.
the ultimate source of sustainable life is not ours to control. It is God through Christ who sustains life.
we need to ask whether the idea of sustainability is enough. if sustainable simply means things are being maintained or that the project activities and impacts continue after we leave, is this enough? Don't we really seek sustainable growth, learning, and continuing transformation? I think we do, but we need to say so.
Physical sustainability
Mental sustainability
Social sustainability
A Christian view of social sustainability will require a theology of civil society that defines the roles and responsibility that individual Christians, voluntary Christian groups, and churches should play in order to add value to the societies in which they live.
Spiritual sustainability
The church is not so much the Christians gathered, although it is this too, as it is the place where Christians learn and are challenged to live the whole gospel in the fullness of the life of the larger community
THINKING HOLISTICALLY
Putting all of these ideas together, we have a framework for transformation that points us toward the best human future—the kingdom of God. This future is framed by the twin goals of transformation: changed people, who have discovered their true identity and vocation; and changed relationships that are just and peaceful.
this convergence of stories means that the story of the community and the holistic practitioner will never be fully the same. Each story affects all the other stories. The poor will borrow from our story and we, if we are not too proud, will learn from theirs. There is no longer a single narrative in the community. This is why engaged, respectful relationships are so important to transformational development.
Asking the community to locate God in its history is a way of helping its members to discover that they are not god-forsaken.
The community already has a survival strategy. The community has well-established patterns for making sense out of its world and staying alive in it. Only in disaster situations will we find such severe dislocations that its people are unable to cope and survive.
Take as much time as it takes. Development does not work on a time table. Getting activities done on time may make donors happy, but it is unlikely to enhance transformation or sustainability. Remember that God is willing to walk at three miles an hour because that's the best that human beings can do (Koyama 1979).
A Christian apart from a church is ultimately a contradiction in terms. No matter how comfortable the fellowship within a Christian charitable institution may be, an NGO is not and cannot be a church in the biblical sense of the word. We must guard against becoming a sanctuary for those Christians whose pain or disappointment with the church tempts them to try to approximate the church through their work in a para-church agency.
God likes good work, and so must we. We should never believe or act as if being a Christian is an excuse to be amateurish in our work. There should be no dichotomy between being Christian and being professional.
The starting point for being professional is the challenge to become truly holistic.
Holistic practitioners need to develop a deep understanding of the complexity of poverty and its many dimensions and expressions.
Holistic practitioners must be holistic disciples themselves. part of formation is being discipled in a holistic sense. The goal of discipling is to discover in God our own true identity and our own true vocation.
A genuinely Christian spirituality alive and at work in the daily life of holistic practitioners is the key to seeing what is true and what is not. Charles Elliot, dean of Trinity Hall at Cambridge and co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Spirituality, called for the development of a spirituality that enables us to see the world through the lens of the kingdom of God
Development is fundamentally an attempt to create sustainable change in adaptive social systems made up of poor communities and the social, political, and economic systems in which they are embedded. The development of poor communities can no more be master planned than the feeding of the people of New York every day.
In a study of five successful development programs in Asia, Korten found that these programs succeeded because they made continuing adjustments to their program design based on information that arose from a continuous process of monitoring and observation. The program purposes remained unchanged, but the inputs, outputs, and outcomes underwent many adjustments over time.
A truly Christian approach to designing a transformational development program also needs to be open and attentive to what God has to say to us. Even more important, the community needs to be invited to be open and attentive to what God has to say to it. Together we need to be quiet and listen in the midst of the all the information we have gathered and be open to God leading us to the information and conclusions that God deems most important.
The laundry list of problems the community would like the NGO to fix is lost in the enthusiasm of describing what is already working. The community comes to view its past and itself in a new light. We do know things. We do have resources. We have a lot to be proud of. We are already on the journey. God has been good to us. We can do something. We are not god-forsaken.
The goal of PD is to invite social change driven from within and among the people. Contrary to our modern expectations, it is not important that they understand the rationality behind the new behavior or even feel positive about it. Many early adopters have no idea about the underlying science of immunizations or improved seeds. But, PD argues, if they change their behavior and it works for them, their hearts and minds will follow.
There are three guidelines. The first is to design, not engineer.
The second guideline is to discover, not dictate. “The wisdom to solve problems exists and needs to be discovered within each and every community.”
The third design guideline is to decipher, not presuppose. As technically educated development facilitators the temptation is to jump quickly to conclusions based on our knowledge and experience from somewhere else, and thus local knowledge and initiative are squelched. This temptation needs to be resisted.
relationships and vision matter a lot to successful program transitions; they are the software or process side of development that is critical to sustainability.
Just as important as planning for potential problems is planning to mitigate the impact of a successful program. improving health and nutrition means fewer deaths and thus an increasing population. Fewer children dying under the age of five means increased demand for schools and teachers and eventually jobs. poor people from surrounding communities will move into a successful program area and thus threaten to overwhelm the benefits the community has worked so hard to create.
