Remember the Poor / Admonish the Idle

The shooter at a recent incident in Texas became angry when he was not given cash.

We help people like this from time to time at our church. We give them food, fuel, medicine, and transportation. Thankfully most of them are not resentful or angry. But sometimes odd behavior makes you careful. Unfortunately these problems are increasing in our society as more and more turn away from God. We urge our members not to hand out cash to people that might approach them on the parking lot. Tell them to wait and talk to one of the pastors. We're used to this, and we can usually sort out those who have legitimate needs and those who don't. Paul said, "remember the poor" (Gal 2.10). But he also said, "admonish the idle" (1 Thess 5.14). As far as fellows like this one in Texas, the best prayer is still, "Deliver us from evil" (Matt 6.13).

The Darwinian Worldview and the Creation Worldview

This morning I was teaching eighth graders about the implications of the idea of evolution. I showed them this Powerpoint slide:

Sadly, there was an example of the Darwinian worldview in the news today. The father of a child born with birth defects in Toledo, Ohio posted signs about a fund raiser for his four-month-old child. But someone posted three additional signs next to his that read: "Stop asking for money. Let the baby die. It's called Darwinism. Happy Holidays." You can read more about it below.

Let the baby die' signs target Ohio family with sick infant: report

As I said in a sermon this year: "If all we are is matter, then nothing really matters." (Text  Audio   Video) 

When Helping Hurts (Review and Notes)

When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself by Steve Corbett, Brian Fikkert, John Perkins, and David Platt. 2009, 2012

This book is similar to Walking with the Poor, by Bryant Myers. Whereas the former provides abundant quotes and references for the vast amount of development work that has been attempted, When Helping Hurts..., provides more descriptions of actual programs and specific instances of good development. Both books are in complete agreement that broken relationships are the root cause of poverty. They both emphasize that restored relationships with God and with others are the keys to economic improvement. When Helping Hurts... emphasizes the problem of paternalism (doing for others what they can do for themselves) which only creates dependence. They key is helping people do what they can for themselves. Both books emphasize participatory learning and other ways to involve the people in the process of development. One of the key words here is “empowering.” We need to empower people to engage in the process of development. To me, as a pastor, that means educating and motivating. That involves a lot of things such as prayer, mentoring, challenging, accountability, etc. 

Here are some of the programs that the book mentions:

Asset Based Development & Asset Mapping: Approach development by looking first not to the needs but to the assets of the community. Look to what is good and build on that.

Participatory Learning: Involving the community in the plan for development

Family Advocates: Single mothers were matched with family advocates who worked with them to improve the situation. 

Jobs for Life: This program involves classroom training, mentors and businesses that work with poor people to get them into good jobs.

Micro Loans: Small loans to help the poor start businesses

Individual Development Accounts: This program provides matching funds to the poor to help them build savings.

Savings and Credit Associations: This is like micro loans except that the loans come from the people within the community rather than from outside donors.

Business as Missions: This program helps start for profit businesses within a poor community that will help provide jobs.

Circle of Allies: This is a mentoring program in which allies (mentors) and participants meet monthly and at other times to plan and work together for development.

Kindle Notes For:

When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself by Steve Corbett, Brian Fikkert, John Perkins, and David Platt. 2009, 2012

Well-intentioned welfare programs penalized work, undermined families, and created dependence. The government hurt the very people it was trying to help. Unfortunately, the same is true for many Christian ministries today. By focusing on symptoms rather than on the underlying disease, we are often hurting the very people we are trying to help. Surprisingly, we are also hurting ourselves in the process. As followers of Jesus Christ, we simply must do better.

Diverse Sectors: Page: 14-15

Finally, no single sector can alleviate poverty on its own. Like all human beings, poor people have a range of physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs. Hence, appropriate interventions for poor people include such diverse sectors as economic development, health, education, agriculture, spiritual formation, etc. 

Now, Not Yet Page: 32

Of course there is both a “now” and a “not yet” to the kingdom. The full manifestation of the kingdom will not occur until there is a new heaven and a new earth. Only then will every tear be wiped from our eyes (Rev. 21:4). But two thousand years ago, Jesus clearly stated that there is a “now” to the kingdom, saying, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21).

Come, Lord Jesus Page: 33

When she was three years old, my daughter Anna bowed her head one night and prayed, “Dear Jesus, please come back soon, because we have lots of owies, and they hurt.”

Reverend Marsh Page: 37

For all of these reasons, Reverend Marsh focused his attention and energies, not on fighting the Ku Klux Klan, but on the lack of personal piety and unbelief of some of the civil rights workers. This culminated in his writing a famous sermon, “The Sorrow of Selma,” in which he lambasted the civil rights workers, calling them “unbathed beatniks,” “immoral kooks,” and “sign-carrying degenerates” who were hypocrites for not believing in God.

What Would Jesus Do? Page: 37

In one sense, Reverend Marsh was right. Many of the civil rights protestors longed for the peace, justice, and righteousness of the kingdom, but they did not want to bend the knee to the King Himself, which is a prerequisite for enjoying the full benefits of the kingdom. In contrast, Reverend Marsh embraced King Jesus, but he did not understand the fullness of Christ’s kingdom and its implications for the injustices in his community. Both Reverend Marsh and the civil rights workers were wrong, but in different ways. Reverend Marsh sought the King without the kingdom. The civil rights workers sought the kingdom without the King. The church needs a Christ-centered, fully orbed, kingdom perspective to correctly answer the question: “What would Jesus do?”

Isaiah’s Concern for the Poor Page: 38

Lord. “I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. When you come to appear before me, who has asked this of you, this trampling of my courts? Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths, and convocations—I cannot bear your evil assemblies…. Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow. (Isa. 1:10–13, 16b–17)

Early Christians Page: 43

God’s kingdom strategy of ministering to and among the suffering was so powerful that other kings took note. In the fourth century AD, the Roman Emperor Julian tried to launch pagan charities to compete with the highly successful Christian charities that were attracting so many converts. Writing to a pagan priest, Julian complained, “The impious Galileans [i.e., the Christians] support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.”12

Avoiding the Social Gospel Movement Page: 44

As evangelicals tried to distance themselves from the social gospel movement, they ended up in large-scale retreat from the front lines of poverty alleviation. This shift away from the poor was so dramatic that church historians refer to the 1900–1930 era as the “Great Reversal” in the evangelical church’s approach to social problems.15 It is important to note that the Great Reversal preceded the rise of the welfare state in America. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty did not occur until the 1960s, and even FDR’s relatively modest New Deal policies were not launched until the 1930s. In short, the evangelical church’s retreat from poverty alleviation was fundamentally due to shifts in theology and not—as many have asserted—to government programs that drove the church away from ministry to the poor. While the rise of government programs may have exacerbated the church’s retreat, they were not the primary cause.

Rwandan Massacre  Page: 45

Despite the fact that 80 percent of Rwandans claimed to be Christians, a bloody civil war erupted in 1994 in which the Hutu majority conducted a brutal genocide against the Tutsi minority and Hutu moderates. Over a three-month period, an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered, the vast majority of them Tutsis.

World Bank Page: 52

For example, during the initial decade following World War II, the World Bank believed the cause of poverty was primarily a lack of material resources—the last row of table 2.1—so it poured money into Europe and the Majority World. The strategy worked in the former but not in the latter. Why? The fundamental problem in the Majority World was not a lack of material resources. The World Bank misdiagnosed the disease, and it applied the wrong medicine. If We Believe the Primary Cause of Poverty Is … Then We Will Primarily Try to … 

A Lack of Knowledge Educate the Poor Oppression by Powerful People Work for Social Justice The Personal Sins of the Poor Evangelize and Disciple the Poor A Lack of Material Resources Give Material Resources to the Poor TABLE 2.1

They Don’t Deserve Our Help Page: 63

“Pastor, we are tired of trying to help these people out. We have been bringing them things for several years now, but their situation never improves. They just sit there in the same situation year in and year out. Have you ever noticed that there are no men in the apartments when we deliver the toys? The residents are all unwed mothers who just keep having babies in order to collect bigger and bigger welfare checks. They don’t deserve our help.”

Importance of Relationships Page: 73

Poverty is rooted in broken relationships, so the solution to poverty is rooted in the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection to put all things into right relationship again.

Pachamama Page: 80

Although successful in increasing output, the impact on the farmers’ incomes was far less than hoped because of the farmers’ deep reverence for Pachamama, the mother earth goddess who presides over planting and harvesting.

Alisa Collins Story Page: 93

After decades of living on welfare checks, Alisa Collins suddenly started finishing her high school degree, working full-time as a kindergarten teacher, and getting up at 4:00 a.m. to wash her family’s clothes before she was due at work. What happened? Alisa’s worldview changed and the system in which she lived changed.

Rehabilitation and Development Follow Relief Page: 100

 “Rehabilitation” begins as soon as the bleeding stops; it seeks to restore people and their communities to the positive elements of their precrisis conditions. The key feature of rehabilitation is a dynamic of working with the tsunami victims as they participate in their own recovery, moving from point 2 to point 3. “Development” is a process of ongoing change that moves all the people involved—both the “helpers” and the “helped”—closer to being in right relationship with God, self, others, and the rest of creation. In particular, as the materially poor develop, they are better able to fulfill their calling of glorifying God by working and supporting themselves and their families with the fruits of that work. Development is not done to people or for people but with people.

Paternalism Page: 109

However, there is a good rule of thumb that is extremely useful in cutting through a lot of the complexity: Avoid Paternalism.

Labor Paternalism Page: 112

Labor paternalism occurs when we do work for people that they can do for themselves. I remember going on a spring break mission trip to Mississippi while I was in college. I will never forget the sick feeling I had as I stood on a ladder painting a house while the young, able-bodied men living in the house sat on their front porch and watched. I did so much harm that day. Yes, the house got painted, but in the process I undermined these people’s calling to be stewards of their own time and talents. It might have been better if I had stayed home for spring break, rather than to have gone and done harm.

Why Relief Is Easier Page: 114

Ironically, you will also typically find that most existing organizations in your community are focusing on providing relief. Why? There are at least three reasons. First, many service organizations have a material definition of poverty; hence, they believe that handouts of material things are the solution to that poverty. As a result, they often provide relief to people who really need development. Second, relief is easier to do than development. It is much simpler to drop food out of airplanes or to ladle soup out of bowls than it is to develop long-lasting, time-consuming relationships with poor people, which may be emotionally exhausting. Third, it is easier to get donor money for relief than for development. “We fed a thousand people today” sounds better to donors than “We hung out and

Asset Based Community Development Page: 119

For these reasons, many Christian community-development experts have discovered the benefits of using “asset-based community development” (ABCD) as they seek to foster reconciliation of people’s relationships with God, self, others, and creation. ABCD is consistent with the perspective that God has blessed every individual and community with a host of gifts, including such diverse things as land, social networks, knowledge, animals, savings, intelligence, schools, creativity, production equipment, etc. ABCD puts the emphasis on what materially poor people already have and asks them to consider from the outset, “What is right with you? What gifts has God given you that you can use to improve your life and that of your neighbors? How can the individuals and organizations in your community work together to improve your community?”

Needs Based Development Page: 120

In contrast, needs-based development focuses on what is lacking in the life of a community or a person. The assumption in this approach is that the solutions to poverty are dependent upon outside human and financial resources. Churches and ministries using a needs-based approach are often quick to provide food, clothes, shelter, and money to meet the perceived, immediate needs of low-income people, who are often viewed as “clients” or “beneficiaries” of the program. Pouring in outside resources is not sustainable and only exacerbates the feelings of helplessness and inferiority that limits low-income people from being better stewards of their God-given talents and resources. When the church or ministry stops the flow of resources, it can leave behind individuals and communities that are more disempowered than ever before.

The Rest of Grace’s Story Page: 123

Grace was clearly in need of relief. Lying in agony on the floor of her shack, she was unable to help herself and needed somebody to provide assistance to her. But was I the best person to provide such relief? Remember a key relief principle we learned in chapter 4: Respond when needs of the affected population are unmet by local people or organizations (or family members) due to their inability or unwillingness to help. I never even considered this principle when reaching into my pocket for the eight dollars to pay for the penicillin. Relief was the right intervention, but I was not the right person to offer it. I failed to consider the local assets that already existed in this slum, assets that included small amounts of money, a church, a pastor, and the social bonds of the one hundred refugees attending the small-business class. The truth is that there was more than enough time to walk back to the church, where the small-business class was still assembled, and ask the participants what they could do to help Grace. While the refugees were extremely poor, they could have mustered the eight cents per person to pay for the penicillin. In short, by providing the eight dollars, I violated the four key elements of ABCD mentioned above. Of course, handing over the money was so much easier and so much faster than asking the refugees to assist Grace; and therein resides the problem of many poverty-alleviation efforts: the North American need for speed undermines the slow process needed for lasting and effective long-run development. Why does all of this matter? Grace desperately needed relationships in the community in general and in St. Luke’s Church in particular. Her former way of life had created many enemies, and, being infected with HIV, Grace was going to need solid support structures as time wore on. In fact, Grace needed to have her poverty of community alleviated if she was going to have any chance for long-term survival. Neither Elizabeth nor I could provide this for Grace over the long haul. I was soon leaving the country, and Elizabeth did not live in this slum. Grace needed the members of the community and of St. Luke’s Church to embrace her and to consider her as one of their own. By giving the eight dollars myself, I missed an opportunity to facilitate such relationships between Grace and the local support structures that were crucial to her long-term survival. My eight dollars removed a chance for St. Luke’s to be what the Bible calls it to be: the body, bride, and fullness of Jesus Christ in this slum. I denied St. Luke’s the chance to declare the good news of the kingdom of God in word and in deed to “the least of these.” Instead of helping St. Luke’s to be “salt and light,” I joined decades of North American evangelicals in communicating that the mzungu—the powerful, rich, educated white person—was the “salt and light.”

Page: 125

Oh to have that eight dollars back. I wish I had encouraged Elizabeth to go back to St. Luke’s to ask the refugees to assist Grace. Elizabeth could have brought the pastor in as part of the problem-solving process. While they were doing this, I should have gotten in the taxi and gotten out of there as fast as possible. Why? My entire presence in this situation, given all that it means to be a mzungu, was completely debilitating of local assets, be they human, financial, social, or spiritual.

Page: 126

I am absolutely sure Elizabeth would have stepped in with her own money if she had needed to do so—and she was less of an outsider than I.

Note: But she didn't step in. She said the medicine was too expensive.

Asset Mapping  Page: 126

Made popular by John Kretzmann and John McKnight of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University, Asset Mapping has become a common approach to community development work in the United States.1 A better term for this approach might be “asset inventorying,” since the strategy primarily uses individual or group-based interviews to catalogue the assets in a particular community.

Participatory Learning Page: 128

Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) is a mind-set and an associated set of tools developed by community development workers in the Majority World during the 1990s.2 PLA uses a variety of group-based exercises to engage and energize community members in thinking about their community’s history, assets, survival strategies, and goals.

Relief Failure Page: 133

Wanting to assist a village in Colombia with its rice production, a nonprofit organization gathered the villagers into a cooperative and bought them a thresher, a motorized huller, a generator, and a tractor. Rice production boomed, and the cooperative sold the rice at the highest price the farmers had ever received. The project appeared to be a tremendous success. The nonprofit organization then left the village, but several years later one of its staff members returned to find that the cooperative had completely disbanded and that all of the equipment was broken down and rusting away in the fields. In fact, some of the equipment had never been used at all. Yet, as the staff member walked through the village, the people pleaded with him, “If [your organization] would just come help us again, we could do so much!”1

Importance of Participation Page: 134

This book has already explained a number of reasons for the slow progress in poverty alleviation, but another reason needs to be highlighted: inadequate participation of poor people in the process.

Empowered to Make Decisions  Page: 136

Thus, the goal is not just that the equipment gets used and that rice output goes up, but rather that poor people are empowered to make decisions about the best way to farm, to act upon their decisions, to evaluate the results of their decisions, and then to start the decision-making process all over again.

Note: What do we really mean by "empowered"? I think it involves education and motivation.

Family Advocates Page: 137

Instead of having a one-size-fits-all blueprint for each family, [our ministry] tries to journey alongside a single mother and her children, believing that the family’s unique strengths, history, and future goals need to be understood and appreciated. The mother meets weekly with a Family Advocate, who helps her begin to explore the areas of her family’s life that are in need of restoration. While the Family Advocate facilitates the process, each single mother participates in the process by working to envision the family’s future and setting goals and initiating the action steps necessary to achieve them. The Family Advocate is then able to help hold the mother accountable, as well as contribute to the family’s long-term plan through resource development.

Watch Out for Post-Modernism Page: 138

A word of caution is in order. Secular arguments for participation often rest on two faulty assumptions. First, given the postmodern belief that truth is relative, some argue that poor people must participate in the process because they need to construct their own reality. Who are we outsiders to impose our ideas on poor people? they say. Second, a humanist faith in the inherent goodness of human beings leads some to believe that participation, like democracy, will necessarily produce positive results. Both of these assumptions are wrong from a biblical perspective. The Bible clearly teaches that there is absolute truth and that—to the extent that we know it—we are to speak such truth in love (Eph. 4:15). Moreover, all of us, including poor people, are sinful; participation does not have the capacity to overcome the basic corruption in the human condition. Individuals and groups make bad decisions all the time! However, a participatory approach is consistent with a biblical perspective concerning poverty and its alleviation. The scriptural truths that all of us are broken and that all of us retain the image of God are affirmed by a process that solicits and values the positive contributions of everyone, both insiders and outsiders. Furthermore, the fact that participatory approaches enable the materially poor to “teach” the materially non-poor helps to overcome the inferior-superior dynamic that typically characterizes the interactions between them. As a result, the dignity of the materially poor is affirmed, and the god-complexes of the materially non-poor are dispelled.

Explosion of Short Term Missions Page: 151

There were 120,000 in 1989; 450,000 in 1998; 1,000,000 in 2003; and 2,200,000 in 2006. The numbers reflect a tsunami of epic proportions, a tidal wave of American short-term “missionaries” flooding the world. The cost? Americans spent $1.6 billion on short-term missions (STMs) in 2006 alone.1

Problem with STMs Page: 155

The core problem with STMs to poor communities is that STMs tend to reflect the perspective of “poverty as deficit,” the idea that poverty is due to the poor lacking something. North Americans often view the “something” as material resources, but a lack of knowledge or spirituality is also commonly cited.4 This conception of poverty leads to poverty-alleviation strategies in which the materially non-poor are necessarily in the position of giving the “something” to the materially poor, since the non-poor have the “something” and the poor do not have it. Chapter 2 expressed some of this dynamic in the following equation: This “poverty as deficit” perspective is especially problematic in the context of STMs, since all of the “giving” needs to get done within just two weeks!

Don’t Do What People Can Do for Themselves Page: 156

For example, after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc along parts of the Gulf Coast, tens of thousands of Christians rushed to assist. This aid took many diverse forms and in many ways it was a great testimony to the beauty of the body of Christ. One particular STM team made up of young people went to the New Orleans area very soon after Katrina hit and worked hard to clear roads and homes of debris. The same STM team returned about a year later to help with the rehabilitation of some of the damaged homes. By this time the residents were returning to the area. The STM team was asked to work on restoring the house owned by a family that included several young adult males. While the STM team worked hard every day tearing out Sheetrock, carpeting, and more, the young men living in the house sat back and watched the STM team all day long. The first trip was an appropriate STM response, applying relief in a context in which it was needed. But the second STM trip, while well intentioned, was an incorrect response. The homeowner’s family had the capacity to participate in the renovation of its house but was unwilling to do so. It would have been better for the STM team to go back to the local ministry and ask to be reassigned to work on another house whose owners were open to helping with their own recovery.

Jobs for Life Page: 176

Advance Memphis is one of 130 affiliates of the nationwide Jobs for Life network, which mobilizes churches and Christian ministries to help poor people find and keep jobs.

Jobs for Life Page: 176

1. Classroom training for poor people that emphasizes the development of “soft skills” from a biblical perspective. Soft skills are general, nontechnical abilities such as a solid work ethic, the ability to function in a team, and strong communication skills. In contrast, “hard skills” include the technical knowledge needed for specific jobs; for example, an auto mechanic needs to know how an engine operates. JFL develops soft skills using a biblically based curriculum that addresses such issues as career planning, the inherent value of work, good attitudes, personal integrity, respect for authority, conflict resolution, responsibility, punctuality, appropriate dress, etc. 2. Mentors, called “champions,” provide support and encouragement to JFL participants, helping them to overcome obstacles that hinder their ability to complete the class, to get a job, or to cope with life. While one-on-one mentoring is possible, mentoring teams from churches are likely to be able to sustain relationships over longer periods of time, as the mentoring process can be overwhelming. 3. Businesses covenant to provide interviews, job opportunities, and supportive work environments to JFL graduates. This represents a tremendous opportunity for Christian businesspeople to serve the kingdom by helping poor people to get a fresh start on fulfilling their God-given callings. Ideally, employers will be in contact with the mentors so that they can work together to nurture the JFL graduate through the ups and downs of the job.

Micro Loans Page: 178

Isaac, an African American in his late twenties, drives up to Title Brokers in a rusting minivan that needs a new muffler. In exchange for handing over his car title and a set of keys for the repo man, Isaac receives a check for $600. At the end of the month, he will owe $750, which amounts to an annual percentage rate (APR) of 300 percent. Should he fail to repay within ninety days, he will owe $1,172, reflecting an APR of 381 percent. “If I wasn’t in such a desperate situation, I wouldn’t come back. I’m embarrassed to be here because these guys rip people off. This is [money] I should be investing for my children.”17 Isaac’s story is becoming all too common. Poor neighborhoods are teeming with mortgage brokers, rent-to-own stores, payday and tax refund lenders, pawnshops, and car title loan dealers, all of which charge very high interest rates, often burying people in a cycle of debt. For example, a two-week loan of two to three hundred dollars from payday lenders charges interest averaging more than 400 percent APR, and the majority of payday borrowers have to roll over their loans multiple times, incurring additional fees in the process. The average payday borrower spends $800 to repay a $325 loan.18 Many poor people do not understand the terms of the loans from these sources, leaving them open to abuse from unscrupulous lenders, many of whom engage in outright fraud. Indeed, research has found that a lack of financial education significantly contributes to people’s falling prey to such schemes.19

Individual Development Accounts Page: 180

Veralisa was struggling to get off welfare and to support herself and her two children by making jewelry. But her income for the year totaled less than six thousand dollars, and then she received the heartbreaking news that she had developed cancer, possibly as a result of the harsh chemicals she was using in her jewelry business. A government agency referred Veralisa to Covenant Community Capital, a faith-based organization in Houston, Texas, that helps low-income, working families to escape the cycle of poverty by building money management skills and by helping them to acquire assets that grow in value over time. Veralisa enrolled in Covenant Community Capital’s Individual Development Account (IDA) Program, which rewards the monthly savings of working-poor families by providing a two-to-one savings match. Veralisa earned her match by saving some of her hard-earned dollars and by attending personal finance education and home-buyer preparation classes that were a required part of the IDA program.

The Grameen Bank Micro Finance / Micro Loans Page: 185

In 1976, a virtually unknown economics professor was visiting a village in rural Bangladesh during a devastating famine. There he encountered Sufiya, a very poor woman who was struggling to support her family by weaving bamboo stools. Sufiya was trapped. She needed to borrow twenty-two cents per day to buy materials, but banks would not lend to her because she did not have acceptable collateral and her desired loan size was too small. As a result, Sufiya was forced to borrow from loan sharks, whose exorbitant rates of interest left her with only two cents of profit at the end of a twelve-hour workday. Sufiya’s neighbors expressed similar frustration, facing interest rates ranging from 10 percent per week (520 percent per year) to 10 percent per day (3,650 percent) per year. The professor reached into his pocket and lent Sufiya and forty-one of her neighbors a total of twenty-seven dollars. To the amazement of observers, the loans were fully repaid on time.1 Contrary to the received wisdom, it was possible to lend money to very poor people and get it paid back! Thirty-five years later, that economics professor, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, is a Nobel laureate, and the Grameen Bank, which he established to provide credit to the poorest people of Bangladesh, has 7.58 million poor borrowers and has lent $7.4 billion since its inception in 1976. More than 98 percent of Grameen’s loans have been repaid, meaning that Grameen’s money can be lent and re-lent

 Page: 186

to poor people over and over again!2 Moreover, Dr. Yunus’s work has spawned the global microfinance (MF) movement, which aims to reach 175 million of the world’s poorest families with loans and other financial services (e.g., savings and insurance) by the end of 2015.3 Indeed, MF, which is sometimes also referred to as “microenterprise development,” has become one of the premier strategies for bringing economic empowerment to poor people in the Majority World.

Problems with Micro Loans Page: 186

A few months later, John took a two-week trip to Uganda to help the churches there to put together a business plan for a MF program. John left them with a check for twenty thousand dollars to start making loans. Six months later, all of the money had been lent out. Twelve months later, almost none of the money had been paid back, and the churches in Uganda were now asking Grace for more money to replenish their MF program. The black hole was bigger than ever before. Although there may be some exceptions in particular contexts, Grace Fellowship’s experience is very common. Many churches, missionaries, and ministries from North America have been trying to use MF as part of their global outreach. Unfortunately, they usually find that emulating the Grameen Bank is far more difficult than they imagined. Loans are often not repaid, putting a drain on ministry budgets and causing some programs to collapse entirely. Everybody gets hurt in the process: the North American churches, ministries, and missionaries; the partner churches and ministries in the Majority World; and—most important—the poor themselves.

 Page: 190

What makes MFIs like the Grameen Bank work? There are many technical issues, but a key feature of their success is that the MFI, like any bank, must convince borrowers that it will exist over the long haul. If borrowers do not believe the MFI will be there tomorrow, they will not worry about repaying their loans today, as the MFI will not be around to penalize them for not repaying. And if borrowers do not repay their loans, the MFI will go broke.

Savings and Credit Associations Page: 193

The Savings and Credit Association (SCA) associated with God’s Compassion Church dispensed a total of forty-one relatively low-interest loans, enjoying a 100 percent repayment rate. Moreover, the interest paid on the loans enabled the SCA members to earn dividends on their savings that averaged 50 percent in annual terms.

 Page: 193

A SCA is a very simple credit union in which poor people save and lend their own money to one another. Each member contributes an agreed-upon savings amount to the group’s fund at a weekly meeting. The SCA members decide how much of the group’s fund to lend, to whom it will be lent, and the terms of the loans. At the end of a predetermined length of time, usually six to twelve months, each member’s savings are returned along with dividends they have earned from the interest charged on loans. It is microfinance without outside managers or money!

Business As Missions Page: 197

A related intervention that has gained renewed popularity in the past decade is called business as missions (BAM). BAM finds its roots in the ministries of Paul, Aquila, and Priscilla, who used tent making as a means of supporting their missionary work. Today, BAM takes on many forms, but its defining feature is that the missionary owns and operates a legitimate, for-profit business that he or she uses as a vehicle for ministry.17 In contrast, the other interventions described in this chapter, the Provider, Promotion, Partnership, and Complementary Training Models, all focus on helping poor people to own and operate their own microenterprises.

Lack of Sustainability Page: 206

One of them spoke up. “Dan, we love you, but something has to change. We have been writing checks to pay for short-term teams for years, but the people in those African villages are just as poor as they were before we started going over there. We have dug wells, built latrines, handed out used clothing, and donated to their new church building, but they just keep asking us to send more teams and more money for more projects. If anything, they seem more dependent on us than ever before. This is bad stewardship of the money we are donating to this church. Something has to change! We’ve had enough.”

Volunteers Who Can Get Close to the Poor Page: 210

But reality often falls far short of the ideal. Typically, the biggest challenge that ministries face is an insufficient number of people who are willing to invest the time and energy that it takes to walk through time with a needy individual or family. Finding armies of people to volunteer one Saturday per year to paint dilapidated houses is easy. Finding people to love the people, day in and day out, who live in those houses is extremely difficult.

Circle of Allies Page: 211

There are a number of approaches and helpful resources on mentoring,3 but Diane’s story illustrates the power of the circles of support model that is gaining momentum across North America.4 A circle consists of two to five volunteers—called “circle allies”—who come alongside one materially poor family or individual—called the “circle participant” or the “circle leader.” The “allies” are people who are willing to use their time, talents, social and professional networks, and possibly financial resources to help the family or individual to escape material poverty. The “participant” (sometimes called the “leader”) commits to use the circle to move forward toward a more positive future, including overcoming the shame and social isolation that is at the root of much of material poverty.

Walking with the Poor (Review and Notes)

Walking With The Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development (Revised and Expanded Edition)  by Bryant L. Myers

This book is a very thorough study of the problem of poverty. Myers believes that the ultimate problem is that of broken relationships with God and with one another. But he carefully examines the many causes of poverty. The book is full of quotes and footnotes for anyone who is interested in details. I’d like to see more actual programs and examples of development that did help the poor. 

These are my highlights from the book:

Spiritual/Natural Dualism Location: 361

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.

Goal Location: 371

The book is written for those involved in Christian development programs and challenges them to move toward holistic ministries.

Dichotomy Location: 373

Too often in church planting we have relegated God's transforming work to spiritual realities and assigned earthly matters to science and technology.

Relationships Location: 395

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.

Excluded Middle  Location: 398

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.

God-Complexes Location: 410

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.

Author’s Conversion Location: 472

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.

Purpose Location: 514

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.

Dichotomy Location: 518

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.

Dichotomy Location: 527

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.

Creative Tension Location: 531

by which we meant that development and Christian witness should be held together in a creative tension.

Adding In Location: 532

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.

World Vision Location: 546

I left World Vision to become a professor of international development in the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary five years ago.

Transformational Development Location: 560

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.

Christian Witness Location: 583

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

Reducing Location: 595

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.

Dichotomy Location: 623

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.

Excluded Middle Location: 647

We suffer from what Hiebert calls “the excluded middle.”

Listen Location: 651

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.

Holistic Location: 654

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 and Deeds Location: 687

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.

Humans Can Save Themselves Location: 735

These offerings provide approaches for the eradication of poverty that are secular and materialistic, resting on the assumption that human beings can save themselves.

Understanding Poverty Location: 761

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.

 Location: 769

absence of access to power, resources, and choices became part of our understanding of poverty.

Lack of Freedom Location: 771

Later in the 1990s Amartya Sen argued that poverty is more the result of a lack of freedom than the lack of money.

Disempowerment Location: 774

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.

Relational Location: 778

Drawing heavily on Jayakumar Christian, I propose that the nature of poverty is fundamentally relational and that its cause is fundamentally spiritual.

Relational Location: 779

The poor are poor largely because they live in networks of relationships that do not work for their well-being.

Salvation Location: 796

The Christian view of salvation points to the cross and the resurrection as the only framework that can truly bring us home.

Transformational Development Location: 799

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.

Changed People Location: 819

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.

Vocation Location: 826

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.

Participatory Learning Location: 869

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.

Changed Relationships Location: 908

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.

The Gospel Location: 911

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.

Crucified Mind or Crusading Mind Location: 919

It goes on to remind us of the importance of carrying out our Christian witness with a crucified mind, not a crusading mind.

WWII Location: 937

The idea of development in terms of helping a nation escape from poverty dates to the immediate aftermath of World War II.

To Stay Alive Location: 949

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.

Global Wealth Location: 952

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)

 Location: 963

“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”

 Location: 966

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.

 Location: 967

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.

 Location: 1,034

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.

 Location: 1,054

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.

 Location: 1,072

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.”

 Location: 1,078

For this work Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in development economics.

Location: 1,104

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.

 Location: 1,205

A fan of Edmund Burke and the British Enlightenment, Easterly opts for a bottom-up, discover-what-works, and learn-your-way-into-the-future approach that assumes that incremental discovery is a better fit in a complex, dynamical world about which we can never know enough.

 Location: 1,224

Collier identifies four poverty traps: experiencing chronic conflict, suffering the negative impact of natural resources (the resource curse), being landlocked with bad neighbors, and bad governance (2007, 56).

 Location: 1,270

The third group of villages was also visited by the monthly health fair, but in addition, the mothers were given a kilo of dal (beans) and a set of metal dishes when their children completed their immunization series. Based on empirical results, the third option proved the most effective. This is an example of learning the way into the future—something we will turn to in Chapters 8 and 9—and echoes Easterly's concern for the importance of evidenced-based monitoring and evaluation.

 Laziness? Location: 1,321

De Soto's research demolished the prejudice that the poor are lazy and stupid.

 Location: 1,324

de Soto showed that the informal businesses of the poor cannot grow in the informal sector and are vulnerable to theft, extortion, and natural disaster (1989, xix).

 Location: 1,327

De Soto documented the raft of rules, fees, and procedures created by government regulation that make the legal registration of a local market or vendor's license a time-consuming and costly nightmare. These convoluted processes can involve more than fifty different steps, dozens of different government ministries and departments, and two to four years' worth of income to complete (1989, 131-32). The purpose of these regulations is to protect vested economic interests from competition.

 Location: 1,339

The emergence of a system of property rights in the West provided this kind of proof to a lender, and so property became capital that could be leveraged. A system of property rights and the legal means to enforce them are largely missing in many parts of the world where the poor live. Systems of communal ownership, government ownership, or conflicting or undocumented ownership make for what de Soto calls dead capital, because no one will loan money on something a person cannot prove he or she owns (De Soto 2000).

 Location: 1,351

One of the key contributions Yunus made to thinking about development was his idea that simply transferring money from the non-poor to the poor through a non-profit charitable arrangement might not always be the best thing to do. It has two weaknesses. First, this approach tends to create dependency and has not always helped the poor find a sustainable role in the local economy. Second, the scale and sustainability of such an approach are limited by how much the non-poor would give and how long they would give.

 Location: 1,367

The good news is that the percentage of people living on less than US$2 a day has dropped from over 95 percent in 1820 to about 43 percent in 2008 (World Bank 2008).

 Location: 1,377

Although the development proposals of Sachs, Easterly, Collier, de Soto, and Yunus have led us beyond simple models of economic growth and the historical tendency to have negative views of the poor and their potential, all of these contributors and their varied approaches share a common perspective: the modern worldview. All are materialistic, often technocratic, and reflect a firm belief in human reason, technology, and money as the keys to solving the problem of poverty. Their biggest common gap lies in the absence of religion and things spiritual in their explanation for why people are poor and what can be done to help them.

 Location: 1,405

This chapter summarizes the history of American evangelical thinking on poverty and development.

 Location: 1,411

This book is written from an evangelical perspective, with the word evangelical understood as affirming the uniqueness of Christ, the need for personal conversion, the importance of Bible as a guide to life, and a commitment to doing mission in the world.

 Location: 1,416

In the 1920s American evangelicals took a holiday from history when it came to the thinking and doing of social action. Deeply wounded by the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, our conservative forbearers retreated behind the fundamentals of the faith and the singular importance of evangelism and stayed in a defensive posture for almost fifty years.

Note: Evidence?In the LCMS this was a time of orphanages. This is also a time of survival because of the Depression and the Second World War

 Location: 1,466

Modernity, and particularly the fruits of the French Revolution, had led to a faith in the supremacy of human reason, and the resulting critical philosophies were pushing religion off the public stage. The effectiveness of science and technology was having the same effect. The materialistic and critical voices of Marx, Darwin, and Freud made religion seem less and less important. Modernity was in full bloom, and religion had been relegated to the spiritual realm and was expected to eventually go away altogether.

 Location: 1,597

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”

 Location: 1,690

Human beings are to be God's co-creators in the world—with a very large assignment. In creation we are to use our God-given power to observe, reason, and then act on that new knowledge. 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.

 Location: 1,699

In Populorum progressio Paul VI concluded that being made in the image of God, and having been given gifts by God to contribute to the well-being of creation, implies that “every human life is called to some task by God….

 Location: 1,742

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).

 Location: 1,754

It led to widespread deception, distortion, and domination in all forms of human relationships—with God, within one's self (and family), within the community and between others, and with the environment. Figure 3-2: Impact of sin on all relationships.

 Location: 1,759

We cannot read Satan out of the story and have it make any sense.

 Location: 1,760

The direct consequences of the fall in terms of poverty and development are fairly obvious. A fruitful creation meant to sustain life does so reluctantly (Gn 3:17), and making the creation productive enough to sustain life now means struggle and hard work (Gn 3:19). Human life now has an end (Gn 3:19). The relationship between men and women became distorted and unequal (Gn 3:16). Violence and murder entered the human story (Gn 4:8), and the hunger for revenge entered the human heart (Gn 4:23). Complete human well-being is now a struggle and beyond the reach of human agency alone.

 Location: 1,770

Human beings have made the world a better, safer, less threatening place to live, and abject poverty has been in decline since the beginning of the 1800s. Yet this improving world is still the site of genocides, wars, unjust social structures, greed, consumerism, and a host of other reminders that sin is alive as well.

 Location: 1,795

Distorted by the fall, people occupying positions of power or influence within the economic system yield to the temptation to act more often as owners and less as stewards. They skew the system to enhance and protect their own self-interest and insulate themselves from the impact of these distortions on the less fortunate.

 Location: 1,800

Finally, the religious system, which was created by God to bring the nations and their institutions into relationship with God and to make them aware of God's will and commands, too often colludes with the fallen political and economic systems. The prophets of accountability are gradually seduced by money, power, and prestige, gradually becoming silent (Ezek 22:28).

 Location: 1,807

Park argues that focusing only on sin, as has been the preoccupation of Western theology, makes the impact of social or structural sin invisible. To rectify this, Park has proposed a theology of the wounded (2004).

Sinning and Sinned Against Location: 1,810

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).

 Location: 1,862

Economically, the Exodus story is about moving from oppression in someone else's land to freedom and a productive life in their own land, a land fairly distributed to all so that everyone could enjoy the fruit of his or her own labor. Psychologically, the Exodus story is about Israel losing its self-understanding as a slave people and discovering the new understanding that, with God's help, they could be a people and become a nation.

Note | Location: 1,877

The author does not consider The Prophet Of Deuteronomy 18 to be the Messiah. How could he miss that Moses said He would be greater. None of Israel’s prophets were greater than Moses.

 Location: 1,921

By struggling with the temptations and deceptions of the Evil one, the one who is against life and against God, Christ determined that he was called to be the Son of God and the Suffering Servant, both at the same time.

Note:He knew this from the beginning. I must be about My Father’s business.

 Location: 1,934

Where is the periphery today, and what does it mean to say that Jesus can make it the center of power?

 Location: 1,938

At the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus said that the Holy Spirit had anointed him “to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor” (Lk 4:18-19). Jesus' mission is a holistic mission to the poor.

Note:What about: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And, Go preaching repentance and the remissions n of sins?

 Location: 1,951

When asked what must be done to inherit eternal life, Jesus said that the greatest commandment was a twin affirmation: “Love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself' (Mt 23:36). This is a commandment about relationships, not law and transgressions; about whom we must love, not simply what we must believe or do.

Note:This is nuts. It’s everything. How can you love God without believing His teaching?

 Location: 1,958

This must shape our view of poverty. 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.

 Location: 1,963

The cross clarified something else. on the cross, in addition to canceling our sin, Paul tells us that Christ disarmed the powers and authorities, making a public spectacle of them (Col 2:20). In Christ, we no longer have to accept the rule of oppressive structures or of deceiving and dominating social systems.

 Location: 1,968

Transformational development that does not declare the good news of the possibility of both personal and corporate liberation and redirection toward God is a truncated gospel, unworthy of the biblical text.

 Location: 1,977

Christ is risen This is the transformation that begets all other transformations.

 Location: 2,071

For too long evangelicals have treated the Bible as a book for the spiritual world and have failed to give it the freedom to inform the material world of everyday life and everyday “non-spiritual” decisions (see Figure 1-2). One of the challenges of Christian holism in development will be to release the Bible and the biblical narrative to speak to all phases of the process of human transformation. One of the best gifts that we have for the poor and the non-poor is the living word of God. We need to share it with them and let the living word speak for itself. More about this in the chapter on Christian witness.

 Location: 2,097

From the day our first parents walked out of the garden, estranged from God, each other, and the earth itself, God has been at work redeeming and reconciling the fallen creation, its people, and its social systems.

 Location: 2,137

There is no transformational development apart from people who themselves are being transformed and who live in the community that is the home of their transformation.

 Location: 2,145

If there is to be any human transformation that is sustainable, it will be because of the action of the Holy Spirit, not the effectiveness of our development technology or the cleverness of our participatory processes (see Chapter 6).

 Location: 2,148

The chief actor in the historic mission of the Christian church is the Holy Spirit. He is the director of the whole enterprise.

 Location: 2,160

We are to see the world as created, fallen, and being redeemed, all at the same time.

 Location: 2,162

God at one and the same time upholds a given political or economic system, since some such system is required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive to full human actualization; and presses for its transformation into a more human order. Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third. The Christian is expected to hold together all three. (1992, 67)

 Location: 2,169

There are five theological ideas that seem useful for Christians working for transformational development: creation, incarnation, redemption, kingdom of God, and power.

 Location: 2,212

Between 1920 and the 1980s, evangelicals could not talk about the kingdom of God as it was a theme associated with “being liberal” and the ecumenical movement, and it was thus an object of some suspicion.

 Location: 2,225

E. Stanley Jones, long-time missionary to India, makes an important contribution to kingdom theology when he presents the biblical metaphors of the “unshakable kingdom” and the “unchanging person” (Jones 1972).

 Location: 2,270

Diamond has concluded that “history followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves” (ibid., 25).

 Location: 2,378

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.

 Location: 2,390

First and foremost, in an intimate and serving relationship with God, through Jesus Christ. Second, in healthy, righteous, and just relationships with ourselves and our communities. Third, in loving, respectful, “neighboring” relationships with all who are “other” to us. Finally, in an earth-keeping, making-fruitful relationship with the earth.

 Location: 2,411

Shalom is the biblical ideal for human well-being or flourishing.

 Location: 2,474

Postman reminds us that the “first science storytellers, Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler and Newton for example—did not think of their story as a replacement for the great Judeo-Christian narrative, but as an extension of it” (1997, 31).

 Location: 2,591

Figure 4-1: Christian views of the poor. (Developed from Mouw 1989, 20-34)

 Location: 2,612

Time is the basic resource of the household, according to Friedmann, not money. The household allocates the time of individual members to different tasks, areas of life, and domains of social practice in order to live. “poor households…rely heavily on non-market relations both for securing their livelihood and pursuing their life goals” (Friedmann 1992, 45). The poor cannot rely on money to satisfy their needs. This often makes poor households invisible to economic research.

 Location: 2,647

The poor are no more lazy, fatalistic, improvident, stupid, or arrogant than anyone else. All people suffer from these problems, poor and non-poor alike. But only the non-poor can afford to indulge in these behaviors. “People so close to the edge cannot afford laziness or stupidity. They have to work and work hard, whenever and however they can. Many of the lazy and stupid poor are dead” (Chambers 1983, 107).

 Location: 2,658

The poor are often women, and the poverty of women is both a special concern and a special opportunity. These UN statistics are now widely known: women perform two-thirds of the world's work, earn one-tenth of the world's income, are two-thirds of the world's illiterate, and own less than one-hundredth of the world's property (Williams and Mwau 1994, 100).

 Location: 2,706

The majority of the household are women, the very young, and the very old.

Note: Why?

 Location: 2,711

Spiritual poverty: With apologies to Chambers, I add this category in the interest of the holistic Christian perspective we are trying to develop.

 Location: 2,721

First, they are subject to social conventions such as dowry, bride price, feast days, weddings, and funerals. While these are examples of the importance of celebration and ritual, these social requirements may also deplete the assets of the poor by creating a permanent demand for moneylenders, whose usurious rates ensure permanent poverty. We must note that religious leaders often collude at this point by making such conventions part of religious life.

 Location: 2,727

Fourth, there are unproductive expenditures for things like drink, drugs, unproductive assets (like radios, shoes, or clothes), and poor business investments. Finally, there is the exploitation that takes advantage of vulnerability. Exorbitant interest rates, trickery, coercion, intimidation, and blackmail are used by the powerful (often the non-poor in poor communities) to take what little a poor household has—its assets and even its labor.

 Location: 2,736

Second, robbery. Local police, politicians, and landowners use deception, blackmail, and violence to rob the poor who, in turn, lack recourse to justice, “since they do not know the law, cannot afford legal help and fear to offend the patrons on whom they depend” (1983, 133).

 Location: 2,741

One important feature is missing from Chambers's analysis of poverty: the impact of spiritual poverty. Each of the elements of his poverty trap has a spiritual dimension.

 Location: 2,754

Friedmann focuses on the powerlessness of the poor and defines poverty as lack of access to social power.

 Location: 2,781

Friedmann's understanding of poverty alludes to, but does not develop the spiritual dimension of life. There is no explanation for why social systems exclude the poor and become self-serving. A spiritual dimension is needed to account for the fact that social institutions frequently frustrate even the best and most noble intentions of the people who inhabit and lead them. Without a theology of principalities and powers, it is unclear why good people cannot make social institutions do what they were set up to do. Furthermore, there is no means to account for the destructive behaviors and poor choices of both the poor and the non-poor, nor for the fact that the poor often exploit each other.

 Location: 2,823

Jayakumar Christian, a long-time Indian practitioner and World Vision colleague, codified his development experience in his Ph.D. thesis (1994) at Fuller Theological Seminary and his important book God of the Empty Handed (1999). Christian builds on Chambers and Friedmann while adding a spiritual dimension to his understanding poverty.

 Location: 2,842

Citing the “eternal yesterday”' as the justification for influencing the “eternal tomorrow” of the poor. “It has always been this way.”

 Location: 2,863

Salvian, in the fifth century, wrote: “They [the poor] give themselves to the upper classes in return for care and protection. They make themselves captives of the rich, as it were, passing over into their jurisdiction and dependence” (in oden 1986, 151). It took forty years to get the experience of Egyptian slavery out of the collective mind of Israel before Israel could be come a people and a nation. This is an expression of what Christian calls the marred identity of the poor (more on this shortly).

 Location: 2,880

In another example of a worldview supporting oppressive social relationships, members of the Brahmin caste are taught by their Hindu tradition that they were made from the head of God and so are supposed to rule. The harijan are taught that they were made from the lower parts of god and thus are inferior by nature. This is not just a problem for a Hindu context. Every culture, including those of the West, has beliefs that disempower people, discourage change, and label oppressive relationships as sacrosanct and ordained.

 Location: 2,927

As Christian stated in a telephone interview in 1997, “Poverty is the world telling the poor that they are god-forsaken.” Figure 4-8: The disempowering themes in the Hindu belief system. (Adapted from Christian 1994, 241)

 Location: 2,930

Sitting at a campfire in the Kalahari Desert, I heard a San woman say, in response to hearing the news that the Son of God had died for her sins, that she could believe that God would let his Son die for a white man, and that maybe she could believe that God might let his Son die for a black man, but she could never accept the idea that God would let his Son die for a San woman. This is spiritual and psychological poverty of the deepest kind, the root of fatalism.

 Location: 2,934

One final note. Christian's framework also provides a way of understanding what John Dilulio of Princeton University calls “moral poverty.” In his studies of violent youth in American inner cities, Dilulio describes “the super-predators,” teenagers who will kill without thought or remorse simply because they are inconvenienced. Dilulio says that moral poverty is what you get when people grow up without loving, capable, responsible parents who teach you right from wrong…who habituate you to feel joy at other's joy, pain at other's pain, happiness when you do right, remorse when you do wrong…. Poverty is growing up surrounded by deviant, delinquent and criminal adults. (1995, 25) Figure 4-9: The all-encompassing web of lies. (Developed from Christian 1994, 264)

 Location: 2,946

When the poor accept their marred identity and their distorted sense of vocation as normative and immutable, their poverty is complete. As one's freedom diminishes, so does one's hope. The absence of freedom and hope erodes the human spirit. This is permanent unless this issue is addressed and the poor are helped to recover their identity as children of God, made in God's image.

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Ravi Jayakaran, an Indian expert in the use of the Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) methodology and a former colleague of Robert Chambers, describes poverty as a lack of the freedom to grow (1996, 14).

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Echoing Luke 2:52, Jayakaran pictures the poor wrapped in a series of restrictions and limitations in four areas of life: physical, mental, social, and spiritual (see Figure 4-10). Figure 4-10: Poverty as a lack of freedom to grow. (After Jayakaran 1996, 14)

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Jayakaran adds to our understanding of poverty in two important ways. First, he locates the causes of poverty in people, not in concepts or abstractions. This is important and is frequently forgotten. It is easy to blame greed, systems, the market, corruption, and culture, but these are abstractions and cannot be directly changed. People—the poor and the non-poor—have to change.

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We have looked at poverty as deficit, as entanglement, as lack of access to social power, as diminished personal agency, as disempowerment and as lack of freedom to grow.

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We can conclude that poverty is a complicated social issue involving all areas of life—physical, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual.

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Having said this, I add a word of caution. I doubt there is or ever will be a unified theory of poverty.

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The simple chart in Figure 4-11 illustrates the point. Figure 4-11: How cause shapes response.

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If care is not taken to understand our unwitting biases, our understanding of the causes of poverty tends to be an outworking of our place in the social system, our education, our culture, and our personality.

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There has been a recent addition to the physical causes of poverty offered by Jared Diamond, a physiologist with a background in linguistics, archeology, and ecology (Diamond 1997). Diamond looks not just at the biology of humans, but at the biology that surrounds humans. He is looking for an alternative to the kind of social Darwinism that explains the world map of development by implying that some ethnic groups are better than others. Diamond argues that geography, the quality of land, climate, and native plant species; guns and capital, which allow exploration and domination; and germs, carried by the urbanized and now immune explorers, hold more explanatory power for economic, political, and cultural progress, than the claim of superior racial characteristics.

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“There are large-scale social practices and a whole system of social roles, often firmly approved by the members of society generally that cause or perpetuate injustice and misery” (Wolterstorff 1983, 24).

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As an example, the Voices of the Poor study learned that the poor identified lack of physical safety and security (overt violence) as a major factor in their poverty.

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In other words, the rituals, explanatory narratives, art, the media, and social institutions act together in communicating the nature of social roles and the correct behavior that accompanies them. For example, the billboard advertising sugar in Brazil has a smiling white woman holding a bag of sugar against a backdrop of picturesque sugarcane fields with people of color working in them. The underlying message about roles and function is clear.

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(see Figure 4-14). Figure 4-14: The dynamics of oppression and marred identity. (Synthesis of Christian and Cudd)

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Some of the causes of poverty have to do with the mental condition of the poor. At the simplest level it is obvious that poverty is caused in part by lack of knowledge and technical information. Poor nutrition during important early childhood years means permanent diminished capacity for learning. The existence of debilitated mental states as the result of poor nutrition, illness, alcohol, or drugs also creates and sustains poverty. But we need to go deeper in understanding the mental causes of poverty.

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“Han can be described as internalized collective memory of victims generated by patriarchal tyranny, racial discrimination, economic exploitation, ethnic cleansing, massacre, foreign occupation, state-sponsored terrorism and unjust war” (Park 2004, 15). Han and marred identity seem deeply related.

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Examining the causes of poverty in an area development program, the view of the community differed considerably from the view of World Vision staff (see Figure 4-15). Figure 4-15: Community vs. staff views.

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In every case the community blamed itself for its poverty, having internalized the very descriptors of the poor that Chambers warns development workers to avoid (Chambers 1983, 107).

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Janoff-Bulman argues that human beings, at least in the West, make three assumptions about themselves. First, we are good, capable, and moral; we have worth or value (1992, 11). Second, the world is more good than bad, and other people are basically good, kind, helpful, and caring; the world is or is supposed to be benevolent (1992, 6). Finally, people tend to get what they deserve, so they will act accordingly; the world is basically just (1992, 9).

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“learned helplessness”

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I have already pointed out how Chambers, Friedmann, and Prilleltensky largely ignore the impact of the spiritual world, shamans, and witchcraft and their very significant contribution to making and keeping people poor.

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Jayakaran actually names the spiritual as a cause of poverty. This is the reason I have adopted his framework for this section on the causes of poverty.

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So, what can we say about poverty and its causes at the end of this review of major contributors to the conversation? First, poverty is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. There are no simple answers. Second, understanding poverty requires that we be multidisciplinary; we need the tools of anthropology, sociology, social and community psychology, spiritual discernment, and theology, all nicely integrated. Third, the works of Chambers, Friedmann, Prilleltensky, Christian, and Jayakaran need to be seen as complementary views, each adding something to the other.

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This is the point of departure: 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.

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For the Christian, the biblical story provides an unambiguous answer. Sin is what distorts these relationships. Sin is the root of deception, distortion, and domination. When God is on the sidelines or written out of our story, we do not treat each other well.

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The non-poor are socialized into their dominant role through mythic stories, narratives, symbols, and rituals that make their position of power make sense, even seem ethically defensible.

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A partial list of Wink's delusional assumptions includes:   •  The need to prevent social chaos requires that some should dominate others. •  Men are better at being dominant than women; some races are more naturally suited to dominate others. •  A valued end justifies any means. •  Violence is redemptive; it is the only language enemies understand. •  Ruling or managing is the most important social function. •  Rulers and managers are entitled to extra privileges and wealth. •  Those with the greatest military strength, the most advanced technology, the biggest markets, and the most wealth are the ones who will and should survive. •  Production of wealth is more important than production of healthy, normal people and sound human relationships. •  Property is sacred and property ownership is an absolute right. •  Institutions are more important than people. •  God, if there is a God, is the protector and patron of the powerful. (Wink 1992, 95)

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Man cannot live without bread. But, man must not live by this essential bread alone. Bread-alone, shelter-alone, clothing-alone, income-alone, all these alones damage man's quality of life.

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The idea of too much or too little being two sides of the same problem reminds us of Proverbs 30:8-9:   Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, “Who is the LORD?” Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.

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The poverty of the non-poor is fundamentally relational and caused by sin.

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

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The decline in the numbers of poor people in China, India, and Brazil has been dramatic. Yet improving conditions are not enough to support the claim that modernity alone will save the poor.

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The development practitioner must understand that the fundamental claim of capitalism, globalization, science, and technology is a lie: they cannot save. Saving is not within their power. Economic growth, modern medicine, agriculture, water development, and the technologies that support them are tools, provisions of a good God. We must use them sensitively and appropriately. They can enhance life and make people more productive. But they do not save. “The unshakable hope the 1960s placed in development and freedom and expressed in the liberation projects of the 1970s has evaporated…. Latin America and the world…need to rethink…to reinvent hope on a different foundation” (Parker 1996, 248).

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There is one other possible source of salvation that needs to be debunked, lest we do harm unwittingly. It is understandable that the poor may believe that the development worker or the development agency will be the one who saves. After all, we come in power with four-wheel drive vehicles, money, technology, and technical knowledge. We seem to understand why things are as they are and how to change them. Helping the poor set aside this perception is a significant methodological challenge for the development worker. I will come back to this important issue in the chapter on development practice.

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And so it goes—differing views of poverty drive us to differing approaches to transformation. Figure 5-1: Transformation from what? To what?

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systems. Korten's prophetic call is to move to his fourth level—promoting people's

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Sen's central assertion is that development is less about increasing wealth, providing technical knowledge, and modernization, and more about increasing human freedom or agency in ways that allow people to pursue those ends that they deem important and valuable to them.

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Christian is attempting to fill in the spiritual blind spot in a broad and holistic way, and by so doing make their proposals more complete. Without addressing the web of lies, it is hard to see how any development process can be sustained.

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Therefore, the community and everyone in it are facing a choice (see Figure 6-1). Figure 6-1: Development in the context of the biblical story.

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For example, World Vision in the Philippines, a Catholic country with a strong renewal movement emphasizing personal renewal and lay Bible reading, found that poor communities gravitated toward the biblical metaphor of Isaiah 65 as a way of visualizing the future that they believe God intends for them:   •  A place of joy; there is no weeping. •  Children do not die. People live full lives. •  People build homes and live in them. •  People enjoy the product of their own labor. •  The community is restored and harmonious. •  The irreconcilable live in peace. •  God is in their midst, answering them before they call.

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People, not money or programs, transform their world. Figure 6-2: Identity and vocation for the poor and non-poor.

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The central relationship in need of restoration is one's relationship with the triune God, the God of the Bible. The good news is that God desires this restoration and has already taken the step necessary for this relationship to be restored.

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people are seeking God, many other good things will follow and become possible. if they are not, the horizons of change are more limited and difficult (see Figure 6-3). Figure 6-3: Transformed relationships.

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In summary, to move toward a better human future we must encourage and develop relationships that work for the well-being of all, relationships that are just, peaceful, and harmonious. This is the heart and spirit of shalom and the only way leading toward abundant life for all. Thus transformational development that enhances life works to promote relationships that work as well as they can in a world of fallen people. Life and relationships are inseparable. “Development should aim at a blessed life, a life at peace with itself, others, the environment and with God” (Musopole 1997, 3).

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The second caution is that the ultimate source of sustainable life is not ours to control. It is God through Christ who sustains life. Psalm 104 reminds us of God's active role in making springs, giving drink, causing grass to grow, and “bringing forth food from the earth: wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread that sustains his heart” (Ps 104:14-16). Most communities are already sustainable in some manner because God has been and is at work through them.

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For centuries, contemplatives have opened their day with the prayer, “Thank you, O God, for waking me this morning, you didn't have to.” Fortunately, most poor communities in the South believe this more deeply than most of us do in the West.

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If the church is to lead at all, it is in serving; in applying the creative energies released in Christ towards the stewardship of creation and the bringing of fallen structures closer to God's original purposes. (Maggay 1994, 72)

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Too often development workers unwittingly assume that their story is a better story; after all, they know how to do sustainable agriculture and understand maternal child health. it is a difficult challenge to lay down our own story and not pick it up again until the poor ask us to do so (see Figure 7-1). Figure 7-1: Convergence of stories.

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The middle level of the worldview, while still spiritual and unseen, is the world of folk religion. There is a folk version of everything—folk Islam, folk Buddhism, and even folk Christianity.

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Thailand, fresh from a seminary in Japan. He describes the angry response of a Thai woman to his conversation about the gospel: “She was annoyed at me for looking at her in my own terms. She felt that she was only an object of my religious conquest. I had a message for her, but I did not think of the possibility that she might have a message for me” (Koyama 1974, 90).

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effort to restore a better sense of identity. if we agree that there are already resources within the community, then participation is the logical means by which this knowledge can be discovered and part of the development process. if we have the humility to know that we do not know enough to do someone else's development for them, then seeking local participation is the only safeguard against our doing unwitting damage. By any measure, local participation is a critical success factor for transformational development.

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The following guidelines for effective participation are adapted from a set proposed by Sam Voorhies (1996, 129-35):   •  Participation begins at the beginning, with the community's story and analysis. •  Start small, in a manner that the community can manage largely on its own. •  Use a process or learning approach, not a blueprint. Help the community learn how to learn. •  Encourage the community to mobilize its own resources. Get community members to invest. •  Encourage community members to run the program and experience the joy of their successes and learn from their mistakes. •  Build capacity. Participation that empowers needs to be learned; help community members succeed. •  Invest in organizing; help them find new ways of working together. •  Have a bias toward peace. Participation means power, and power tends to divide. Be very inclusive. •  Communicate, communicate, communicate.

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A word of caution has emerged from recent studies on the effectiveness and even legitimacy of participation as empowerment. Sometimes participation finds expression as a ritualistic charade that hides the demand for rapid assessment and program design (Cooke and Kothari 2001).

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In addition, we must be careful not to take an overly romantic view of participation; that is, that the poor are always right and their views should always trump those of an outsider.

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When local people assert that girls going to school is not a priority or that female genital mutilation is a necessary rite of passage, we are hard pressed to be supportive.

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Sadly, too many Christians, hearts broken by the suffering of the poor, simply rush out to help. While simple charity is always in order, a desire to extend one's efforts to transformational development uncovers a serious flaw. Wishing to do well is not the same as being competent to do well.

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Kreef identifies our transformational frontiers by comparing the seven deadly sins with the qualities Jesus celebrates in the Sermon on the Mount (see Figure 7–6). Figure 7-6: The transformational frontiers inside us. (Based on Kreef 1986)

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Charles Elliot has devoted considerable effort to helping us understand this kind of prayer. in Praying the Kingdom he examines the role of prayer in the emergence of the kingdom of God in the world and then provides a series of meditation exercises from the Old and New Testaments that help the practitioner bring praying for the kingdom to the real world of working with the poor (Elliot 1985).

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Searching for a balance between dedication and being driven is what Reinhold Niebuhr was trying to describe in his well-known Serenity Prayer, the prayer that every holistic practitioner must keep close to his or her heart: God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to         know the difference: Living one day at a time, accepting hardship as the pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that you will make all things right, if I surrender to your will, so that, I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with you forever in the next.

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Every development organization has a framework for the design, monitoring, and evaluation (DME) of a development program.

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This thinking is organized in a Logical Framework (Log Frame).

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To build a school, use a Log Frame. To transform the way a poor community functions as a social system, we need a different way of working.

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After all, in the prophetic literature of the Bible, we learn that while the rulers of israel were feeling good about the size, success, and influence of the nation of israel, God viewed the lack of well-being of the widow, orphan, and alien as evidence of false worship (is 1:4, 16–17; 2:8; 3:13; 58:6; Ez 22:12). God's focus was on the treatment of the poor as the evidence of Israel's well-being.

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Community organizing emerged in the 1960s in Chicago as Saul Alinsky searched for tools to empower poor people in the inner city to take an active role in their own transformation.

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Any practitioner would be well advised to follow the work of the human capabilities network closely. Figure 8-11: PLA toolkit. (Adapted from Jayakaran 1996)

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The Sternins called this the Positive Deviance (PD) approach.

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Rogers discovered that in any community there are always a small number of people whom he called “early adopters”; they will try almost anything new. The communication challenge is to move this innovation on to the rest of the community. Rogers

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Managing change is a complicated process (2003, 11–21). Figure 8-14: Diffusion of innovation in communities. (Adapted from Rogers 2003,

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In another example, when inhabitants of an Indian village were asked to brainstorm together on the things they would most like to change, they kept coming back to the importance of karma or fate. When asked what kinds of things influenced fate, they mentioned water, education, hard work, land, and money. Normally, a PLA exercise would end at this point, and the conversation would shift to helping the community decide how it wanted to improve these areas of material life. Considering the holistic nature of the local worldview, however, another question was asked: What influences these areas of your life? The answers listed the names of local gods and their association with various temples. In the villagers' worldview there are spiritual forces behind the material changes that change one's karma. If the development practitioner does not share and seek this view, the PLA exercise too often ends before the full story is told.

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PLA Notes. Electronic newsletter available on the planotes.org website.

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Pascale, Richard T., Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin. 2010. The Power of Positive Deviance: How Improbable Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems. Boston: Harvard Business. The final section contains a basic field guide to the use of the Positive Deviance approach.

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Positive Deviance Initiative. http://www.positivedeviance.org.

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This chapter explores monitoring, evaluating, and reflecting as key tools for learning our way to a better future.

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The bottom line is that we have to learn our way toward transformation.

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In The White Man's Burden William Easterly insists on moving monitoring and evaluation to the center of the development stage. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, Easterly is not convinced that we actually know what makes for a successful development effort. He calls for shifting the strategic question from How do we get more development aid and projects?

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Figure 9-3: Comparing conventional and participatory evaluation. (Narayan 1993)

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Figure 9-5: Values moving toward the kingdom.

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Figure 9-7: One approach to holistic evaluation. (Adapted from Christian 1998b)

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Figure 9-8: Transformational Development Indicators. (Adapted from World Vision International 2003)

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We need to be quiet and listen in the midst of all the information we have gathered to see if God has anything so say, if there is anything in particular to which God might want to call our attention. We need to immerse our work of development and evaluation in a covering of prayer that asks that we may have eyes to see and ears to hear. We need a stance that is open to God leading us to the information and conclusions that God deems to be important. We need to use the Bible, as the living word of God, in our monitoring, evaluating, and reflecting. What might we hear from the word that is relevant to determining what change really matters?

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The bottom line is that we need to be concerned about who gets worshiped at the end of the development program. Jayakumar Christian reminds us that whatever we put at the center of the program during its lifetime will tend to be what the community worships in the end (1998b).

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The idea of living and doing development in a way that evokes questions to which the gospel is the answer addresses the second of my twin challenges for Christian witness in the context of transformational development. When water is found in the desert, when children no longer die, when water no longer makes people sick, something has happened that needs an explanation. When trained professionals live in poor villages and everyone there knows they could be making more money and their children could go to better schools in the city, this odd behavior provokes a question. The explanation is the gospel. The answer to the question Who witnesses? is that development facilitators do through the life that they lead, how they treat the poor, and how they promote transformational development.

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This avoids Tillich's complaint that “it is wrong to throw answers, like stones, at the heads of those who haven't even asked a question.”

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When we stand outside the text and look into it as a resource from which we pick and choose, we are putting ourselves above the text. This stance is exemplified both by historical criticism and by those who favor proof-texting as a tool of persuasion.

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In using the Bible in the communities, World Vision Philippines operates under the following assumptions:   •  God is already at work in the community. •  Members of the community have accumulated a great deal of wisdom about all areas of life, including spiritual perspectives on life. •  The community is solely responsible for its own spiritual pilgrimage. •  People in community are capable of making their own application of spiritual truth to their local situation. •  The local churches have the major responsibility for contributing to the spiritual nurture of the community and hence Scripture Search is non-proselytizing.

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The Seven Steps approach has a Bible-to-life orientation and is an adaptation of an ancient approach to praying the scriptures called Lectio Divina. In the first centuries of the Christian church the Bible was experienced as the spoken word in four movements: reading aloud, meditation (reflection), prayer, and contemplation (God's presence beyond the words).

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McIlwain decided to resequence the Bible chronologically so that it could be told as an epic story, beginning with creation in Genesis and ending with the second coming of Christ in Revelation. The result is a chronological teaching outline that tells the whole salvation story so that it builds a foundation on which a person, who has never heard ofJesus or of Israel or been to a city, can say with understanding, “Yes, I believe.” McIlwain understood that it is the whole of our story as Christians that reveals the character and activity of the God of the Bible in human history. “The story of Christ begins in the first verse in Genesis” (McIlwain 1991, 32). If telling the whole biblical story is foundational to understanding the Jesus story and making an informed faith decision, no one should be invited to make such a decision until he or she has heard the whole story. In this sense, discipleship begins before the evangelistic act itself.

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When women believe the gospel in Colombia, the way they act and witness leads to the erosion of the machismo culture of the men. This means less drinking and womanizing, which in turn means more surplus cash. The women invest this surplus in micro-enterprise, and the household income increases (Brusco 1986). This is transformational development at its best; we cannot tell where the spiritual and material change begin and end.

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Governments in the West are worried about Christians being involved in development because they are afraid Christians will use their aid as a tool to encourage people to change their faith. To use aid to promote a particular religion is not appropriate, they say. And, of course, they are right. Any Christian would agree.