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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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For this work Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in development economics.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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).
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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.
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This chapter summarizes the history of American evangelical thinking on poverty and development.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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”
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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.
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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….
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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).
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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.
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We cannot read Satan out of the story and have it make any sense.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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.
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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.
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Where is the periphery today, and what does it mean to say that Jesus can make it the center of power?
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Christ is risen This is the transformation that begets all other transformations.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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The chief actor in the historic mission of the Christian church is the Holy Spirit. He is the director of the whole enterprise.
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We are to see the world as created, fallen, and being redeemed, all at the same time.
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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)
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There are five theological ideas that seem useful for Christians working for transformational development: creation, incarnation, redemption, kingdom of God, and power.
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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.
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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).
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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).
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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.
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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.
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Shalom is the biblical ideal for human well-being or flourishing.
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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).
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Figure 4-1: Christian views of the poor. (Developed from Mouw 1989, 20-34)
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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.
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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).
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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).
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The majority of the household are women, the very young, and the very old.
Note: Why?
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Spiritual poverty: With apologies to Chambers, I add this category in the interest of the holistic Christian perspective we are trying to develop.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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Friedmann focuses on the powerlessness of the poor and defines poverty as lack of access to social power.
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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.
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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.
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Citing the “eternal yesterday”' as the justification for influencing the “eternal tomorrow” of the poor. “It has always been this way.”
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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).
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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)
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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.
