Thuso Siziba was one of the lucky ones. He had a job, to begin with. Forty percent of Zimbabweans don't. But Thuso earned enough to eat one good meal a day, in a country where that isn't to be taken for granted. He knew almost as many languages (three) as he had shirts (four). He had severe problems with his eyes but no money for treatment.

Thuso was my partner in ministry in Masvingo, Zimbabwe. Poverty such as he and countless others experience is slow, grinding, and pervasive, wearing ruthlessly on the societies over which it lords. The numbers are telling: two million people in Africa alone die of AIDS each year; 33,000 children die every day from largely preventable diseases; between 1943 and 1992 an estimated 149 major wars plagued our world, the majority of which took place in developing countries. But the pain of poverty runs far deeper than numbers can measure.

In spite of the vast need, donor fatigue has forced international organizations and U.S. government initiatives to operate with continually shrinking budgets. Globally, the World Bank reported that official development finance dropped an astonishing 29 percent between 1990 and 1996. Nationally, the 1999 U.S. Census Bureau indicates that between 1995 and 1997, U.S. foreign aid for economic assistance was reduced by 19 percent.

In the face of these trends, evangelical development efforts have grown steadily, and their performance has not gone unnoticed. USAID has been increasingly willing to fund organizations such as World Vision, Opportunity International, and World Relief, accounting for as much as 40 percent of their annual budgets. Indeed, evangelicals seem poised to help fill the emerging development gap in a great and mighty way. But do they have a strategy? A solution? If so, is it any different from the World Bank's?

The evangelical community is concerned first and foremost with spreading the gospel of Christ, as it should be, for the Christian message alleviates spiritual poverty. But poverty cannot be compartmentalized. Often the best way to address spiritual poverty is to do so in tandem with more visible poverty areas.

If evangelicals accept the challenges of material and political poverty through out the world as a Christian responsibility—indeed, as an opportunity to exercise love—then how are they measuring up to this challenge? To be honest, the evidence is mixed. On the plus side, centuries of missions experience have resulted in a range of effective development approaches that offer great potential for development agencies in general, secular as well as religion-based. On the minus side, evangelicals need to broaden their vision and make their organizations more relevant to the global demands of the twenty-first century. But we begin with what evangelicals do well with respect to development: reconciliation, leadership training, and incarnational ministry.

Evangelical Strengths

In the early 1990s South Africa was at the boiling point. Political violence and human-rights abuses were rife, and it was far from certain whether the imminent elections would bring celebration or bloodshed. One evangelical group, African Enterprise, helped to tip the scales toward peace by providing reconciliation exercises.

African Enterprise took leaders from both sides of the conflict to secluded, relaxed environments and asked them to enter into dialogue. The retreats in variably began in a relationally frigid atmosphere, but as the room thawed, the participants were able to achieve the first step of reconciliation: an honest recognition of the problem. The dialogue allowed personal stories of injustice to emerge, and the starkly one-sided views each had brought to the retreat gradually became more balanced. At times the shift of view was emotionally painful. When a white politician appeared skeptical of a black counterpart's story of abuse, for in stance, the victim stood up, took off his shirt, and showed the deep scars across his back. The white politician could no longer deny that evil had been done; it had a human face.

But this was only the beginning. The evangelical sponsors knew that repentance must follow a right understanding of the conflict. If the truth that is uncovered brings shame to those most responsible for the problems, they may try to find new ways to hide their crimes rather than repent. Such a reaction in these retreats would have seriously jeopardized their outcome, as it would have hindered the third aspect of the reconciliation process: forgiveness. Thus, the sponsors led participants to offer humble repentance, opening the door for a more natural and authentic proclamation of forgiveness.

More natural—but still not at all easy. For while forgiveness calls for the perpetrator to take the intensely vulnerable position of repenting, the victim is asked to do no less than follow Christ's example and, however deep the scars may have been, to let go of all thoughts of revenge and retribution. Even more than this, the highest order of reconciliation calls upon both parties to restore a fully functional relationship in all its being.

African Enterprise achieved a high degree of success, contributing to peaceful elections in a way secular development agencies could not. Words such as repentance and forgiveness are theological at their core, and Christian agencies tend to be the ones most comfortable in applying them to particular situations.

A second evangelical development strategy is leadership training. Christian NGOs, continent-wide evangelical associations, and other Christian organizations increasingly rely on indigenous leaders to build up the church. And they do so with arguably more dedication and en during results than most World Bank or government training programs. How are the differences accounted for, and what can others learn from this faith-centered approach?

The evangelical strategy is to lift leaders out of their communities and put them through an intensive training program. Numerous Bible institutes and mission organizations offer programs that vary in time and scope, but always include some form of biblical education. Other areas of study often include conflict resolution, meeting procedure, communication, public speaking, decision-making skills, time management, negotiation skills, listening skills, problem solving, goal-setting, and action-planning.

In following this format, evangelicals touch on a number of leadership elements that are simply missing in standard secular or World Bank efforts. The most obvious of these is the moral dimension. A story is told of secular development workers facilitating a leadership seminar in the Philippines. Much to the chagrin of these workers, the group insisted that each day begin with Scripture reading. But the facilitators gradually began to realize that the devotional time somehow augmented their work during the rest of the day. They learned that people long to attach spiritual meaning to what they do, a fact which is central to all evangelical endeavors.

Furthermore, evangelical training programs bring together people who are of like mind, with the conscious aim of creating a community. A unity is fostered among the fellow students as they study, eat, and sleep together that does not die at the commencement ceremony. Rather, tremendous spiritual and psychological value is derived from the awareness that there are others out there working for the same cause and against the same obstacles, even if they are not working side by side.

A mark of evangelical success is that the students can be trusted to return to their communities and take up their posts without oversight. Their autonomy helps to instill a true sense of ownership both within themselves and with in the people they serve. The result is often a growing church or an increasingly effective organization.

Obviously, secular developers are not going to train pastors. But with slight modification, this strategy could be used for any community leaders, including teachers, government extension workers, and even NGO personnel. Morally infused training can also allow local leaders to achieve this kind of ownership and motivation in areas other than faith, including agriculture, managing personal finances, and basic hygiene habits.

A third effective development technique employed by evangelicals is the incarnational strategy. This approach is modeled after the ministry of Christ, who instead of reaching out to us from on high, "took upon him the form of a man," and in doing so made his message infinitely more understandable to those he was trying to reach. Bruce Olson, a missionary to indigenous tribes in South America, provides an excellent illustration of how evangelicals can effectively employ the same strategy.

Olson's call was to the Motilone tribe in Colombia, a group that was not receptive to outsiders. After narrowly escaping martyrdom upon his arrival, Olson settled into the Motilone community and spent the next several years learning their tonal language (never before translated). He came to understand their value system, their myths, their social structure, even their dietary patterns, and integrated himself into the Motilone way of life. Olson's patience and efforts at integration eventually allowed him to act as a catalyst for significant development. Before he left, the Motilones had made significant advances in health care and literacy, and the entire tribe had gone through a conversion experience.

The evangelical approach stands in contrast to that of many secular development workers, who do not actually enter into the indigenous culture. Rather, the career of the individual is invested in development while he continues to live a western lifestyle and maintain a social circle of other expatriates. There are exceptions to the rule. Though they use secular terms, Peace Corps volunteers also employ the incarnational strategy in the work that they do. It has, however, been standard mission and development methodology for centuries, and when the Peace Corps was being shaped in its early years the founders consulted certain Christian groups who were living and working with the poor abroad.

Strategic Shortcomings

Evangelicals clearly have valuable contributions to make in the development arena. But they must also examine their weaknesses. Many evangelicals in the trenches of missions and development work—especially but not only younger Christians—believe that evangelicals fall far short of the mark in a number of development areas.

Many of these shortcomings can be linked to one common cause: fear of being co-opted by agendas seen as antithetical to Christian commitments. Often, secular development agencies will advocate policies that run counter to evangelical beliefs, and so potentially productive partnerships must be forgone. But in passing up these partnerships, evangelicals take on the moral responsibility of establishing their own response to these issues. Two areas in which they have not yet provided a satisfactory alternative response include gender issues and serving as a moral voice in our globalized world.

First, evangelicals have by and large not heard the cry of the downtrodden when it has come from women. The campaign for women's rights in the developing world is often associated with the pro-abortion, anti-family movement sponsored by secularized women's groups in the West. In response, evangelicals too often either merely react against this movement (without providing a Christian alternative, perhaps reframing the issue without the language of "rights," as Stanley Hauerwas and others have urged) or simply ignore the issue altogether.

Evangelicals must first recognize the terrible condition in which most poor women currently find themselves, from the very beginning of life. Because boys are valued more highly than girls in many developing countries, the girls in the family go hungry when resources are short. In Latin America, for instance, 31 percent of female children are underweight, compared to 17 percent of their male counterparts. Tens of millions of female infants—no one knows exactly how many—have been aborted or abandoned in Asia in the last decade alone, simply because of their gender. According to noted development ethicist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the problem is so extensive that men now significantly outnumber women, especially in China. Even if females live to adulthood, their situation is bleak. The UN estimates that of the 1.3 billion people currently living on less than one dollar a day, 70 percent are women.

The degradation of women leaves the family unit in disarray—a problem to which evangelicals should be particularly sensitive. Women often must care for children without the help of the father. If they are uneducated, they are both more likely to have families too large for their means and less able to provide their children with even basic care. Statistics show that an in crease of even one year of female primary education is associated with a significant drop both in the infant mortality rate and in the total fertility.

It is clear, then, that evangelicals need at the very least to be active advocates and practitioners of female education and improved women's health care. If a girl is educated in basic literacy and health, then when she becomes a mother, she is going to be able to better care for her children. Sadly, because evangelicals have not more actively pursued even these basic policies, many of the accusations made against them by groups like the World Bank are justified.

Evangelical voices are also conspicuously absent from top-level global development debates. Recent conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Kyoto, and Seattle have created binding treaties between nations and have directly influenced international financial flows earmarked for certain types of development work. The issues debated are often morally charged, and have included global population, the environment, gender, and trade. A variety of actors, including nation states, multi national corporations, and NGOs have been involved. But evangelicals have not had a presence in such forums.

Evangelicals should involve themselves in these debates for several reasons. First, the church has a responsibility to proclaim relevant biblical and moral norms in the public square, which is a distinctly different role from that of an interest group with a specific agenda. The church should bring a moral or redemptive voice into the international political dialogue, while at the same time remaining detached from the political contest.

Finally, evangelicals must be humble about the extent to which they can solve poverty on their own, and realize that further cooperation with others is necessary. The more involved evangelicals are in forming the policies of possible future partners, the more they will be able to agree with the strategies and ideologies they encounter in the field.

Conflicting Priorities

If evangelicals are often crippled by fear of being co-opted by secular agendas, they are also hamstrung by conflicting priorities. This is true especially in the field, where tight budget restrictions discourage innovation. For example, a mission may in principle agree that more emphasis should be put on female education and health care, but when they receive a $500 donation they have to decide how that money will be spent. Should they initiate new programs in these areas, or should they try to maintain a church planting program already in existence?

Two Scripture passages best symbolize the dilemma: the Great Commission and the Sermon on the Mount. The Great Commission is really the bedrock passage of the evangelical community. One of the evangelical movement's defining moments, the Lausanne International Conference on World Evangelization (1974), was devoted to gaining consensus on the precise content of the Evangel, or the Good News of Jesus Christ. There was further discussion concerning the reason the Evangel must be communicated, the appropriate strategies for doing so, and the results that can be expected. To guard against the watering down of the gospel, the Lausanne Covenant explained in no uncertain terms the distinction between socio-political engagement and evangelism. And since that landmark conference, evangelicals have steadfastly maintained their commitment to spreading the Evangel, or following the Great Commission. The global growth of the movement is evidence of the strategy's success.

The other argument, the one more characterized by the Sermon on the Mount, also affirms the centrality of evangelism to the evangelical. But it then reminds evangelicals that they are not called solely to evangelistic minis try. This side of the debate understands evangelism to be that act by which the seeds of Christianity are planted, but asserts that the fruit of conversions al ready made must be more diverse than just further proclamation. Indeed, the participants in the Lausanne Congress recognized that Christian ministry en compasses more than evangelism. Christ himself augmented his evangelistic message with ministries of healing, cleansing, and liberating. Thus, according to the Sermon on the Mount argument, evangelicals today should shape their budgets in ways that are consistent with Christ's example.

Evangelicals naturally approach the needs of people already in the church through holistic ministry. The strategy often changes, however, when they approach non-Christians, as it is difficult to advocate socio-political and economic outreaches to nonbelievers before first introducing them to the life-giving Evangel. Inadvertently, evangelicals have put boundaries on their love for others. They have grasped with clarity their call to further the cause of Christ and his Kingdom; apparently not so clear is how feeding poor Muslim children, say, accomplishes this mission.

We return, in the end, to the needs of Thuso and others like him. They have placed before us both a wonderful opportunity and a great responsibility; may we have the vision and will to rise to the occasion.

Stephen Offutt recently received a master's degree from the John Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and is now living and working in El Salvador.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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