1 of 5

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.

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.

next page... |  1 of 5

share this page