Tearfund and the Quest for Faith-Based Development

Dena Freeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000693270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Institutions & Organizations

This book gives an in-depth analysis of the role of faith in the work of Tearfund, a leading evangelical relief and development NGO that works in over 50 countries worldwide.

The study traces the changing ways that faith has shaped and influenced Tearfund's work over the organisation's 50-year history. It shows how Tearfund has consciously grappled with the role of faith in its work and has invested considerable time and energy in developing an intentionally faith-based approach t relief and development that in several ways is quite different to the approaches of secular relief and development NGOs. The book charts the different perspectives and possibilities that were not taken and the internal discussions about theology, development practices, and humanitarian standards that took place as Tearfund worked out for itself what it meant to be a faith-based relief and development organisation. There is a growing academic literature about religion and development, as well as increasing interest from development ministries of many Northern governments in understanding the role of religion in development and the specific challenges and benefits involved in working with faith-based organisations. However, there are very few studies of actual faith-based organisations and no book-length detailed studies showing how such an organisation operates in practice and how it integrates its faith into its work.

In documenting the story of Tearfund, the book provides important insights into the practice and ethos of faith-based organisations, which will be of interestto other FBOs and to researchers of religion and development.

1 Introduction

This book examines the changing role of faith in Tearfund’s work over 50 years, from its formation in 1968 up to 2018. It is not an ‘authorised history’, recounting stories of heroic work overseas in various projects and programmes in the fashion of Maggie Black’s book about Oxfam (Black 1992), Mark Luetchford and Peter Burns’s book about War on Want (Luetchford and Burns 2003), or indeed Mike Hollow’s earlier book about Tearfund (Hollow 2008). Instead, the aim is more specific – to explore the role of faith in Tearfund’s work and to trace how its identity has changed over the years and how its development, humanitarian relief, and advocacy work has adapted as a result. At the book’s centre is an analysis of Tearfund’s attempt to develop a distinctly Christian faith-based approach to its relief, development, and advocacy work.

During the past 15 years there has been an increase in scholarly work about so-called ‘faith-based organisations’ (FBOs) and particularly about those FBOs which are involved in relief and development activities overseas (‘faith-based development organisations’, FBDOs). While there is now a rather large literature about ‘religion and development’ and ‘faith-based development’, much of it has remained at the level of generality, seeking to delineate differences between FBDOs and secular NGOs, and to make generalised claims about their comparative advantages or disadvantages. However, there is a huge diversity within the category of ‘FBDO’, and the term bundles together hugely different types of organisation – from different faiths and denominations, with different aims and purposes, and in which religion is embedded and operationalised in vastly different ways. Much of the scholarly literature has centred on forming typologies of such organisations with the aim of setting an analytic order and framework with which to understand this vast diversity (e.g. Bradley 2009, Clarke and Ware 2015, Jeavons 1998, Sider and Unruh 2004, Thaut 2009, Tvedt 2006; for a good overview of FBO typologies, see Smith 2017).

What has been sorely missing, however, has been in-depth studies of particular FBDOs – how they operate in practice, how they understand and frame what it is that they do, and how they negotiate the contestations and tensions that occur as they seek to engage with both secular and religious practices and discourses about ‘good change’. While there have been a small number of book-length field-level studies of faith-based development organisations working in particular contexts, such as Bornstein’s study of Protestant NGOs in rural Zimbabwe (Bornstein 2003), Occhipinti’s study of Catholic NGOs in rural northwest Argentina (Occhipinti 2005), and Halvorson’s study of American Lutheran NGOs in Madagascar (Halvorson 2018), there has been no book-length organisational study of a single FBDO. Several scholars have highlighted the need for such work. Elizabeth Ferris has argued that ‘further research is needed on the faith-based organizations themselves, including research on their development and history … in order to deepen our understanding of the ways in which they operate’ (Ferris 2011: 622). Likewise, Jonathan Smith has called for ‘in-depth organizational case studies [that] would add richness to the complex interaction between material and sacred dimensions, and longitudinal studies [that] could reveal how organizations adapt their beliefs and practices over time’ (Smith 2017: 73).

This book seeks to respond to these calls by looking in depth at one particular FBDO, Tearfund, and exploring in some detail the role that faith has played in Tearfund’s work over the years. This role has not been static: it has evolved as it has been influenced by changes in Christian ideas about evangelism and social change, secular theories of development, and mainstream ideas about the role of religion in society, as well as broader socio-political–economic transformations. By tracing this history, we can look inside one particular FBDO and get a deeper sense of how it works in practice and the role of faith in that. And, at the same time, we can begin to understand some of the key elements that differentiate Tearfund from secular NGOs, and indeed from many other Christian FBDOs, and in this way develop a more contextualised understanding of some of the lines of variation between different FBDOs.

Tearfund was chosen for this study as it is the UK’s largest and most influential evangelical development NGO. Evangelical development NGOs have increased in size and number since the 1990s and currently represent the fastest-growing category of FBDOs. It has been estimated that evangelical NGOs account for almost 80 per cent of all US faith-based humanitarian and development agencies (Barnett and Stein 2012: 5, McCleary and Barro 2008). In the UK the numbers are much smaller, but evangelical development NGOs still have a considerable, and growing, presence within the British international humanitarian and development sectors. As the UK’s largest evangelical development NGO, Tearfund occupies a significant position of influence within this growing sector of evangelical relief and development organisations, and among British evangelicals more widely. As such, the story of Tearfund also allows insights about some of the dynamics within the UK evangelical relief and development sector more broadly.

Academic book-length studies of specific NGOs are surprisingly few and far between. There is Forsythe’s study of the Red Cross (Forsythe 2005), Hopgood’s study of Amnesty International (Hopgood 2006), and Redfield’s study of Médecins Sans Frontières (Redfield 2013). These in-depth studies of major humanitarian and human rights NGOs show the value of an approach that combines institutional history and ethnography to give a detailed understanding of how these organisations carry out their work and how this has changed over time as they have grown, institutionalised, and dealt with dilemmas around whether and how they should modify their original mission in order to respond to external changes. The long-term historical view enables a dynamic analysis of the internal moral and political debates that arise as organisations negotiate changes in their fundamental understanding of what they do and why, and the best ways to manifest these changed understandings in their evolving mission, strategy, and practice. To date, there are no similar book-length studies of major development NGOs, or indeed of major FBDOs. This book thus fills an important gap by looking in depth at Tearfund. It is more institutional history than ethnography, focussing less on Tearfund’s internal workplace culture and more on the debates about how best to integrate faith into the various areas of its overseas work as it sought to conceptualise and carry out a distinctly Christian kind of development.

The research for this book was mainly carried out between October 2017 and March 2019 and was based on interviews, ethnography, archival research, and field visits. Over 60 in-depth interviews were carried out with present and past Tearfund staff and a further 15 interviews were conducted with a small selection of partner organisations and other Christian NGOs and mission agencies. The research also draws on 14 interviews with partner organisations carried out by Lydia Powell, a Tearfund research analyst, in March 2018. Transcripts of 34 interviews carried out by Mike Hollow, an independent consultant and former Head of Creative Services at Tearfund, for previous research in 2006, were also drawn upon, and quotes from these interviews are marked in the text with an asterisk (*). Two months of ethnographic research were carried out in Tearfund’s headquarters in Teddington, UK, including attendance at staff prayers, team meetings, new staff inductions, information briefings, and one of the year’s special ‘jubilee days’ of prayer and reflection. In addition, two field trips were made to visit partner projects in Africa and Asia, and insights from a third field trip by Lydia Powell to visit partners in Latin America were also drawn upon. These field trips included visits to projects, interviews with local partner staff at national- and field level, and focus group discussions with beneficiaries. Finally, well over 500 Tearfund project proposals, reports, evaluations, policy papers, strategy documents, and internal memos from over a 50-year period, in both digital and paper archives, were reviewed. While Tearfund allowed and facilitated this research, it should be stressed that this book does not present an official Tearfund perspective and that the analysis and conclusions are very much my own.

Theoretical discussions

The academic literature on religion and development is diverse and interdisciplinary, drawing on scholarship from development studies, international relations, religious studies, sociology, and anthropology. Nonetheless it is possible to discern three interconnected research themes that dominate much of the literature. The first, as mentioned above, is defining and categorising FBOs in order to try to understand their variety and their relation to secular development NGOs. The second focusses on analysing the role of faith in FBDOs and on discerning whether and how FBDOs do development differently from secular development NGOs. And the third looks more broadly at the role of religion in development and asks more general questions about the role of ideas, values, and worldviews in societal change. This book touches on issues across all these three research themes and thus some of the main lines of discussion will be reviewed here.¹

From typologies to historical and contextual analysis

There are literally dozens of different typologies seeking to make sense of the variety of FBOs. Many seek to categorise FBOs according to the degree to which faith affects their activities. Sider and Unruh (2004), for example, suggest that faith-based organisations exist along a spectrum from ‘faith background’, in which the organisation may have a historical tie to a faith tradition and some staff may be motivated by faith, but in which there is no religious content in their activities or programming, through to ‘faith permeated’, where the connection with religious faith is evident at all levels of mission, staffing, governance, programming, and support. Thaut (2009) proposes distinguishing among FBOs according to their ‘theologies of humanitarian engagement’ as evidenced in their mission (how they conceptualise the change they want to bring about), their institutional affiliations (for example, with a particular religious denomination), their staff policies (for example, whether they require staff to sign up to a statement of faith), and where they get their funding from (individual donors or government grants). Paras (2014) seeks to distinguish between those that are ‘proselytising’ and those that are not. And so on and so on.

Typologies such as these seek to provide an analytic framework in which all kinds of FBOs can be placed, including for example places of worship, religious schools, and community centres, as well as small and large NGOs, across the full range of different religions. In attempting to bring together such a wide variety of actors within one framework these typologies necessarily become rather vague and abstract. An alternative approach, I suggest, is to narrow the focus to one particular faith tradition and then to map out some of the different actors through an understanding of their histories, theologies, and objectives. Thus, in seeking to understand Tearfund, this book aims to contextualise the organisation within the setting of Protestant development actors. As will be shown, primarily in Chapter 2 but also throughout the text, there is considerable variety even within this one sector, and an understanding of the missionary past (and present) theological differences between various camps within the broader Protestant church, and the history of the emergence of secular development NGOs is necessary to appreciate the differences and distinctiveness of the various Protestant development actors and therefore to position Tearfund within this field. Thus this book does not discuss FBDOs from Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or other faith traditions, and only mentions Catholicism and Catholic FBDOs in passing. This is not because these actors are not important, or not prolific, but rather because I seek to develop an understanding of a particular FBDO within the fields in which it most often operates and through which it defines and understands itself.

Having narrowed the field of enquiry in this way, it is then instructive to try to locate Tearfund between the secular development sector and the evangelical missionary sector. Some scholars refer to evangelical development NGOs as missionaries (e.g. Hofer 2003, Pelkmans 2009, Hearn 2002), while others see them as a particular kind of development NGO (e.g. Berger 2003, Clarke and Ware 2015). And indeed, it can be difficult, for both staff of Christian FBOs and the scholars who study them, to clearly demarcate the boundaries between ‘mission’ and ‘development’ (Paras 2014, Hovland 2008). A lot of the debate hinges on the definition and understanding of both ‘mission’ and ‘development’, both of which are contested terms with multiple meanings that have changed and evolved over time (Bosch 2011, Rist 1997). The detailed historical analysis in the following pages allows us to understand how Tearfund has positioned itself with regard to these two fields and how it has variously worked to differentiate itself from both mission agencies and secular development NGOs at different points in its history.²

The role of faith in FBDOs

A second research theme seeks to identify and clarify the role of faith in FBDOs. It is undisputed that faith provides a strong motivational force for many people to become involved in projects of charity and ‘betterment’ and is a source of inspiration for many FBDOs. It is also clear that faith can significantly shape the workplace culture of FBDOs, many of which institute times for reflection and devotion and seek to integrate prayer into team and strategy meetings. However, the question that is most pervasive in the literature, and which is much less clear, is whether faith influences the way FBDOs actually carry out relief and development.

Underlying many studies in this strand of research is an interest in religion as a worldview or a set of beliefs, ideas, and values. The guiding question is, how do these different beliefs affect the practice of FBDOs? Scholars in this area are drawn to the presumed potential of FBDOs to offer alternative approaches to development (e.g. Kim 2007, Lunn 2009, Ter Haar 2011, Tyndale 2006). Ter Haar, for example, argues that religious ideas can present ‘a new vision of what development means’ (Ter Haar 2011: 24), while Lunn suggests that religious approaches have the potential to envision a ‘more holistic’ development that takes into account non-economic matters such as emotions and spirituality (Lunn 2009).

However, for many Protestant Christian FBDOs it has not been the case that an ‘alternative vision’ of development has emerged directly from their different beliefs and worldview. Most of them are firmly rooted in secular thinking about development, which they have then sought to combine with some of their religious ideas, practices, and motivations. Thus the role of faith in relief and development work has become a subject of intense and complex discussion within many FBDOs themselves (e.g. Hovland 2012, Lynch and Schwarz 2016, Paras 2014). Far from being immediately apparent, FBDOs are actively and self-consciously thinking about how their faith could or should shape their work. This is certainly the case for Tearfund, and much of this book focusses on these internal debates and discussion as Tearfund has self-consciously sought to integrate faith into its development work.

For many evangelical organisations the major question has been how to combine evangelism and social action. This has been the subject of discussions at large international evangelical conferences and consultations, and FBDOs such as Tearfund, World Vision, and Compassion have played important roles in putting these ideas into practice in their practical work. As this book will show, for many years Tearfund lived with a dichotomy that it carried out both evangelism and social action but for the most part these were two separate activities that were carried out in parallel. It was only from the mid-1990s onwards that it consciously thought about how to combine these two activities into one integrated type of action – a distinctly Christian, faith-based, form of development.

While scholars and FBDOs have been discussing the role of faith-as-worldview, donors, on the other hand, have recently become interested in FBDOs less because of their beliefs and more because of their institutions and networks. In the 1990s and early 2000s a number of national governments began to start thinking about the potential role of religion in development and how they could work with FBOs as development partners. In 1995 the Canadian government developed a policy framework for how it could engage with FBOs. In 2002 a new Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was created within the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and in 2004 USAID started to support faith-based NGOs through its funding schemes. A few years later the Australian government launched its Church Partnership Program in Papua New Guinea. At the same time several European governments began to fund research looking at the existing and potential roles for religion in development. In 2005 the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) funded a £3.5 million research project about ‘Religions and Development’ that was carried out by scholars at the University of Birmingham. In subsequent years further research studies were initiated by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, and others.

These studies highlighted both the potential benefits and the challenges for governments in working with faith-based organisations. While several studies noted a number of downsides of working with faith-based organisations, namely that they sometimes had exclusionary approaches and worked only with people of their own faith, sometimes exacerbated local religious tensions, were often small and unprofessional, and had a tendency to engage in forms of evangelism and proselytism, they also highlighted a number of presumed strengths of FBOs that could nonetheless offer advantages for development interventions. Most importantly, religious organisations were connected in large national and international networks that led from offices in the cities of the North to churches in the smallest and most distant village in the global South. It was this possibility of working through existing grassroots networks of trusted local organisations embedded in local communities that made partnership with FBOs so enticing for DFID and other government donors. Furthermore, in Southern contexts where trust in governments is often low, it seemed likely that many people would be more likely to listen to development messages if they came from local faith leaders.

In other words, these secular government agencies sought to instrumentalise religious institutions and to use their networks to deliver (secular) development services (Jones and Peterson 2011). Thus, despite their newfound interest in working with FBOs, most government donors sought to rigorously s...