Holistic Mission

Wonsuk Ma

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781911372356
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

This book reaffirms that to be true to the bible, to follow the example of Jesus, the church must address the whole person in all their needs. It considers the meaning of the holistic gospel, how it has developed, and implications for the individual Christian, for the local church, for denominations and church groups, for missionary societies, for Christian NGOs, and for theological training. It takes a global, eclectic approach, with 19 writers, church leaders, academics and practitioners and addresses crictally and honestly one of the most exciting, challenging, and important issues facing the church today. To be part of God's Plan for God's People, the church must take holistic mission to the world.

PART D

UNDERLYING ISSUES IN IMPLEMENTING HOLISTIC MISSION

HOLISTIC MISSION: NEW FRONTIERS¹

Bryant L. Myers

The purpose of this chapter is to look briefly at the journey of evangelicals toward an integrated way of thinking about and practicing holistic mission. A look backward is then joined with a look around us today with the intention of sketching out what may be useful frontiers for further action, research, theological reflection and study. This is done in the spirit of recognizing that a new generation of young evangelicals, deeply called to ministries of social action and Christian witness, are emerging all over the world and they need to be encouraged to take over the conversation and extend its frontiers.

Where are We Coming From?

In the 1920s, American evangelicals took a holiday from history when it came to 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 50 years.

In 1952, Carl H. Henry, the seminal conservative evangelical theologian of his era, stirred the waters when he wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Fundamentalism, in which he recalled the evangelical involvement with social issues at home and on the mission field throughout the nineteenth century (Henry 1947). Henry wondered if losing sight of the social side of the gospel of Jesus Christ might have been an unintended consequence of the “battle for the faith” in the 1920s.

It took almost another quarter century before this question was raised again during the emergence of the Lausanne movement and its inaugural meeting in Lausanne in 1974. As the Lausanne Covenant (Stott 1975) – still the most widely accepted contemporary affirmation of evangelical beliefs – was being drafted, some courageous brothers from the south insisted that no statement of evangelical belief could be complete if it did not include a gospel call for action on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. Today we stand indebted to Samuel Escobar, René Padilla and others for reminding evangelicals who we really are.

During the 1980s, a new, but related, disagreement emerged. It was agreed that social action and concerns for justice reflected a biblical understanding of Christian ministry. But were evangelism and social action equally important? Wasn’t evangelism primary?

In the early 1980s, meetings under the Lausanne umbrella were held in Grand Rapids (Nicholls 1986) and at Wheaton College (Sine 1983; Samuel 1987). Discussions ranged over issues relating to justice, social action, eschatology, and the importance of reaching the unreached. Evangelism and social action were described as two sides of the same gospel coin or two wings on the gospel bird.

New questions emerged. Is development – a construct of the west – the right word for evangelicals to use or not? Is holism spelled with a ‘w’ or an ‘h,’ and so on. In the midst of this discussion, Wayne Bragg of the Wheaton Hunger Center introduced a new word: transformation. The gospel was about change – material, social and spiritual change – and the biblical word was transformation. The word stuck.

By the early 1990s, a strong movement of evangelical social action emerged that grew increasingly self-confident. A variety of labels emerged: holistic mission, wholistic development, integral development and transformational development. Evangelical agencies like Food for the Hungry, World Relief, World Vision, World Concern and many others moved forward to the next question: What does transformational development look like in practice? How does one do it well?

During the 1990s, this was the question that evangelical relief and development agencies and practitioners met to talk about. Ted Yamamori, myself, and others organized meetings where practitioners shared case studies in holistic mission. This was done in Africa, Latin America, and Asia; there was also a meeting on holistic ministry in the cities. The World Vision/MARC series on holistic ministry were a result of these ongoing conversations (Yamamori et al., 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998).

Today, the issue of social action or evangelism among evangelicals is largely a historical footnote. Over half of the incoming masters students to the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary in 2007 enrolled to study children-at-risk, international development and urban studies. Allen Hertske has documented the growing engagement of contemporary evangelicals with human rights and advocacy work (Hertzke 2004). Ron Sider has made the cover of Christianity Today. Operation Blessing is an outgrowth of Pat Robertson’s ministry. Campus Crusade has its Global Aid Network (GAiN). Small evangelical missions are simply getting on with transformational development, like Mission Moving Mountains and their discipleship for transformation training programs.

This brief and oversimplified overview of the evangelical conversation on holistic mission sets the stage to examine the new frontiers of thinking about and doing holistic mission in 2010 and beyond. This essay will examine contemporary evangelical social action, its understanding of transformational development, and make some suggestions about what remains to be done. Where are today’s frontiers?

We need to begin by noting what has not happened. No new volumes of case studies have been published in the last ten years. There are very few new books on transformational development. There are very few serious program evaluations that are genuinely holistic. There is very little, if any, serious research by Christian practitioners – very few PhD studies, and almost no academic research into transformational development. There is very little new theological reflection; we are resting on the excellent work done in the 1980s. There is no new ecclesiology, and yet the question of the relationship between the Christian relief and development agency and local churches remains unclear. The bottom line is this: for the last twenty years, evangelical holistic mission activists have acted. They’ve gone out and done transformational development. Doing is good. But there is more to doing than just acting.

Recovering From Modernity

As the conversations of the 1980s came to a close, some of us realized that we had been arguing about evangelism and social action without understanding the root cause of the problem – the pervasive impact of the modern worldview on evangelical theology and practice. Modernity, the long-standing and dominating outcome of the Enlightenment, had distorted our theological conversation. Modernity’s separation of the spiritual from the material was the root of our argument about evangelism or social action (Myers 1998). We realized that if our worldview was genuinely Christian, we would have less trouble with the idea that loving God and loving neighbor are missional outcomes of the same Christian gospel.

The problem was that once we agreed on the gospel validity of both evangelism and social action, we evangelicals stopped working conceptually and theologically for the most part. Yet we lived then, and continue to live now, in a world in which the modern worldview still is the dominant interpretive construct for development theory and practice.

Some will say that the world is post-modern now, so this is old news. In the areas of popular culture, cultural and critical studies and the social sciences, this is true. But in the world of poverty eradication and development, the institutions and the thinking are still modern in nature and practice. From the World Bank to USAID to Action Aid, poverty is still a problem to be solved and the solution is to be found in human ingenuity, generosity, and skilled technical practice.

While this continuing preoccupation with the material is understandable for secular agencies, it is an indictment of us as Christians, whether we are academics or practitioners. Once the false argument about evangelism or social action ended, we should have moved with vigor and diligence to thinking through a genuinely biblical way to frame our theory and especially our practice of transformational development. Many of the frontiers in what follows are actions Christian development folks should have been working on for the last twenty years.

There are at least five specific examples of this unfinished work of recovering from modernity.

First, we need to be more intentional and deliberate in the formation of holistic practitioners. Holism is a state of mind, not a program. Holism is a way of thinking and seeing the world. We need practitioners who have been trained to overcome their captivity to a two-tiered modern worldview, which is a product of their professional education or culture or both. We need practitioners who use the bible and theology, along with their understanding of spirituality, to infuse and shape their transformational development theory and practice. Holistic practitioners must be trained to think theologically about their work and especially their actions – acting theologically is an important skill. We need holistic practitioners who have been enabled to practice a spirituality that strengthens them for the journey.

Second, we need to do a better job at figuring out where local churches fit into the work of transformational development on the ground. For too long, Christian development agencies worked in the material realm – their work did not look all that different from their secular counterparts – while ignoring the local churches on the grounds that churches are not development agencies, but the caretakers of spiritual matters for local Christian souls. This is a false and unhelpful dichotomy that reflects a modern worldview (Myers 2000).

Yet the local churches are the body of Christ, present before agencies come and present long after they leave. We need a new development ecclesiology that helps us understand local churches as being both the caretakers of local Christians, and also as one expression of God’s activity in the form of civil society. In many parts of the world, and in the inner cities of the United States, local churches are often the only functioning civil society there is. Christian agencies must recover from their pride and professionalism and find a way to become part of the Christian community on the ground. Agencies must figure out how to become engaging, supporting and empowering partners of local churches, with each discovering and respecting their respective roles in God’s work of transformation.

Third, we need to recover the Christian account for why development technology is effective. The modern worldview places God in the spiritual realm and technology and science in the realm of the ‘real world’. Technology explains itself by pointing to its effectiveness. This is an echo of the modern, not Christian worldview. When we find water in the desert, there are reasons that are deeper and more Christian than just effective hydrology and soil science. Vaccinations that protect children from disease are illustrations of God’s grace, as well as testimonies to effective science.

We’ve forgotten where the science came from. Part of the science story is that the world was created by an order-making God. We’ve forgotten that the reason we can figure science out in the first place is that we are made in the image of this God, and are hence rational order-recognizing humans, who are thus able to figure out how things work in God’s world.

Before the Enlightenment, God was part of the explanation for technology. We need to recover that story and reclaim it. This will require that theologians leave their quiet, comfortable places and join agencies living with and among the poor. This will require theologians who are willing to admit their former captivity to the modern worldview.

Fourth, we need to create a biblical and theologically informed Christian understanding of macro-development. The stage is currently dominated by the predominantly modern frame of Jeffrey Sachs and his End of Poverty (Sachs 2005), the more post-modern frame of William Easterly and his White ...