Undivided Witness: Jesus followers, community development, and least-reached communities

INTRODUCTION: EXPLORING A NEW SPACE

MARK GALPIN AND DAVID GREENLEE

EMBODIED LOVE

In 2014 our team started praying about moving into one of the most conservative, least-reached towns in our Central Asian, post-Soviet, Muslim country. Soon, our agency received what we considered to be our ‘Macedonian call’: an invitation from the mayor and leaders of the local association of the blind and visually impaired to engage in water and other projects in this district.

As we moved into the city, our team of expatriate workers, highly trained in community development as well as cultural relevance, experienced a welcoming spirit of hospitality. Local townsfolk told us of supernatural signs they experienced, such as dreams about welcoming us because we would do good things. One of us reached out to the community concerning the situation of children with disabilities. The worker openly prayed with workers of the Muslim partner organisation for a lead on how to find the children. Within minutes, a government social worker entered the room and asked for help in their work.

By 2018 the project was serving 200 families and children with disabilities. The interventions range from basic rehabilitation and production of assistive devices to training parents and social workers on the causes of disabilities. In that training we counter folk beliefs that the children are cursed or punished by God. Speaking about our creation in the image of God opens ways to share stories of Jesus. In turn, several of the women have engaged in Discovery Bible Studies in the last year. I would call what we have here a ‘vibrant group of Jesus seekers’. They are starting to be transformed as they move closer and closer to him and are already transforming their communities by acting out his commandments.

A long-term development worker in Central Asia

People being drawn to Jesus through the changed lives and loving behaviour of Christians is not a 21st-century missiological innovation. Alan Kreider observes that changed lives were the key to growth of the Church in the third and fourth centuries. ‘What the outsiders saw was not their worship. It was their habitus’,¹ the kind of ‘good lives among the pagans’ that caused them to glorify God (1 Pet. 2:12) and recognise that they were Jesus’ disciples (John 13:34–35). Kreider continues:

According to Tertullian, the outsiders looked at the Christians and saw them energetically feeding poor people and burying them, caring for boys and girls who lacked property and parents, and being attentive to aged slaves and prisoners. They interpreted these actions as a ‘work of love.’ And they said ‘Vide, look! How they love one another.’ [Tertullian, Apology 39.7] They did not say ‘Aude, listen to the Christians’ message’; they did not say, ‘Lege, read what they write.’ Hearing and reading were important, and some early Christians worked to communicate in these ways too. But we must not miss the reality: the pagans said look! Christianity’s truth was visible; it was embodied and enacted by its members. It was made tangible, sacramental.²

FOCUS

Much has been learned and many volumes published concerning the planting, formation and growth of churches. This has been accompanied by research into ‘unreached people groups’ and ‘the unevangelised’; many mission agencies have made church planting and evangelism among these groups the focus of their mission goals and strategies.

Community development and the alleviation of poverty and suffering has been a key focus of other organisations, particularly Christian faith-based relief and development agencies. More recently, these themes have been increasingly studied in depth by missiologists with a growing interest in evangelical circles in what Bryant Myers termed ‘transformational development’ in the 1999 first edition of his benchmark work Walking with the Poor.³

In practice, a number of mission organisations focusing on evangelism and church planting among the least reached have included aspects of community development in their work, though often not as a mainstream activity. Meanwhile, those organisations focused on community development have often found that their work with communities leads to people coming to faith in Jesus Christ and, at times, the emergence of fledgling churches. While this has happened in practice, and is a phenomenon familiar to practitioners, rarely have missiologists explored the overlap between these domains. Indeed, often the respective disciplines of church planting and community development have been treated as being in tension or competition with each other rather than as areas of potential fruitful synergy with many principles of good practice in common.

The contributors to this book address this gap by exploring the conceptual and practical intersection between community development, the least reached, and the emergence of vibrant, growing churches or ‘communities of Jesus followers’ that we refer to as the ‘Community Development Least Reached’ (CDLR) space. While the principles we explore overlap with other spaces, our intention is to shed light on an area familiar to some practitioners but left largely untouched in published missiology. One exception is the recent doctoral research by Christian Giordano who examined the relationship between the implementation of development projects by evangelical, Iberoamerican missionaries (that is, from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal) and the emergence of new communities of Jesus followers in Muslim contexts in North Africa, Senegal, and Uzbekistan.⁴

The unexplored CDLR space

DEFINITIONS

Before going further it is important that we briefly define the three phrases we use to describe the focus of the ‘CDLR space’ explored by the contributors to this book.

Community development and relief:

For the purposes of this discussion we will use the term ‘community development’ (CD) in its widest sense. We define community development as a long-term process in which ‘community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems’.⁵, ⁶ The term encompasses a variety of approaches from more sector-focused projects in which outputs are clearly defined, to more process-focused approaches with broader, more interdisciplinary impact.

Among Christian agencies, approaches emphasising the ‘incarnational presence’ of CD workers living in the community have also been accentuated. More recently, strength-based approaches to community development have gained popularity and credence. While these approaches differ, all seek to draw on the knowledge, experience, and resources of community members to engage them in a process of change to achieve their desired goals. While the levels of participation depend on the approach used, this inclusiveness is seen as key in bringing about empowerment, leading to long-term sustainable change.

Within contexts of poverty and marginalisation, people’s lives are often punctuated by severe crises requiring the short-term provision of resources to meet basic needs and avoid further loss of life. These crises may be at the household level or community-wide, such as the impact of a natural disaster. While community development approaches often seek to reduce vulnerabilities and strengthen resilience to these risks, in the face of crisis, short-term provision or relief approaches are required to enable the community to survive. These ‘relief’ interventions are often followed by a phase of ‘rehabilitation’ where a community is assisted to return to the standard of living they had prior to the disaster. While conceptually a clear boundary is often drawn between relief, rehabilitation, and (community) development, it is now recognised that in practice there is a much more dynamic relationship between these phases of intervention. Effective relief and rehabilitation incorporate community development principles such as empowerment and participation. Organisations working in contexts of poverty often must switch from longer-term community development approaches to the provision of lifesaving relief in the wake of disasters and back again. For this book, our definition of community development therefore includes all of these phases and incorporates stories and case studies from each of these phases of intervention.

We recognise that the practice and implementation of community development often overlaps with many other disciplines, approaches, and ministry areas. These might include enterprise development and business, sports ministry, the arts, education, and political involvement, among others. The boundaries between what we term community development and these approaches are not always clear. CD may incorporate or lead to these other areas and can also be a result of these other areas of involvement. Our focus on CD in this study is not intended to treat other approaches as irrelevant but to give an adequate focus and boundary to our study and reflection. The principles discussed in this book may well be relevant to these related ministry areas, and we welcome and encourage reflection on this to build on the work in this book.

‘Least reached’:

In this book our focus is on community development with and among the ‘least reached’. By this term we mean communities among whom:

a. There has been no gospel engagement. No one is living, proclaiming, and demonstrating the gospel among them, nor has there been a positive response to God’s grace in all its truth; or

b. There has been gospel engagement, but no gospel-centred and gospel-proclaiming community of Jesus followers is present; or

c. There is a community of Jesus followers living, proclaiming, and demonstrating the gospel but, due to geographical distance, cultural barriers or linguistic obstacles, access to it is significantly limited for the vast majority of that people or community.⁷

We have intentionally used the term ‘least reached’ rather than ‘unreached’ due to the associated idea of ‘unreached people groups’, which emphasises clearly defined ethnolinguistic groups. While in some settings community development is carried out with specific ethnolinguistic groups, more often our work includes people from a range of ‘people groups’, who are unified by their experience of poverty or marginalisation whether through disability, disease, or disaster. Our CD work therefore focuses on all of those affected by these issues, independent of their ethnolinguistic or religious identity.

‘Vibrant Communities of Jesus Followers (VCJF)’:

Our interest is in examining the phenomenon of churches that emerge among the least reached through community development work. The term ‘church’ has at times become laden with unhelpful meanings related to buildings and structures and is often weighed down with historical baggage which can be particularly problematic in leastreached, restrictive settings. We therefore use the term ‘vibrant communities of Jesus followers’ (VCJF), pointing back to the biblical model of ekklesia. This terminology is particularly helpful in restrictive contexts where followers of Jesus might identify themselves by their relationship with Jesus rather than with words such as ‘Christians’ or as a ‘church’.

EXPLORING A NEW SPACE

Our motivation for this study grew out of the desire of community development workers serving with Operation Mobilisation (OM) and its partners to better align ourselves with and identify our contribution to OM’s shared vision ‘to see vibrant communities of Jesus followers among the least reached’. In working to clarify our own principles and shared understandings, we realised that while Christian community development practitioners within OM and beyond have gained significant experience in this area very little has been written or formally researched to explore the CDLR space.

Within evangelical development circles there has, in the last two decades, been an increased recognition and focus on engaging the local church, with significant movements of local churches playing a central role in bringing transformative change to their local communities. However, our focus by definition is on areas where the local church is yet to become established and existing contact with the church is limited. When we extend our thinking to least-reached settings, the questions—and possibly the answers—are different from past research based on areas where churches and Christians are well-established. While there are some (previously) least-reached settings where many have turned quickly to faith in Jesus Christ, questions of timing and patience are required both in terms of community change in general as well as in terms of a positive response to the good news. And while some have explored the role of the church where it is already an accepted part of society,⁸ what is our role where there is no (or very little) local expression of the church? What should our contribution be, given that not all—and perhaps very few—of the local community will come to faith in Jesus Christ any time soon, even if we long for a rapid movement of people turning to him?

In a conversation between David Greenlee and Bryant Myers in June 2018, Myers confirmed what he had previously observed in print,⁹ that while there is an increasing interest in what Myers first called ‘transformational development’,¹⁰ still very little has been researched or published on the CDLR space.¹¹ Myers writes that Bob Mitchell offers ‘the first systematic field-based academic research on the theory and practices of faith-based development done by a Christian organization’.¹² Interacting with Mitchell is vitally important. We share his concerns about inappropriate, programmatic evangelism linked to community development work;¹³ however, we would more intentionally incorporate into our principles and work a desire not just for transformed, vibrant communities but also for the establishment of vibrant communities of Jesus followers.

The ten principles that form the basis for the chapters of this book were first developed at a meeting hosted by the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies in October 2018. Six OM workers with significant experience in community development were joined by an OM missiologist, faculty experienced in development work at OCMS and All Nations Christian College, and a colleague from another agency. The principles were distilled from the group’s shared understandings and reflections and later refined through an extended online discussion among selected OM workers and partners in other agencies. These were then published in the journal Transformation in 2019.¹⁴

This approach of corporate reflection and drawing principles from experience is valid for a number of reasons, including:

•the familiarity of the contributors with the issues, given they have spent many years embedded in the communities they serve

•the range of ministries they have participated in and that are included in the broad domain of community development

•the geographic spread of cases, which includes different parts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and among refugees in Europe

•the communal nature of the process that enables shared learning.

In this book, the contributors expand on each of the principles identified in that paper, exploring in more depth both the theory and thinking behind these principles and how they work out in practice. Our intention is not to provide an instructive ‘how to’ manual nor to produce a purely academic text but to share both the experience of working in this CDLR space from a range of different regions and organisations and the theory behind the work undertaken in these areas. We have drawn on a diverse range of authors, all with significant experience in this over-arching area of ministry but in very diverse geographical, cultural, and ministry contexts. We have sought to ensure that their individual voices can be heard and their stories told; through them we can hear the voices of those we serve. Individual chapters will therefore have differing styles with some being more personal and practical and others delving more into theology and theory. In addition, while each chapter focuses on one of the ten principles developed, we recognise that these principles do not operate in isolation from each other; they interact, synergise, and build upon each other. While we have attempted to minimise any unnecessary repetition, our hope is that the interrelatedness of the principles comes across in the book as a whole.

WHERE OUR STUDY FITS

Both secular and Christian approaches to community development recognise that poverty is complex and multidimensional and that effective development approaches must facilitate communities to move out of poverty in multiple dimensions. Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen describes development as ‘a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy’ and postulates that ‘the enhancement of human freedom is both the main object and the primary means of development’, reminding us that poverty and development are not merely financial or technological issues.¹⁵

Christian development thinkers also emphasise the holistic nature of change that is required for effective transformation. Myers suggests that the goal of Christian development is ‘restored relationships’ or shalom and highlights the importance of aligning the community’s story with God’s story.¹⁶

The biblical story starts with a picture of shalom in the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve living in perfect harmony with themselves, each other, creation, and God. Their disobedience results in the breaking of all these relationships by sin. They hide from God when he comes walking in the garden, as they see themselves naked and experience shame—a broken relationship with self. Adam accuses Eve and then God for their disobedience, and part of the punishment for Eve is that her husband will rule over her. Adam’s punishment is that work becomes hard and burdensome as God curses the earth. Adam and Eve are then banished from the garden.

The story of the fall is a ‘holistic mess’ resulting in psychological, social, spiritual, and ecological brokenness.¹⁷ The rest of the biblical story is of how God goes about restoring that shalom, ultimately through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The vertical spiritual relationship between God and humanity, broken by sin, is restored as we, who are in Christ, are reconciled to God (2 Cor. 5:18). The horizontal social relationships between different parts of humanity are restored as all are made one in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:14–18). The psychological relationship with self is restored as we no longer bear the guilt and shame of sin but are made righteous through Christ (Rom. 5:19), and the cosmic and ecological nature of redemption is revealed as all things in heaven and earth are reconciled to God in Christ (Col. 1:15–20).

At the end of the biblical story, expanding on pictures only partially seen in the Old Testament prophets, in Revelation 21 and 22 we are given a picture of the new heavens and the new earth. Shalom is once more restored; there is no more crying, weeping, pain, or death (Rev. 21:4). The curse is removed from the earth,