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March - April 1998 The Editorial MF Behind the Scenes
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Sphere Three: Relief and Development Missions Defined One specific post-2nd World War type of derivative mission is the “let’s go out and deal realistically with the physical needs of people on the field, with or without relationships to the Standard Missions.” This category is highlighted by World Vision, World Concern, Food for the Hungry, Samaritans Purse, etc. Over the years such agencies have tended to add “development” as a major dimension—helping people to solve their own problems. Now, more recently, they have realized that economic development, say, must be accompanied by what is called “community development.” The tendency now to converge at this point with Standard Missions becomes quite fascinating. —RDW Relief and Development Missions Represented Tim Dearborn Chief of Staff, World Vision USA An integrating theme in Scripture is God’s call that we love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength and—that we love our neighbor as ourselves! In mission, we participate in this great “love affair” of God for his creation, calling all to be reconciled in Jesus Christ. This reconciliation involves the whole person—heart, soul, body and mind, in a whole community—the Body of Christ. World Vision is committed to sharing the whole Gospel with whole people. Because God’s love and reign encompass the whole of life, so must our ministry, as we are used by God to provide people with tangible hope in time and for eternity. Merely to save souls is to focus on “ghosts”—souls without bodies. Merely to care for people’s physical needs is to care for “corpses”—bodies without souls. The Gospel is God’s care for persons in community—heart, soul, body and mind reconciled with God and one another. Relief and development organizations like World Vision exist to tangibly express God’s love for the whole of people’s lives. Through our ministries, we seek to witness the Gospel in word, deed and life—causing people to ask the questions to which Jesus is the answer. Thus our concern for the whole person propels us to integrate evangelism and Christian witness into all our relief and development activities. In doing this, we are not “church-planting” organizations. Rather, we partner with churches and evangelistic organizations, each bringing our strengths to the manifestation of the Gospel of Christ. Because of this, World Vision operates through literally 100’s of partnership agreements with other organizations. Each of our 5,000 projects in the 103 countries where we serve are multifaceted joint-ventures with churches, mission organizations, nongovernmental and government organizations. We find this to be especially important in evangelistic efforts among unreached people groups. Not only can relief and development activities provide a bridge for involvement, they also are essential in sustaining emerging Christian communities in the future. In many places in the 10-40 Window, new Christians experience social ostracism because of their faith, and are discriminated against regarding employment. As a result, while their spiritual stature emerges, their economic opportunities crumble. This not only produces great hardship, it threatens the future of the Christian movement in these regions. Unemployed young believers have difficulty getting married, which obviously limits the number of Christian families nurturing subsequent generations in the faith. Thus, micro-enterprise and community development activities are vital partners with evangelistic efforts. I recently returned from several weeks in East Africa, researching future ministry possibilities. Three days were spent in fascinating conversations with the elders of a small unreached people group along with government officials. Because of the credibility of our development programs, both the government and elders are asking us to become involved. In describing their threatened future, one elder said, “It is too late for us to feel shame about asking for help.” God has indeed come to our “help” in Jesus Christ. We feel no shame over admitting our need. What a privilege it is for us to express that help in Word, deed and life, and in so doing enable people to experience fullness of life in Christ’s Kingdom. Editorial Comment on Relief and Development Missions: Having already read our comment on Service Missions it may appear that entities specializing in relief and development activities are, in fact, basically (or at least potentially) Service Missions themselves. That is true. One reason for a separate category includes the fact that these organizations now have a separate association, AERDO—Association of Evangelical Relief and Development Organizations—which for the first time met jointly in 1997 with the Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies. A second reason for a separate category is that, especially in the past, there has been far less cooperation between the R and D organizations and the Standard Missions. The fact that “World Vision operates through literally 100’s of partnership agreements with other organizations” explains that—the way it is presently set up—it actually cannot, in fact, deal with the whole man without the ministry of the Standard Missions and their product: The 100’s of thousands of existing churches and millions of Christians. Service Missions in general, and this sphere in particular, do not concern themselves with the training of pastors, for example, as do the Standard Missions. This is understandable. In some countries they would not be welcome if they were known to be in the church-planting business elsewhere. These agencies have been able to get hundreds of millions of dollars of government surplus food in some cases where an overtly religious agency could not. Most of these agencies, (World Vision, World Concern, and even World Relief—a department of the National Association of Evangelicals), started out simply offering relief in situations of disaster around the world, and their overseas employees are perhaps mostly but not necessarily Christian believers. More recently these agencies have realized that for long-term solutions you need what can broadly be called “development,” which often is very similar to that with which the Standard Missions have been involved. It would be embarrassing to tell how much the educational system of Nigeria, for example, owes to SIM. Most overseas schools, hospitals and universities in the non-Western world are there due to the impulse of the Standard Missions. Last fall, the President of AERDO, at the combined meeting of AERDO and EFMA, told how as a boy he had gone with his missionary father to a distant village no white man had ever entered. Prickly, delicate negotiations with the chief allowed a new well to be built and a whole new attitude toward the missionary—an opening for Christ. Thus, for example, World Vision has come a long way from the days it was mainly subsidizing orphanages in Korea to being involved now in “5,000 projects.” Quite a few of these involve what is nowadays called “community development,” where both the outlook and the economy of whole villages is lifted. I would hope that World Vision would be willing to be a church-planting organization. Quite often villages are polarized by clans or rival families, and cannot be addressed as a single body, as a single community. The Gospel may create a new group that is friendly to all factions. Dealing sensitively with the realities at the grass-roots level demands that all missions of every kind continue to work closely together or, perhaps, also, add to their range of skills so as to be able to do the whole job. —RDW
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