by Naomy Rono, WCIU student
This “Reflection” is by a WCIU student responding a question about their personal understanding of the term, “international development.”
Read Moreby Irene Nyambura, WCIU student
This “Reflection” is by a WCIU student responding a question about their personal understanding of the term, “international development.”
Read MoreResources compiled by Timothy Skinner, MLS.
Read MoreResources compiled by WCIU Reference Librarian, Timothy Skinner, MLS
Read Moreby Jim Harries
Dr. Harries has lived for many years in an African village using African languages and resources, He sees two implicitly contradictory truths presupposed by Westerners:
1. That today’s Western people’s peculiar history has enabled them to be global trendsetters especially in economics and technology, and
2. That people with different histories are no less capable of doing the same.
He explains his view of the dangers of secularism that he sees resulting in non-Western people being brought into a subservience to things that they do not understand.
Read Moreby Beth Snodderly
This refection is an excerpt from my book, Chaos Is Not God’s Will: The Origin of International Development..
Read Moreby Beth Snodderly
Societies experience well-being, safety, health, and peace to the extent that God’s people are influencing (for the good) the way people relate to each other within that society.
Romans 12 lists seven gifts God has given the body of Christ for creating shalom. After listing the gifts and how to use them, Paul gives examples of practical applications of each gift. To notice the correlation of the examples with the gifts, the reader needs to know about the memory aid of chiasm, commonly used in the oral world of the Ancient Near Eastern. A chiastic structure is a form of ancient poetry of “rhyming” similar thoughts, for example, ABCCBA.
Reading Romans 12:5-21 with this literary device in mind helps us see more clearly what a society and inter-personal relationships should look like when God’s people are actively using the gifts God has given them.
Read Moreby Kenton Moody
In this analysis of the root cause of gang violence in El Salvador we can see that the United States is not unique in its current crisis with tens of thousands of deaths and civil unrest against government. What lessons can be learned from the failure of the Evangelical church in El Salvador to have a transformational impact on society?
Read MoreBy Ralph D. Winter with Beth Snodderly
If Winter were living today, he might have asked, Is there is a future in mission for those the world now thinks of as “evangelicals”? Unfortunately, what the public is seeing from so-called evangelicals is not bringing glory to God.
Winter first reviewed the history of the evangelical movement in America that started with a theology combining both personal salvation and social responsibility that glorified God. During the early 20th century, evangelicals largely withdrew from efforts to influence society and focused almost exclusively on salvation and escape from this world to the next. But now, as Winter predicted, the evangelical world has again taken an interest in societal impact, although with mixed results.
Read MoreUncontrolled urbanization and urban sanitation in South Cameroon. The case of the Obili district in Yaoundé
by Samuel-Béni Ella Ella, Maître de Conférences, Département de Sociologie, FALSH, UY1 and Carole Alexis Ngassomo Emama, doctoral student
Article is in French. [Copy and paste into Google Translate to read one segment of this article at a time (3900 character limit per translation).]
Uncontrolled urbanization and urban cleaning up in South-Cameroon. The case study of “Obili”‘s quarter in the Yaoundé III Town”. The present interactionist research establishes a relationship between uncontrolled urbanization and urban cleaning up at the “Obili”‘s quarter of the Yaoundé III Subdivision Council. After a brief description of this popular quarter, the authors reveal the deep causes of this uncontrolled urbanization, which focus on the non-respect of urban planning and public health, the demographic growth and the deviancy of inhabitants. This uncontrolled urbanization, which is materialized through anarchical constructions without rights of ways and the general insalubrity, creates the urban disorder, the dirt illnesses, the growing insecurity and the promiscuity, which disturbs relations between neighbors.
Read Moreby Kenton Moody
“To be honest, I think all of us are a little afraid,” said one of the pastors who had come to discuss the establishment of a transition house for gang members wanting to leave the gangs. A circle of Evangelical leaders sat around the table looking defeated and puzzled at the same time. “We’re here because we want to do something and don’t know what to do,” said another, “Fear has all of us paralyzed!”
The pastor could’ve been speaking for the large majority of the Salvadoran population. Fear is part of life in El Salvador, one of the most dangerous countries in the world.
Like many Latin American countries, El Salvador’s history is rife with violence, dictatorships, coups, war, and economic instability. The country won its independence from Spain in 1821 and unsuccessfully tried uniting with neighboring countries to form a larger Central American union. With such a small land mass, El Salvador survived by single crop economies—first indigo and then coffee. Fourteen families, who were known as the oligarchy, controlled the politics and economy for most of the 20th and 21st centuries and still are part of the controlling political parties today (Boland 2001).
Read MoreInnovating in an African Catechism to Overcome the Superficiality of Faith: The Central African Case Paradigm
by Banga Anatole, PhD Student, Institut Universitaire de Développement International (IUDI)
This article is in French. Use Google Translate if necessary to read one section at a time (3900 character limit per translation)
The author writes about an absence of transformation in the lives of those who declare themselves Christians. The ongoing crisis in the Central African Republic (CAR) raised many questions among which the biblical teachings or catechism that pioneer missionaries taught years ago to introduce Christianity in the country. During the current armed conflict, when Muslim rebels persecuted harshly Christians to the extreme and destroyed churches, one can observe the so-called Christians militias reacted in very evil ways against Muslims in the country. The use of witchcraft to protect oneself against bullets from enemies, the killing of innocent people in the name of Christ, and so on, were some of the images international medias and breaking news at that time portrayed as the misconduct of believers in CAR. Yet, it is widely known Central African Republic has the record of 80% Christians, and according to Operation World 52% are evangelicals. Are such mentioned above testimonies the confirmation of the saying “in Africa churches are one mile length and one inch deep”?
When reflecting about that problem, we may find the root in the lack of anthropological knowledge at the time missionaries arrived and also their misinterpretation of the African peoples’ culture. The gospel was modeled according to a western point of view and didn’t deal according to the local context. Today, on the one hand, souls are saved every day, churches are planted every month, and statistics astonish us every year. But on other hand, there is no transformation of African societies. Poverty has prospered, wars are waging over the continent. We are suggesting an African catechism to overcome the problem. Such catechism will take in consideration the oral tradition of the people, the cultural context of the nation, the wide range of stories in use in the traditional societies for teaching, the community way of living of African people, as well as socioeconomic realities.
Read Moreby Sunny Hong and Esther Miller
Refugees have been described with words like “severely trauma-stricken”; those who have lost their homes, language, culture, and normal life; “marginalized”; “powerless”; “victims of a social force”; “deprived”; “vulnerable”; and “dehumanized.” Their severe experiences impact their identity and their survival tremendously. However, because of outside forces that threaten their lives, sometimes their situations cause them to seek more in their spiritual life and can result in their becoming messengers of the gospel. Being exposed to many languages and cultures also causes them to look at their language and culture from different perspectives. Through the ethnographic description of two refugees, this paper uses sociological approaches to understand how they responded to crises; what factors made them seek spiritual life; what has impacted their spiritual journeys; how their identities have been changed; how their language and culture have impacted their lives; how their trauma has been dealt with; how they participate in the global economy; and how family relationships are impacted throughout their refugee lives.
Read Moreby Ron and Carolyn Klaus
The authors share a story about a young man whose tribe had been attacked, his farm burned, and a close relative killed. Without any outside encouragement, he walked into the attacking tribe’s territory. Their leaders encircled him in a threatening way. “Wait,” he said. “Before you do anything, I have something to say. I want to tell you that I forgive you. And I want to ask your forgiveness for the things that members of my tribe have done to you.” He said it first confused the attackers. They could not understand what he was saying. Then, once they grasped it, their hearts melted. They laid down their weapons and began a conversation on how the two tribes could make peace.
Ron also shares that It it helps to realize that God is more interested in executing justice than we are, and will inevitably do so, if not in this world, certainly in the next. Therefore, when we forgive, we are not minimizing the hurt, pretending to forget it, or giving up on getting restitution. We are merely transferring our case into God’s court.
Read Moreby Kumar Aryal
Corruption, lack of education, population growth, and natural disasters are the main causes of the persistent poverty in the Philippines. Evangelical Christians are visible in responding to poverty in the Philippines, but the majority of their programs and services meet immediate needs, which has the tendency to create dependency, instead of development, if continued over a long period of time. Evangelicals seem to have a very minimal partnership with the government, instead going directly to the poor to avoid a long government process, and not wanting government officials to pocket the money that should go to the poor. Compounding the inadequate evangelical response is that there seems to be a lack of collaboration among evangelical Christian churches and NGOs in responding to poverty in the Philippines.
This research shows that in addition to the four causes of poverty in Metro Manilla, there are four types of poverty. When economic, psychological, social, and spiritual poverty are addressed in an integrated manner, poor people will experience shalom, which is the goal of holistic development.
Read Moreby Ralph D. Winter
Winter wrote this article while serving in Guatemala in 1958. These are some of the discussion questions he added 50 years later:
• How many evidences do you see in this document which clearly indicate that it was written a long time ago?
• What evidences do you see of an awareness even back then of the phenomenon of “Globalization”?
• What do you feel is the most radical difference between the Guatemalan situation described and the situation of a U. S. congregation? How easily is this difference understood by U. S. donors?
• Why, according to this document is the giving of food not an adequate answer?
Read Moreby Ralph D. Winter
In the 1950s and 60s, Winter served in Guatemala where he encountered conventional thinking related to medical clinics. In this short Reflection he points out the problem with Western funding for development projects.
Read Moreby Beth Snodderly
Abstract
A social science model, called a “status degradation ritual,” can help us understand some of the dynamics in the way people sometimes relate to others in a time of crisis. This article looks at a community crisis in the First Epistle of John and notes how the author used the elements of a status degradation ritual to try to solve the problem. The author’s community was having to distinguish between “the children of God,” and those who are having their status degraded to “children of the devil.” In this article I consider if this model also applies to the way some politicians talk about asylum seekers fleeing violence in their home countries. Do the degrading comments by top leaders put those people in a position of being seen and treated as non-persons? Might the similarities and differences between these 1st and 21st century crises help Jesus-followers know how to respond to current immigration issues?
Read Moreby Jennifer Winters
Abstract
Today slavery is almost universally condemned as evil, and absolutely unacceptable, but the practice of slavery has been the rule of history and not the exception. Philosophers and politicians such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and many others believed slavery was the normal and necessary way of life. No culture can claim total freedom for all of its members, although some societies have done better at identifying slavery and allowing freedom to thrive. What are the elements of slavery in our modern day? The goal of this article is to expose the elements and characteristics of slavery, how it grows in a society, and then how it declines. It is no coincidence that the fight to end slavery occurred in the Christian world. The reason why the failure to fully end it seems so atrocious is because it stands in stark contrast to the ideals of freedom given by the Hebraic Christian faith. Slavery has been a stumbling block leading one to infer that there is something in the nature of mankind that descends towards the practice of enslaving others while at the same time acknowledging it as an injustice. By the same reasoning it can be said that people do not choose freedom for others, just for themselves. If one does not choose freedom for one’s self and others one will be enslaved. I hope that this paper will lead men and women to choose freedom over slavery.
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