How does a society’s worldview and/or religious beliefs affect development?
Photo credit: marco magrini - flickr
by Sean Curran
Enns’ book is a good reminder for us to keep a wide perspective of all that is happening—for WCIU to embrace a model of faith that gives space not only for acknowledging the pain of the challenges and changes of the journey so far but also the courage and curiosity to keep looking for what is next.
Read Moreby Richard Gunasekera
According to the biblical record, all of the family of humankind (understood as Homo sapiens) emerged from one family. Genesis 1:26-27 and Genesis 2:21-23 records the creation of a man (“Adam”) and a woman (“Eve”). The scientific data points towards a small founding population of humans, quite similar to the size of the human population found at the end of the first ten chapters of Genesis. The discoveries of the mapping of the human genome has revealed the shared inheritance of the human species all the way down to the molecular level in a manner as never been seen before. Scientific theories on the origin of modern man include two hotly debated hypotheses—also called theories. The older hypothesis for the origin of man is known as the Multiregional Theory. The more recent one is best known as the Out of Africa Theory.
Read Moreby Sundee Simmons
A biblical view of international development is found in the metanarrative of the Bible, i.e., God’s global mission/purpose and specifically in the reality of the Kingdom of God with Jesus as King and humans being made in the image of God. Being made in God’s image, we were made for community, we were made to be in right relationship with God and all that He created.
Read Moreby Jim Harries
The purpose of this article is to make a case in a brief, succinct, and cutting way, for academia to take issues popularly associated with “religion” very seriously indeed. “Anthropologists have neglected Christianity for reasons that now seem implausible,” says Timothy Jenkins (Jenkins 2012, 459). Academic taboo of what is known as religion requires urgent condemnation in favor of listening to more voices, who need not be considered to be inspired by anything supernatural.
Read Moreby Ounho, Cho, PhD
This article describes and compares view of spiritual warfare from Indo-European/Hindu, Tribal, Cosmic Dualism, and Biblical points of view. Each acknowledge a cosmic spiritual battle between good and evil.
Critical Contextualization avoids both uncritical rejection and uncritical acceptance. It insists that old beliefs and customs first be examined to resolve their meanings and functions in the society and then their acceptability in the light of biblical norms.
Read Moreby Kalemba Mwambazambi and Basua Ngandu Kahakatshi
This study addresses the tension between the church and Central African culture. It tackles the question of the necessary new modes of the presence of the church through the resolution of the tension between the gospel and the culture in order to empower the people in Central Africa in different areas. This article demonstrates that the first missionaries in Central Africa countries did not understand the culture of African people and simply rejected what they could not understand because it was considered as heathen. As a result, the first missionaries’ contempt for African worldview and their fundamental values led to proselytism. There is a need to rethink the missional tools used by the church in order to present the Word of God in the language and culture of the people of Central Africa. This can lead to a change of mentality that in turn can lead to holistic development. If these tensions can be resolved, the leadership of the church can work to end corruption and injustice by promoting biblical values through its members who are active agents in all spheres of the African community social structure.
Read Moreby Beth Snodderly
The Christmas carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” concludes, “Oh, come to us, abide with us, Our Lord Emmanuel!” Emmanuel: God with us! In singing this, we are praying for international development: for God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Read Moreby May Nor Clara Cheng
WCIU Professor Clara Cheng writes an encouragement directing readers to examples from Scripture of God as an ever-present help and what it is like when God intervenes on our behalf.
Read Moreby Michael Soderling, MD
The author reflects on the worldview aspect of the burgeoning Ebola crisis. A fascinating, though sad, look inside the challenges rooted in worldview in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and so many other African countries.
Read Moreby Lawrence Alabi
A WCIU student and pastor writes on the careful balance required to avoid saddling cultural values to the Gospel, yet communicating in a culturally relevant manner.
Read Moreby Lizette M. Acosta
ABSTRACT
• Whenever God’s love is mentioned in the First Epistle of John, it is always accompanied by an action that demonstrates that love.
• Believers are to love “just as” God loves. (“If God so loved us, we ought to love one another”)
• While in the Gospel, Jesus makes God known to the world by bringing God’s works to completion, in the Epistle, it is the believers that bring God’s work to completion in their mutual love.
Read Moreby Chris Ampadu
Africa, the pleasant continent of promise, has been perceived as a dark and cursed continent. But is Africa cursed? Most of the world is acquainted with only the bad news of Africa: wars, sicknesses, pain, poverty, hunger, famine, and deprivation. On the continent, many have given up hope. With the massive assistance and support that Africa has received, coupled with the enormous natural resources at her disposal, why has the continent not emerged from her predicaments? Though external factors such as colonialism, the slave trade, and global trade balances have taken their toll on Africa, the biggest obstacle to the continent’s development and progress is internal.
Read Moreby Bob Moffitt
A paradigm is the filter through which we see reality. It is shaped by our beliefs and experiences. Our paradigms can blind us from recognizing what is real. Evangelical Christians have been blinded by a paradigm that focuses on making “converts” and overlooks Jesus’ emphasis on making disciples. The biblical understanding of making disciples is a continuous process that often but not always begins with conversion and leads to obeying/submitting to Jesus and therefore reflecting or looking like Him.
Healing/transformation that begins at the personal level and eventually leads to community and national levels is relatively straightforward. How? God transforms on the condition of the obedience of his people. When his people obey he heals. This is another reason for the priority of discipleship.
Read Moreby Jim Harries
The contemporary approach to development defines Africa’s needs almost entirely in terms of money and Westernization. What Africa needs, donors assume, is to be more like the West. The means used to attempt to reach this goal are outside money and Western-style education in Western languages (usually English).
This article questions these presuppositions. But if outside donor money is not the answer for development in Africa, where should we look for the answer? This article presents research showing that human thinking is rooted in metaphors that are themselves rooted (or embodied) in actual experiences. This, then, opens doors of understanding ways in which Christian / biblical teaching is central to the initiation and propagation of sustainable, transformative, and indigenously rooted socio-economic development.
Read Moreby Dan Poenaru
The dichotomy between physical and spiritual health reflects a gradual degradation of the church from a living, thriving body of believers connected through all spheres of life on earth into a social club gathering offering a very specific, and limited, range of “spiritual services” such as marriages, burials, childhood and adult Christian education, and the like. In the African culture and tradition, this “divine specialization” (Loewen 2000, 95-101) is particularly concerning.
Read Moreby Stephen Mosheni
Sub-Saharan Africa has been on the receiving end of the gospel for more than two centuries. But many came to the faith based on the fear of being banished by God. This was good to certain extent, but many never experienced transformed lives.
Read Moreby Chris Ampadu
Why is Africa poor, given all its natural resources: gold, diamonds, oil, timber?
View a Whiteboard Animation explanation in this blog that is based on Chris Ampadu’s WCIU dissertation and West African workshops.
by Beth Snodderly
What is the “Word of God” in its fulness? Does it mean that God’s glory will be most fully known to humans when he is reflected and understood by every people group on earth?
Read Moreby Bill Bjoraker
This is a reflection on William Carey International University’s original mission statement regarding the roots of human problems around the world.
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