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 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 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 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 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.
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