Toxic Missions: Relief and Development

It’s Important to talk about different styles of doing missions in order to keep away from toxic practices. Today we’ll be talking about relief vs development, how they’re different and when they’re useful.

Let’s be clear, relief work is extremely important and needs to be done. Some examples of relief work would be, working to help find survivors from national disasters, helping get food and water into those areas and doing immediate work to mitigate deaths and harm.

Relief work takes place after a disaster and continues until the community is stable enough to rebuild. Once we’re at that point we’ve hit development.

With relief there’s a lot of trauma involved as well so you have to be deliberate that everyone on the team is trained for that. Disaster is really hard to deal with, there might be a lot of gruesome injuries and or bodies depending on the disaster. So prepping for that outcome is extra important. That can look like, scheduling in time for the group to talk about what they’ve experienced during the day. What was hard? What do you need to talk about or work through? Holding space for each other in evenings will allow people to keep doing the hard work of relief for a longer time.

One organization doing relief work is Convoy of Hope. During the earthquake in Haiti this year they worked with locals to support the efforts of finding survivors, providing food and shelter, etc..

“Convoy of Hope’s response began Saturday and has continued throughout the beginning of the week. Convoy’s team members and local partners have committed to distributing 1 million meals to those affected. Additionally, Convoy is providing sheltering supplies, hygiene kits, medical supplies, and other necessities.”

Convoy of Hope in Haiti.

There are several organizations that are focused on relief work. Relief work is incredibly important when it is needed! It saves lives. But there’s definitely a time and a place for it. They’ve helped with Katrina, the Joplin tornado, and have some amazing response times. They’re always prepared for a disaster and I love that about them.

Most of what needs to be done in countries stricken by poverty or in the rebuilding portion of the aftermath of a tragedy, is development work.

Simply giving people food, clothes, money, water, and meeting their physical needs is not enough here.

This might be necessary in some cases but that should be for the long term missionaries to help facilitate. Poverty is more than just lack of materials and it should be noted that the materially poor are often extremely generous.

Relief work in a location that needs development cripples the community. How can the seamstress down the street compete with the short term trip every month bringing free clothes? They can’t. It puts people out of work and makes them dependent on the support of others.

Development looks like working with the community when projects need to be done.

For example in the book, Helping without hurting in STM’s there’s a story about how a bunch of short term missionaries came to help build a well. Only on the stipulation that if the community didn’t show up to participate the national trip facilitator’s wouldn’t let them do it. The community did show up in great numbers to work on the project so it did get done. It brings up an interesting point. If people aren’t participating and taking ownership of their development then we are no better than colonizers, again. Development needs to be led by leaders on the field and integrated in the community. We cannot just go and start random projects that we think will help. We have to be courteous of our neighbors and come alongside them.

This goes with the term “listen to the community”. How many times have people come into a community with their plans and agendas just for the community to resent them? Even if the idea of the outcome is good, if there is no ownership or desire, then there is no point. It shocked our contacts when they asked what we wanted to do in their community and our response was “what do you need? We don’t want an agenda.” It seemed like this was something uncommon or even unheard of. And yet, I will hold to that response. I don’t want to have an agenda. I want to do what is needed to help develop the community.

With development, the goal is alleviating poverty, so then we must ask “what is poverty?”.

“Poverty isn’t just a lack of stuff. It’s the result of broken relationships with God, self, others, and the rest of creation.” Chalmers.org (the online resource from helping without hurting)

By committing to relief work where it needs to be done and development for the long term we honor the people God has called us to serve.

We treat them not as projects but as real people, and image bearers of God. This path forward lets us honor others.

If you would like to study more into missions, we highly recommend reading the book: Helping without Hurting in Short-Term Missions.

Also, the authors assume that you have read Helping Without Hurting first. Which is also beyond helpful.

There's another super helpful Helping Without Hurting in Church Benevolence, which is also great for those involved in church and church leadership.

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Here's the Podcast version. It's the same theme but it's not transcribed so there are various conversations we have on the blog vs on the podcast.