A Study of Christian Witness in the Field of International Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
International development organizations do more than effect changes in people’s social, political, economic, environmental, educational, and health conditions. By their actions, they also convey values and sets of beliefs about the nature of human wellbeing and how it can be realized. While there may be considerable similarities in beliefs, values, and activities across the spectrum of development agencies, there are also differences between secular, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and other faith-based organizations. Especially as postcolonial criticism exposes the negative consequences of categorizing others as less developed, and setting agendas of change for them, it is important for organizations to understand what meaning is conveyed through their actions and their consequences. Some Christian organizations understand their faith as a motivating factor or an identity marker, but do not intend to communicate distinctively Christian beliefs and values through their work in international development. Others believe their work is an engagement in Christian mission, and do intend to convey distinctively Christian meaning through it. This study suggests and tests a process for assessing whether the intended meaning is being understood by people the organization is active among. Two organizations participated in this study: International Teams Canada and World Renew Canada. Employing an adapted phenomenological methodology, an inquiry was designed to learn what people perceive to be the organizations’ beliefs, values, and aims, based on their experience of the organization’s activities in their community. The inquiry was conducted in two communities in Guatemala in which the organizations are engaged. The participants’ experiences and perceptions are significant for the field of international development because they provide insight into what people living in conditions of poverty consider to be important qualities of improved standards of living. The findings are significant to the field of practical theology because they provide further insight into how meaning is conveyed in and through practice. Lastly, the study contributes to the understanding of Christian witness in international development in two ways. First, it tests a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of an organization’s activities as Christian witness, and offers an adapted research guide as an appendix. Second, it brings more marginalized voices into the missiological discourse and thereby provides a rich opportunity for theological reflection on how community voices influence organizations’ perspectives on the significance of Jesus in efforts to overcome poverty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.052 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".