The God Dance: Community Development

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." --Martin Luther King Jr.  

The effort to eliminate poverty from the globe grew out of the post-World War II desire to re-build the world. Large amounts of money were successfully invested in Europe to return countries to the path of booming industrial progress. As the United States and Russia battled for influence around the world, they sought to apply the same economic principles to the so-called “Third World.”  The efforts did not work as well as anyone intended, forcing development workers to consider more than pure economics as the solution to global poverty. Issues of agency, empowerment, local ownership, conflict resolution, environment, politics, culture, and power dynamics all made community development more complicated. A pure economic logic collided with realities of the human heart as well as cultural and ecological realities.

Community Development, like ecology, economy, and theology, is a truth seeking discipline which attempts to encompass the totality. When we begin seeking to eliminate poverty, we begin pulling on a thread connected to everything. We are confronted with social realities, ecological networks, political systems, available technologies, geography, and spiritual powers. All of these are part of the one world that God made--a part of the same cosmos.

To address the economic issue of poverty, these other issues have to be understood and addressed as part of a unified whole. Thoughtful community development practitioners are forced to ask the question, “Community Development towards what?” What does a world without poverty look like? When given the resources to build their own world, peoples around the world have not always wanted to answer these questions in the same way the USA has: to build a liberal democracy, an industrial society, and a free market system. The American answer to a fundamental question of Community Development—“What is a good life and what is keeping people from it?”—was not agreed upon by everyone. Not everyone has been dreaming the American Dream, but we offered lots of money and military support if they would. We offered military resistance if they didn’t.

The American Dream is an individualized answer to the question, “Community Development towards what?” A world without poverty looks like a self-reliant and independent nuclear family who own their home with a white picket fence. Financial security and access to material goods has been the American answer to the question, “What is a good life?” And to the question, “What is keeping people from it?” we often say lack of investment, lack of hard work, and lack of American values.

If we truly empowered local community members to be the agents of their own change and invited ownership into the processes of change, the residents of South Hill may dream the dream we have been told to dream. We would continue to seek to build spaces of ownership and effective control where we could operate without having to be dependent on anyone. I often run into neighbors who can’t stand those people who throw trash everywhere, those people who won’t get to work and find a job, those kids who just hang around. Those people are always the problem. But if Community Development is a truth-seeking discipline, is the American Dream really true? Are we really developing towards a community of autonomous, secure individuals? Or have we been caught up in a lie about what is the good life?

The American Dream contains several inherent contradictions that force us to seek a different answer to the question of what we are developing our communities towards. If we claim that we own our own land and have achieved independence from our own hard work, where did the land come from? Our ancestors took it, because they could, and our government broke promises to Native Americans to protect the self-interest of its citizens. And was it all our own hard work, or was much of the wealth the result of indentured servitude and slavery? Was our wealth the result of the government giving your parents or grandparents a free education after World War II? And of all the material abundance we now enjoy, what of it has really been the work of our hands? Was it made by factory laborers in China or by immigrant laborers in California? Is the metal in our cell phones from the wars of the Congo and our chocolate from child slaves in West Africa? Is our money that good, that it could justify these things? If we are happy, is it really because we have achieved everything by ourselves? 

This is what Bob Dylan, recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for literature, has to say about all of this: 

The wealth of the American Dream has failed to account for its debt in the bank of justice. I do not advocate the bringing about of this justice on others. Only God can do that, and he will. I do advocate for recognizing that nothing we own is ours and that we are caught up together in more ways than we can understand—economically, ecologically, socially, and spiritually. None of these are separate. If we believe that everything is a gift made in the pattern of a self-giving creator--glorified by God to give glory back to God--we are free to make our part of the story right. We can examine the truths of what got us to where we are, and apologize to those we have wronged. We can seek to understand how we participate in a single fabric and what is a good life in which we all belong.

If we seek a world in which no one is poor, we must first acknowledge that we may be part of the problem. And if we know grace, we don’t need to fear the truth. If we claim to know the Gospel, we know that repentance is the first step. It may not be that we have excluded the poor from the world of wealth, but that our individualized vision of the good life has excluded us from the beloved community. As Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”