Month: November 2008

Categories
Faith

Faith is not fair

In Luke chapter 8, Jesus says, “No one lights a lamp then covers it with a container or hides it under a bed. Instead, the person puts it on a stand, so that people who come in can see the light. Nothing is covered that will not be revealed, and nothing is secret that will not be known and come to light. So be careful how you listen. Whoever has something will be given more, but people who have nothing will have taken away from them even the things which they think they have.”

The message seems to be that some people have it, and some don’t. The ones who have it will get even more of it, while the ones who don’t have it won’t get it. The ones who don’t have it but think they do will lose even what they think they have. Jesus seems to be saying that you’re stuck where you are and can’t do anything to change it. This seems to contradict the rest of his teaching, in which he encourages people to change their way of living.

Perhaps Jesus is indicating that the light which shines from the lamp of a person’s life is powered not by the person’s own willpower, but by God’s. Most people try to get the light by trying to take control of their own lives, and they may deceive themselves, but the only way to get the true light shining from their lives is to give up control and allow God to light the lamp.

Categories
Books

Non-linear leadership lessons

When you exert too much force on a rubber band, it may break or deform permanently; when you exert too little force, then rubber band is slack and does nothing. People are like rubber bands, according to Nancy Ortberg in her book Unleashing the Power of Rubber Bands: Lessons in Non-Linear Leadership. The leader’s job is to exert pressure in a continuous direction over a period of time, and expect to see the people grow in skills and character.

The book is a collection of observations about the nature of leadership. The core of leadership is hope. Vision does not belong on T-shirts; it is about using stories to stir, provoke, remind and imagine. A good leader knows how to value the contribution of each team member. Too often we assume that a person is a bad person, rather than just a bad fit for their job. Leaders ought to be the most self-aware people in the room.

In the introduction, the author explained that the book is a non-linear book, and I personally found it too non-linear for my liking. The writing style is fine and the stories are engaging, but I cannot name any new ideas or compelling information that I gathered from the book. The book seems to be intended both for the church market and for the business market, but in my opinion it is likely to be of interest only to the church market.

Categories
Poverty

Aid is usually counterproductive

Western aid has “offered legitimacy to corrupt and autocratic regimes, allowing them to hang on to power even when they have lost popularity with their own citizens”, according to Sorious Samura in a BBC news report. For many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the amount of foreign aid has been around half of government expenditure for decades. This has encouraged governments to concentrate on pleasing donors, rather than being accountable to their own citizens.

According to Samura, aid sponsors failure, but rarely rewards success. Aid tends to fund the lifestyles of ineffective bureaucrats, rather than stimulating innovation and creativity. Substantial incoming streams of foreign money from donors artificially inflates the value of the local currency, so that the country’s export goods are less competitive in the global marketplace. Thus foreign aid stifles the local economy.

Because salaries in most African countries are very low – except for politicians and government officials – many talented people are unable to earn a reasonable living locally. Each year 70,000 of the best-educated people leave Africa – often after their education has been funded by foreign aid – to pursue employment opportunities elsewhere.

Categories
Future

Clean water challenge

Any city faces a challenge when attempting to clean up its waterways. That challenge is exacerbated in cities which accommodate a large number of urban poor. The Nairobi River is one example of a waterway choked with industrial waste, human waste, garbage and other pollutants. This has a number of adverse effects including environmental degradation, water-borne disease, and lack of access to safe drinking water for many people.

In some places sewers are broken, so that waste gets discharged into the river. Accordingly, large amounts of the city’s sewerage infrastructure will need to be replaced. Numerous corporations are illegally discharging their industrial waste into the river, and the Nairobi Environmental Management Agency plans a “shock and awe” strategy to force such corporations to find more hygienic waste disposal systems.

Some 125,000 people live in slums on the river banks, adding to pollution discharged into the river, and they will have to be moved elsewhere. The people are likely to resist, because they are unlikely to be provided with appealing alternative accommodation. There are significant costs associated with cleaning up the river, and they have to be weighed against other urgent financial needs.

Categories
Present

Tea prices collapse

Kenya is currently going through economic tough times. The price of maize flour – the staple food for most of the country’s poor – has increased 250% in less than one year, from 48 shillings for a 2kg packet in December 2007 to 120 shillings in November 2008. The rapid price rises are attributable to high global food prices and poor local harvests. Many stores have no remaining stocks of maize flour, while others are rationing sales.

At the same time, Kenya’s export income is taking a battering. In recent times, Kenya’s largest source of export income has been tea, but auction prices for tea have dropped by up to 60% since September, largely because of a fall-off in consumer demand attributable to the global financial crisis. One of Kenya’s major markets, Pakistan, is facing significant financial difficulties and unable to pay for tea imports.

For many people in the US and other western countries, a recession is a substantial inconvenience. Some people lose their jobs, some people lose their houses, most people have less money to spend, numerous businesses go bankrupt, and many people lose some or all of their savings. In poorer countries, a recession has even more devastating effects for many people.

Categories
Past

Grace Darling

Grace Darling was born on this day 197 years ago in Northumberland, England. The daughter of a lighthouse keeper, Grace became famous at the age of 22, after an incident which occurred in the early hours of 7 September 1838. Looking from the upstairs window of the Longstone Lighthouse on the Farne Islands, she spotted some survivors of a shipwreck on a nearby rock.

The weather was too extreme for a lifeboat to be launched from the mainland, so Grace and her father set off from the lighthouse at around 7am in a rowing boat. Staying to the lee of the islands, they traversed a distance of about half a mile to reach the survivors. Grace’s father leapt onto the rock to assist the nine survivors while Grace took the oars and held the boat off from the rock. They took five of the survivors back with them in the first trip, including a woman whose two sons had drowned and a man who was badly injured.

Grace’s father then returned with two of the men to collect the remaining four from the rock. As news of the rescue spread, the story soon caught the national imagination, and Grace became a folk heroine. Queen Victoria gave her an award for her courageous actions, and she received numerous letters asking for locks of her hair or scraps of the dress she wore during the rescue. Grace died of tuberculosis four years later, but the legend lived on.

Categories
Faith

Hanging round with seedy people

One of the greatest discrepancies between Christianity as it is practised in the West today and Christianity as it was practised by Jesus is in the type of people who form part of the Christian crowd. By and large churches are filled with respectable people who hang round with respectable people. Most Christians don’t want to have drunkards or criminals or drug addicts or other undesirables loitering round their churches.

There are good reasons why churches want to keep undesirables away: churches want to provide safe environments for children; they don’t want to incur the costs of replacing items which could get broken; and so on. Inappropriate behaviour by a few can tear a community apart. Church leaders should not associate with disreputable people. The problem is that Jesus had different priorities, as illustrated by Luke 7:36-50.

It must have been very embarrassing when a woman of disreputable character started getting intimate with Jesus’s feet in a relatively public place. People would have been encouraged to think that maybe Jesus was involved in the disreputable activities in which the woman engaged. But Jesus made it clear that the issue was not his own safety or reputation: he had been called to serve sinners, just as Christians have today, and that means hanging round with them, regardless of the consequences.

Categories
Books

How simple can church be?

The way we do conventional church is no longer relevant to the vast majority of unchurched people in the West, according to Floyd McClung in his book You See Bones, I See an Army. “No-one will die for a cause that is no bigger than Sunday-oriented, building-fixated Christianity.” Instead, we need to learn from believers in the rest of the world where the church is an army rather than an institution, and it consists of simple organic communities.

McClung, who leads a multi-cultural church-planting movement in South Africa called All Nations, elaborates on five core beliefs that guide his life: Simple Church, which consists of easily-reproducible small groups of Jesus-followers; Courageous Leadership, which is team-based and focuses on guarding, governing and guiding; Focused Obedience, which avoids distractions from the core mission; Apostolic Passion, involving a high level of commitment; and Making Disciples, which should be the heart of everything.

Although I found considerable resonance with many of the ideas in the book, I found it an uncomfortable experience, and it took quite a bit of effort to read all the way through. The simplicity of the simple church model he advocates seems a bit too extreme for my liking, but I think that this is an important book which offers a perceptive critique of contemporary churches, and it should be on every church leader’s reading list.

Categories
Poverty

Microfinance is not working

The Kenyan government’s Youth Enterprise Fund, which was supposed to help young unemployed Kenyans start small microfinance projects, is struggling to find young people who can comply with the conditions necessary to access funding. I can recall seeing President Kibaki launching the fund on Kenyan TV. At the time it was made clear that there would be strict penalties for those who took loans and failed to repay them.

In my experience, in spite of all the things which are said in its favour, microfinance is usually unsuccessful in helping people escape from poverty. This is because poverty cannot be solved until the factors which cause poverty are addressed. If things such as corruption, illness, war, crime, and famine are not eliminated, any money which a person earns gets siphoned off to pay for these things, leaving the person in poverty.

If it is impossible in a particular cultural environment for a person with no capital to accumulate wealth, then it is usually impossible in the same cultural environment for a person with a small amount of capital to accumulate wealth. By far the most common result is that the borrowed money gets siphoned away by the negative environmental factors, and the person is left as poor as before, but with the additional burden of a substantial debt.

Categories
Future

The future of Burma

According to Andrew Selth, as long as the Burmese armed forces remain united and loyal, it is difficult to see how the regime can be removed from power. There is no easy end in sight for Burma’s problems. “The US and EU countries have taken the hardest line, condemning the regime and imposing tough economic sanctions. Others… have pursued ‘constructive engagement’ in the hope that quiet diplomacy and trade would encourage political and economic reforms. The UN has tried to act as an honest broker, by promoting reconciliation between the regime and the opposition movement, led by Aung San Suu Kyi.”

None of these strategies have achieved their aims, and as indicated by the harsh sentences meted out to those who took part in last year’s pro-democracy demonstrations, the military junta have no intention of bowing to internal or external pressures. No-one seems interested in invading the country to effect “regime change”, so it is difficult to see any way in which things can get better for the people of Burma.

Selth argues that, “instead of looking for new ways to punish an entrenched and nationalistic regime, a more constructive approach might be to provide increased humanitarian aid to those communities, both inside and outside Burma, which desperately need help.” However, at the same time he admits that the regime makes the delivery of humanitarian aid very difficult, restricting access to those in greatest need and siphoning off foreign aid for its own benefit.