Advocating for Justice

An Evangelical Vision for Transforming Systems and Structures

Bronkema, F. David, Davis, Robb, Offutt, Stephen, Okesson, Gregg, Vaillancourt Murphy, Krisanne

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781493403547
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Christians are increasingly interested in justice issues. Relief and development work are important, but beyond that is a need for advocacy. This book shows how transforming systems and structures results in lasting change, providing theological rationale and strategies of action for evangelicals passionate about justice. Each of the authors contributes both academic expertise and extensive practical experience to help readers debate, discuss, and discern more fully the call to evangelical advocacy. They also guide readers into prayerful, faithful, and wise processes of advocacy, especially in relation to addressing poverty.

Part 1: The Problem Defined

1
An Evangelical Approach to Advocacy

Definitions and Underpinnings

Rachel is a widow in present-day Uganda. She and her children are being kicked off their land because they do not have a formal land title. Laws that prioritize male inheritance allowed her dead husband’s nephew to claim the house as his own. Unwilling to enter into an exploitive and abusive relationship, Rachel and her children beg on the street for food.

Rachel’s story, and others like it in many parts of the globe, is strikingly similar to that of Naomi and Ruth of the Old Testament. When death took Naomi’s husband and sons, it meant a life of poverty for her and Ruth, her daughter-in-law. Ruth, however, found favor with Boaz, a farm owner who allowed her to “glean” from his fields, a practice of taking leftovers from the harvest that God had enshrined into law to protect the poor (Lev. 23:22). Boaz, therefore, used this power to guarantee the application of God’s legislation.

Not everyone uses power as wisely as Boaz. In fact, just about anybody who has worked with the poor (or watched the news) has witnessed power being used illegally, unfairly, or unproductively. Misuse of power in these situations either causes or perpetuates the poverty at hand. It might be a landlord who is not making needed repairs to an apartment, gangs that demand protection payments, neighborhoods that outlaw homeless shelters, police who inappropriately use force or demand bribes, poor communities without funds for primary education because of structural adjustment policies in the global South, trade agreements negotiated through threats, or women being beaten with impunity. In each case, people with power are impoverishing and dehumanizing those who cannot fend for themselves and who do not have a seat at the table.

Evangelical Christians who come face-to-face with such injustices are forced into prayerful decisions: Is God calling us to become involved in the often-risky business of “advocacy”? Ought we to engage the power of the government, whether through the police, the courts, the bureaucracy, or the legislature, to right these wrongs? If so, how can we approach advocacy in ways that glorify God? Far too often, evangelicals do not know how to answer these questions. As a result, we either do nothing, thus committing sins of omission, or we do things that are neither effective nor God honoring.

We, the authors, believe that Christians are called to political engagement on behalf of others. Thus this book has two main objectives. The first is to help evangelical Christians debate, discuss, and discern more fully the nature and scope of God’s call to evangelical advocacy and to open themselves up to following that call. The second is to guide evangelicals responding to that call into advocacy work that is prayerful, faithful, and wise.

To accomplish these goals, we divide the book into three major sections. First, we explain the evangelical community’s current relationship with advocacy and how we came to be in this situation. Second, we lay out a theology of advocacy, exploring the nature of God as it relates to concepts of advocacy. Finally, we provide practical lessons and narrate experiences showing how a faith community might strengthen its relationship with the Triune God and be faithful in its call to advocacy. In this chapter we begin by explaining what we mean by certain words and concepts that are important to our narrative.

What Is Advocacy?

The word “advocacy,” like all powerful words and labels, is used in different ways. The word has been significantly “depoliticized” in evangelical circles, especially when evangelical definitions are compared to the word’s technical definition and how it is used in human rights movements around the world. The more common political definition, which we use as the basis for our approach in this book, better serves a discussion of effective, holistic advocacy.

Depoliticized Definitions

“Advocacy” in evangelical circles often signifies a personal approach. It connotes a volunteer role such as that of a donor, sponsor, or one who commits time to the cause of an organization. In these cases, the word chosen is a noun—a person may be an “advocate”—rather than a verb. Compassion International’s child sponsorship program, for example, uses this definition and approach,1 with a robust “brand advocacy” department encouraging supporters to invite others to get involved in the cause of remedying child poverty. Here advocacy is about raising awareness and encouraging others to do so, aiding one person in need, or directing one’s time, talent, and resources toward a certain cause or issue. This cause-marketing approach bases its work on the premise that if more people know about a crisis, more can be done. The rationale behind personal advocacy is the belief that once an issue, in this case child suffering, is better understood, more money and resources will be dedicated to alleviating the problem. This model has been hugely successful for Compassion International, greatly enhancing its ability to lift children, one by one, out of some of the most impoverished places around the globe.

A second use of the word “advocacy” in evangelical circles is similar to the first but has a more professional orientation. Advocacy in this sense seeks support for a particular cause and begins to incorporate policy-related elements. Organizations like World Vision, for example, hire professional staff to “advocate” for government grants or to promote the interests of the organization. (We note in later chapters other innovative and grassroots forms of advocacy in which World Vision is engaged.) This implies an engagement with the state by lobbyists who are trying to win bids for important project support. Such activities are considered necessary because of the competitive process of influencing Congress and the officials of a presidential administration concerning critical budget and policy decisions. World Vision became involved in this type of advocacy earlier than most. Their office personnel in Washington, DC, started “in the early 1980s to do ‘professional advocacy’ and pre-position World Vision to get US government grants and bring the needs of children to policy makers.”2 In sum, depoliticized approaches to advocacy have been useful in allowing faith-based organizations to reach certain organizational objectives and, ultimately, serve greater numbers of the poor and vulnerable in societies around the world.

Political Definitions

The problem with this, however, is that the use of the term “advocacy” to connote a depoliticized, primarily financial and personnel-driven approach is significantly at odds with the etymological, historical, and broader current use of the word. Indeed, the vast sector of organizations engaging governments on a whole host of economic, social, cultural, and political issues has an entirely different idea of what advocacy means. This mainstream approach to advocacy is consistent with the medieval Latin word advocare, which means “to summon to one’s aid.” The word “advocacy” appears in English, possibly for the first time in late Middle English, in the mid-fourteenth century. It is used in conjunction with the word “advocate,” or “one whose profession is to plead cases in a court of justice.”3

Advocacy of this kind is still what the term most commonly means today. Contemporary scholars have thus defined it as “organized efforts and actions [intended] . . . to influence public attitudes and to enact and implement laws and public policies so that visions of ‘what should be’ in a just, decent society become a reality.”4 Another technical definition argues that advocacy is “an organized political process that involves the coordinated efforts of people to change policies, practices, ideas, and values that perpetuate inequality, prejudice and exclusion.”5 Such definitions clearly take advocacy in directions that are different from how many evangelical organizations currently use the term.

The Underpinnings of the Political Definition of Advocacy

An awareness of the political dimensions of any work in social change underpins the political definition and understanding of advocacy work. Witness, for example, this testimony from an American Christian who previously spent time in Guatemala:

I believed that if Guatemalan children needed a school, then the local church could open one, and volunteer groups could partner with local churches by assisting in construction and providing student sponsorships. However, if the community lacked a school due to corruption in the local municipality or central government, was our help just enabling the government to continue in its injustice? How should we have balanced the need to address institutional injustice, the children’s immediate educational needs, and the fact that challenging government corruption could take years? Unfortunately, we did not know any veteran expatriates, or even Guatemalan brothers and sisters who were wrestling with these issues. If I were in Guatemala today, the questions I would be asking would be much deeper in substance and the relational connections I would pursue would be much broader in context.6

Structural issues lie at the root of reflective engagement with poverty. The prevalence of these issues shows how contexts in need of relief or development also need advocacy or policy work. Without the latter set of activities, the root causes of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: The Problem: Defined
• Part 2: An Evangelical Theology of: Advocacy
• Part 3: An Evangelical Practice of: Advocacy
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Case Studies in Evangelical Advocacy
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover