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Epp Weaver and Smith Cain, “Outside Agencies Do Not Bring Development:” Mennonite Central  

Committee and the Decades-Long Challenge of Decolonizing Aid  7 

 

“Outside Agencies Do Not Bring Development:” 

 Mennonite Central Committee and the 

Decades-Long Challenge of Decolonizing Aid 

 

Alain Epp Weaver and Emma Smith Cain1 

 
 

Contemporary calls to “decolonize aid” have historical roots. In this article, the authors focus on 

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) as a case study of how one Christian humanitarian, 

development, and peacebuilding agency has grappled for at least five decades with how to carry out 

its mission in a way that abdicates colonial power and fosters mutually transformative partnerships 

with churches and other organizations in the Global South. Exploring how MCC has thought about 

the power it wields offers insights and lessons for other international aid agencies, both Christian and 

non-Christian, about the complexities and opportunities involved in attempts to decolonize aid. 

External and internal pressures to show impact, demonstrate relevance, and ensure compliance with 

standardized policies and procedures have all generated tensions within MCC’s efforts to decolonize 

its work: other international aid agencies, the authors suggest, will encounter similar tensions as they 

work at decolonizing aid. 

 

 
In 1975, Edgar Stoesz, an administrator with 

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), wrote that 

“outside agencies do not bring development” (Stoesz 

1975, 12). This claim reflected a growing understanding 

within MCC in the 1970s that MCC needed to strip 

itself of the illusion that, as an outside agency, it 

“brought development” and to look instead to the 

communities in which MCC operated for visions and 

solutions for addressing community challenges and for 

the knowledge and resources to realize those visions.  

Stoesz’s assertion anticipated contemporary 

discussions and debates within the international aid 

world today. A moral quandary faces international 

humanitarian relief, development, and peacebuilding 

agencies: how can they adequately respond to the 

 
1

 Alain Epp Weaver is a citizen of the United States, racialized as White, whose Swiss-German and German-Russian 

ancestors migrated to the US from what is now Ukraine in the 1870s, settling in South Dakota and Nebraska. He 

previously worked with MCC for over a decade in the occupied Palestinian territories and has directed MCC’s 

planning and learning department since 2009.  

Emma Smith Cain is a citizen of New Zealand, the United States, and the Wahzhazhe (Osage) Nation, a resilient 

Native American tribe based in northeastern Oklahoma. Emma grew up between the ancestral lands of the 

Wahzhazhe along the border of Missouri-Kansas and New Zealand, where her maternal Anglo-Dutch family lives on 

land stolen from the Māori. She has previously worked with World Vision International and Samaritan’s Purse in the 

Democratic Republic of Congo. They are both currently based in MCC US’s Akron, Pennsylvania headquarters. 
2

 For a collection of resources about decolonizing aid, see “Decolonising Aid: A Reading and Resource List” (2022). 

See especially the report from Peace Direct, African Development Solutions (ADESO), Alliance for Peacebuilding, 

and Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security, and Conflict Transformation (WCAPS) (Peace Direct 2021).  

pressing needs generated by armed conflict, climate 

change, mass displacement, extreme poverty, and acute 

food insecurity, responses that require marshalling 

immense financial and human resources, while also 

disentangling themselves from the legacies of 

colonialism in which they find both their origins and 

their current financing? Decolonization has rightly 

become a call to action, including among Christian 

organizations working globally at humanitarian 

assistance, community development, and 

peacebuilding, as aid organizations confront ways in 

which they have too often replicated colonial patterns 

of action.
2

 

The issues that the current call to decolonize aid 

raises are not new for international humanitarian 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Epp Weaver and Smith Cain, “Outside Agencies Do Not Bring Development:” Mennonite Central  

Committee and the Decades-Long Challenge of Decolonizing Aid  8 

organizations. In this article, we focus on MCC as a case 

study for how one Christian aid agency has grappled for 

at least five decades with how to carry out its mission in 

post-colonial contexts.
3

 Exploring how MCC has 

thought about the power it wields and about how to 

strive towards mutually transformative partnerships 

may offer insights and lessons for other international 

aid agencies, both Christian and non-Christian, about 

the complexities and opportunities involved in 

contemporary attempts to decolonize aid. 

For MCC as a Christian organization, this 

grappling with its power and its striving towards 

authentic partnerships marked by mutuality have 

foregrounded vital missiological questions, questions 

about how international Christian aid organizations like 

MCC with roots and primary funding sources in the 

global North might be de-centered, so that we do not 

 
3

 For a more extended examination of MCC’s one-hundred-year-plus history, see Epp Weaver (2020). This book is 

reviewed by Parsons (2023). 

cling to the idolatrous illusion that we are at the center 

of God’s mission, but instead become open to 

encountering Jesus within communities marginalized by 

colonialism’s violent legacies, to recognizing how God’s 

Spirit is at work within those communities, and to 

coming alongside those communities in true 

partnership, relinquishing the need for control. In 

practice, these missiological questions routinely run up 

against and generate multiple operational tensions. 

After a brief summary of contemporary 

discussions of decolonizing aid and the push for 

localization within the international aid sector, this 

article turns towards an examination of historical shifts 

over decades in how MCC understood its call to 

service, with understandings of service transformed 

from primarily unidirectional understandings of service 

as a movement from the Global North to the Global 

MCC as an Organization 

 

Organizational structure, governance, and funding all shape the challenges humanitarian organizations from 

the Global North like MCC face when seeking to decolonize their work. MCC describes itself as a “worldwide 

ministry of Anabaptist churches,” yet in terms of governance it is a Canada-US organization (MCC 2011).  

Structurally, the MCC system for the past decade has consisted of eleven MCC entities in Canada and the United 

States: four regional MCC entities in the US, bound in a covenantal relationship with MCC US; five provincial 

MCC entities in Canada connected through an agreement with MCC Canada; and MCC Canada and MCC US 

jointly owning and administering MCC’s program in 45 countries outside Canada and the US. For most of its 

history, MCC’s headquarters for its international program work was Akron, Pennsylvania; today, both Akron and 

Winnipeg, Manitoba, serve as these headquarters (even as “headquarters” staff have become increasingly 

geographically dispersed, a reality made possible by technological advancements and accelerated during the 

COVID-19 pandemic). 

At a governance level, MCC is accountable to boards with strong representation from Anabaptist churches in 

Canada and the US and with participation in board meetings by representatives from Mennonite World 

Conference (MWC), a global fellowship of Anabaptist churches. During an organizational restructuring process 

from 2009-2011, MCC had discussions with MWC and the service agencies of national Anabaptist churches 

worldwide about the possibility of these agencies coming together in a truly global agency. The strong voice from 

those consultations was that MCC should remain a relief, development, and peacebuilding agency of Anabaptist 

churches in the US and Canada in its governance. In different ways and with varying degrees of success, MCC 

boards in Canada and the US have sought to become less White and more representative of the racial and ethnic 

diversity of Anabaptist churches in the US and Canada. 

MCC’s primary source of funding is from Anabaptist communities in the US and Canada—donations from 

individuals and congregations, income from thrift stores and relief sales, and contributions of material resources 

such as school kits, relief buckets, comforters, and canned meat. The second largest source of revenue comes 

from the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFGB), of which MCC Canada is a founding member. Individual donors 

contribute to MCC’s CFGB account, with CFGB food aid and food security initiatives matched by Global Affairs 

Canada. Last year, MCC supported almost US$13M in food security and food aid projects via its CFGB account. 

While MCC has programmed and continues to program projects funded by governmental and inter-

governmental donors such as EuropeAid and the World Food Program, MCC’s global programs have not 

depended on such grants to stay operational, giving it more flexibility to follow the vision and plans of its local 

partners globally. 

 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Epp Weaver and Smith Cain, “Outside Agencies Do Not Bring Development:” Mennonite Central  

Committee and the Decades-Long Challenge of Decolonizing Aid  9 

South into service as a posture of presence and 

solidarity, with the hope of mutually-transformative 

partnerships. We conclude with reflections on 

enduring tensions MCC faces as it seeks to decolonize 

its work and to be led by the visions of its partners in 45 

countries around the world, tensions that we suggest 

point to conundrums that international aid actors face 

if they attempt to take the call to decolonize aid 

seriously. 

 

Decolonizing Aid, Localizing Action 
Colonization, as an historical process, violently 

imposed external political, cultural, economic, social 

values, and practices on communities in order to 

facilitate the transfer of vast resources from those 

communities to the colonizing powers. These often 

centuries-long systematic practices altered forever 

communities’ sense of identity, knowledge, and cultural 

practices. Today, these imposed values and practices 

form the foundations of contemporary global power 

structures. 

The process of colonization rendered many 

affected communities more vulnerable to disasters and 

humanitarian emergencies through the extraction of 

resources and the external imposition of political and 

social systems. Moreover, contemporary community 

conflicts are often rooted in the legacies of colonialism 

and the trauma of the erasure of indigenous cultural 

norms and practices. Yet, the former colonizing powers 

are the primary funders of most aid responses 

(spanning the humanitarian relief, development, and 

peacebuilding spectrum), giving them disproportionate 

power over the design and prioritization of 

programming. Today, a growing movement led by 

Global South-based organizations calls for the 

decolonization of the aid industry.  

 Colonialism also communicated an order of 

value, in which the colonizing power’s knowledge, 

practices, and beliefs were coded as good and forward-

looking while indigenous knowledge, practices, and 

beliefs were coded as bad and backward. Even after 

anticolonial movements in the Global South drove out 

most colonial powers in the mid-twentieth century and 

gained national independence, the racialized, white 

supremacist value systems introduced by colonial 

systems have proven more challenging to uproot, with 

ideas and approaches introduced by actors from the 

Global North often embraced as progressive and 

innovative. International humanitarian relief, 

development, and peacebuilding actors operate within 

these colonial legacies. These legacies place obstacles in 

front of efforts to ensure that humanitarian assistance, 

development, and peacebuilding initiatives are truly 

generated within and owned by local communities 

instead of being imposed upon them. 

Decolonizing aid is about who the primary actors 

are in humanitarian action, but also about how 

humanitarian action is undertaken, and what sources of 

knowledge are drawn upon to shape humanitarian 

action. Efforts to localize humanitarian action—

commonly referred to simply as localization—have 

sought to address the question of who undertakes 

humanitarian action by calling on governmental, inter-

governmental and international non-governmental 

donors to direct more assistance directly to local actors 

(even as the localization agenda has been unevenly 

translated from rhetoric into reality). The Organization 

for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 

defines localization as the process of international 

humanitarian actors recognizing, respecting, and 

strengthening the leadership of local authorities and the 

capacity of local civil society in humanitarian action, in 

order to better address the needs of affected 

populations and to prepare national actors for future 

humanitarian responses. A step in this direction was 

taken in 2016, when the world’s largest humanitarian 

donor governments, multi-lateral organizations, and 

international aid agencies convened at the World 

Humanitarian Summit. Their discussions, which were 

sparsely attended by local and national actors, resulted 

in the so-called “Grand Bargain,” an agreement which 

sought to make humanitarian action more efficient and 

“level the playing field where all meet as equals” (Inter-

Agency Standing Committee). 

The Grand Bargain had nine thematic 

workstreams, two of which were exclusively focused on 

localizing humanitarian action. Workstream 2, for 

example, called for more support and tools for local 

and national responders and set a target of channeling 

25% of aid directly to those local and national actors by 

2020. Workstream 6 called for a “participation 

revolution” to include people receiving aid in making 

the decisions that affect their lives. Yet in the years 

following 2016, little progress has been made towards 

localization. The 2020 Global Humanitarian Assistance 

report shows that more than four years after the Grand 

Bargain, donor agencies allocated only 2.1% of their 

funding to local and national responders, a far cry from 

the targeted 25%. Now, a 2.0 version of the Grand 

Bargain agreement has been signed with an even greater 

focus on localization—yet progress is still stalled. If part 

of decolonizing aid involves redirecting funding to 

support locally-owned and -led initiatives, scant 

progress has been made. 

For MCC, the shift away from direct 

implementation of humanitarian relief, development 

and peacebuilding initiatives towards localized 

partnerships began already in the 1970s. Today, MCC’s 

primary global programming model involves 

partnerships with churches, church-related agencies, 

community-based organizations, and national non-



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Epp Weaver and Smith Cain, “Outside Agencies Do Not Bring Development:” Mennonite Central  

Committee and the Decades-Long Challenge of Decolonizing Aid  10 

governmental organizations (NGOs). To say that MCC 

began to localize its efforts decades before the global 

call for localization emerged is not hyperbole. This 

article’s ensuing sections trace the history of those 

efforts, while also examining how MCC’s long history 

of localizing its work does not free it either from the 

imperative to decolonize aid or the tensions involved in 

that ongoing work. 

 

From Service as Alternative to War to 

Service as Listening and Presence 
MCC began in 1920 as an inter-church response 

by diverse Mennonite groups in the United States and 

Canada to a call from Mennonites in southern Russia 

(Ukraine today) to provide food assistance in the face 

of revolution and famine. Established only a couple 

years after the conclusion of a global war, MCC 

galvanized the idealism of young Mennonites who 

viewed Christian relief efforts as a positive form of 

Christian service, both as an alternative to the self-

sacrifice of military service and as a positive witness to 

Christ’s way of peace.
4

 

MCC’s role as a mechanism through which young 

Mennonites undertook humanitarian service as an 

alternative to military service intensified during and 

then in the decades after the Second World War. 

Throughout World War II, MCC administered scores 

of Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps in the United 

States, through which thousands of Mennonite, Amish, 

Church of the Brethren, Quaker, and other 

conscientious objectors carried out state-sanctioned 

alternatives to military service, including staffing mental 

hospitals, fighting fires, and volunteering for medical 

experiments. Many young Mennonite women also 

served at or near CPS camps. 

After the war, MCC oversaw the Mennonite 

Voluntary Service program in the United States, 

through which young Mennonite men engaged in 

alternative service assignments as the mandatory draft 

continued. MCC also launched its Pax program (1951-

1976), another alternative service program, but global. 

While many “Pax men” and other MCC workers in the 

war’s immediate aftermath worked on a variety of 

reconstruction and refugee response projects in post-

war Europe, the 1950s were a time of rapid expansion 

for MCC globally, with the organization opening up 

MCC programs across Latin America, Africa, and Asia 

in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, MCC initiated its 

Teachers Abroad Program (TAP, inaugurated in 1962 

and closed in 1985), through which MCC placed 768 

teachers in Christian and government schools in 27 

 
4

 Throughout this article, we use “Mennonites” as a generic category encompassing a wide variety of Christian groups, 

including Mennonite, Mennonite Brethren, Conservative Mennonite, Brethren in Christ, multiple Amish groups, and 

more. 

countries around the world, with most TAP participants 

serving in newly independent countries. Both Pax and 

TAP were established during a period of anticolonial 

ferment and successful national independence 

movements. Over the course of their service terms 

(typically two to three years), Pax and TAP participants 

inevitably confronted questions about what global 

Christian service looked like within post-colonial 

contexts. 

The 1970s saw the start of a multi-decade creative 

ferment and rethinking within MCC about the nature 

of service, with questions raised about who benefits 

from Christian service. In 1976, for example, Urbane 

Peachey, then MCC’s Peace Section executive secretary 

and Middle East director, penned a provocative article 

for MCC’s internal publication, Intercom, titled 

“Service—Who Needs It?” “We’ve really done our best 

to send skilled personnel who could make a needed 

contribution,” Peachey wrote, “but now there are a 

number of countries which are interested in our aid but 

not our personnel.” Peachey urged MCC to ask itself: 

“Who is asking for the relationship? With whose needs 

are we primarily concerned?” Was MCC concerned 

with the need of Mennonites from Canada and the US 

to serve, or with the self-identified priorities of churches 

and communities in the countries where MCC 

operated (which might not include the placement of 

workers from the US and Canada) (Peachey 1976, 5-

6)? Such questions about what role, if any, service 

workers from Canada and the US might fruitfully play 

internationally became more pressing as countries 

around the world gained greater independence from 

former colonial powers, which included the rise of a 

professional class and the growth and development of 

local civil society organizations. As we discuss in the 

next section, the intensity of such questions grew as 

MCC moved from direct program implementation to 

partnership with and accompaniment of local churches 

and civil society organizations. 

Beginning in the mid-1970s, MCC began 

redefining service as learning. Responding to Peachey’s 

1976 Intercom article, Atlee Beechy, a member of 

MCC’s executive committee, wondered whether 

“perhaps it is time to redefine the meaning of service, 

to recognize more fully the two-way dimension of 

service, including the notion that learning from others 

is an act of service” (Beechy 1976, 3). Such pondering 

was accompanied by active debates within MCC during 

the following decades about colonial and racialized 

assumptions about who is serving whom and where, 

with some visions of service critiqued for their implicit 

understanding of service as a unidirectional initiative of 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Epp Weaver and Smith Cain, “Outside Agencies Do Not Bring Development:” Mennonite Central  

Committee and the Decades-Long Challenge of Decolonizing Aid  11 

White Mennonites of European heritage to the rest of 

the world.  

Reflecting on these debates in the late 1990s, Judy 

Zimmerman Herr summarized the concerns about 

service in the form of questions: “Does being in a giving 

posture demean those we send our help to? . . . Is our 

service really an expression of power? How do we 

prevent our service from becoming an attitude of self-

righteousness?” (Zimmerman Herr 1998, 3). 

Moreover, in service assignments in places like Atlanta, 

New Orleans, and Gulfport, Mississippi, MCC workers 

encountered the stark reality of racism in the United 

States. Beyond the U.S., MCC workers also began to 

highlight MCC’s organizational Whiteness and the 

racialized character of MCC’s global service, with 

predominantly White Mennonites from Canada and 

the US going out to the primarily Black and Brown 

countries of the Global South. 

Probing questions about service and power in the 

seventies and eighties led to a redefinition within MCC 

of service as learning and presence. So, for example, 

Bertha Beachy, a long-time Mennonite worker in 

Somalia, wrote in 1978 that Christian service workers 

needed to adopt the stance of being “eternal learners” 

and to participate in “the rhythm of people’s lives” 

(Beechy 1978). The redefinition of service as learning 

was crystallized in a 1986 review of MCC Africa’s work 

led by Tim Lind. “Africans have suffered under 

centuries of words and theories of change/development 

coming from the North,” Lind observed. “It is in this 

context that servanthood for us today means 

abandoning all of the good and useful things we have to 

say in Africa in favor of a listening stance.” MCC 

workers from Canada and the US, Lind argued, needed 

to take a “back seat” and adopt a “waiting” posture. 

Revisioning service as listening and learning, Lind 

recognized,  

 

may seem to some less than exciting and 

creative, particularly as it involves a shift in our 

thinking about ourselves as initiators and 

planners of activities and responses to need. 

However,” he continued, “we feel that this 

posture is in fact highly creative as it allows 

space and visibility to approaches to service 

and development which are different from our 

Western approaches, and which can mix with 

our own approaches in new and exciting ways 

(Lind 1986, 1-2). 

 

This reconceptualization in the seventies and 

eighties of service as a multidirectional movement of 

listening, learning, and sharing has shaped MCC service 

programs up to the present. This new understanding of 

service was reflected in the name adopted by MCC 

when it inaugurated an eleven-month service program 

in the early 1980s for young adults from Canada and 

the US to the rest of the world: Serving and Learning 

Together (SALT). In later years, the Serving with 

Appalachian Peoples (SWAP) program, operated by 

MCC in Kentucky and West Virginia, changed its name 

to Sharing with Appalachian Peoples. Jean Snyder, an 

MCC worker in Jamaica in the mid-1980s, emphasized 

that without a learning stance, service work threatened 

to devolve into pointless activity: “Unless we learn from 

the people themselves . . . who they are and why they 

see themselves, the world, us and God as they do, we 

have little to offer them but our busyness,” she 

explained. “And our busyness may, in the long run, 

have more relevance to our monthly reports than to the 

lives we touch” (Snyder 1986, 2). 

The MCC understanding of service as presence 

took on additional nuances from the seventies into the 

nineties, with presence described as a form of solidarity 

as well as a site of mutual transformation. A 1976 MCC 

board statement underscored the expectation of MCC 

workers “being in solidarity and identifying with the 

weak and oppressed” (MCC Statement… 1976). 

Indigenous leaders in Canada called on MCC workers 

placed in First Nations communities to become 

“partners in the cause,” with the “being there” of 

presence understood as a political act (MCC Ontario 

Consultation on Native Ministries 1982). MCC workers 

in Latin America stood in solidarity with Indigenous 

and economically marginalized communities facing 

violence and repression from right-wing governments 

and corporate interests, while in the occupied 

Palestinian territories MCC workers forged bonds of 

solidarity with Palestinian and Israeli peace activists who 

mobilized against Israeli military occupation and settler-

colonialism. 

Describing service as presence or even solidarity 
could still arguably be interpreted as foregrounding the 

agency of MCC workers, implicitly placing them at the 

center of God’s mission. As a counter to such an 

implicit understanding of presence, MCC began in the 

1990s to describe service in terms of mutuality, mutual 
transformation, and gift giving, reflecting how 

approaches of presence and solidarity sought to 

underscore the agency, talents, and resources of the 

communities in which MCC operated. In its 1993 

statement outlining “A Commitment to Christ’s Way of 

Peace,” MCC articulated this understanding of service 

as mutual gift-sharing thus: “We recognize our own 

spiritual and moral poverty and seek to receive the gifts 

that others, some of whom may be materially poorer 

than we are, have to share with us” (“A Commitment to 

Christ’s Way of Peace” 1993). In a 1999 brochure 

summarizing the Principles that Guide Our Mission, 

MCC described itself as serving “as a channel of 

interchange by building relationships that are mutually 

transformative” and as facilitating “interchange and 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Epp Weaver and Smith Cain, “Outside Agencies Do Not Bring Development:” Mennonite Central  

Committee and the Decades-Long Challenge of Decolonizing Aid  12 

mutual learning between its supporting constituency 

and those with whom we work around the world, so that 

all may give and receive” (Principles that Guide Our 
Mission 1999). 

Multiple MCC service programs over the decades 

have also sought to transform the face of who engages 

in service, an ongoing commitment that can be viewed 

as an effort to decolonize service. For much of MCC’s 

history, “service” was associated with images of 

predominantly White people from Canada and the 

United States being “sent” to the Global South. Yet 

relatively early on in MCC’s history, MCC took 

tentative steps to disrupt such a colonial understanding 

of service. The International Volunteer Exchange 

Program (IVEP) established in 1950, for example, 

introduced elements of mutuality and exchange in 

service, at first providing European Mennonites with 

one-year service opportunities in the United States and 

Canada as a complement to the Pax alternative service 

program. Over the ensuing years, the program 

expanded to welcome participants from scores of 

countries, primarily from the Global South. Beginning 

in 2004 and continuing up to the present, the Young 

Anabaptist Mennonite Exchange Network (YAMEN) 

has operated in partnership with Mennonite World 

Conference, offering eleven-month service 

opportunities for young adults outside of Canada and 

the US to other parts of the Majority World, 

opportunities through which the global church shares 

gifts of service with one another. Meanwhile, an 

increasing percentage of MCC’s multi-year workers, 

including program administrators, come from outside 

Canada and the United States.  

Service within MCC has (albeit slowly and 

incompletely) shifted from a unidirectional movement 

from the Global North to the Global South to a 

multidirectional movement of global sending and 

receiving. At the same time, MCC program teams have 

become increasingly multicultural, with expanded and 

more prominent attention to the staff roles of in-country 

nationals and with greater globalization of program 

leadership. 
 

From Direct Implementation to Local 

Partnerships 
The transformed understanding of service within 

MCC as listening, presence, solidarity, and mutual 

transformation went hand-in-hand with another 

 
5

 Even as Snyder envisioned movement beyond a paternalistic, colonial paradigm, his reference to “underdeveloped” 

countries reflected the paternalism built into modernist understandings of development as a linear, progressive 

movement towards a Western ideal. 
6

Stoesz’s statement begged the question of what the markers were of MCC feeling “compatible” with local 

organizations. Did these local partnerships simply consist of MCC seeking out its own reflection, or did they have 

room for potentially disruptive difference? 

transformation, a shift from MCC directly 

implementing projects to supporting projects planned 

and implemented by local churches and community-

based organizations. The seeds of this shift were 

planted in the 1960s, as MCC leaders rethought 

mission patterns in light of post-colonial realities. 

“Some overseas efforts in missions and relief have been 

characterized by a paternalism similar to the attitude of 

western nations in the so-called colonial period,” 

observed MCC Executive Director William Snyder in 

1963. “The winds of change toward political 

independence have likewise affected the churches and 

mission programs in the underdeveloped countries. 

Missionaries and relief workers today must adopt a true 

servant relationship to these younger churches…” 

Snyder concluded (1963, 3).
5

 

Painting with very broad strokes, MCC program 

director Edgar Stoesz wrote in 1976 in MCC’s internal 

publication Intercom that  

 

North American agencies used to go around 

running their own programs, using their own 

personnel and doing pretty well as they 

pleased. Eventually the error of that approach 

became obvious and we began to have a great 

deal of respect for the indigenous process. 

Now, we much prefer to identify an existing 

agency with which we feel compatible and 

support it with personnel or money, 

permitting it to enlarge its effort (Stoesz 1976, 

1-2).
6

  

 

Also in 1976, MCC’s board affirmed the 

importance of learning from and supporting local 

organizations. “Our involvements will take place in a 

spirit of mutual respect, realizing that we must put as 

much effort into learning as we do into teaching,” the 

board declared (“MCC Statement on Program 

Assumptions, Objectives and Priorities” 1976, 181-82). 

Instead of viewing development as a unilateral process 

in which knowledge and skills are transferred from 

agencies like MCC to communities in so-called 

underdeveloped countries, this MCC board statement 

instead presented development as “based on local 

capacity and self-reliance” (Ibid., B.3). 

From the late seventies into the nineties, these 

emerging understandings of development within MCC 

steadily gained traction. Alongside descriptions of 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Epp Weaver and Smith Cain, “Outside Agencies Do Not Bring Development:” Mennonite Central  

Committee and the Decades-Long Challenge of Decolonizing Aid  13 

service with the vocabulary of presence and solidarity, 

MCC leaders increasingly began talking about its 

programmatic operations as partnership and 

accompaniment.  

Several interconnected and mutually reinforcing 

factors contributed to this shift. First, MCC’s 

experiences in the 1960s in post-colonial contexts in 

which nationalist movements in newly independent 

countries charted new visions for national liberation 

and development pushed MCC to begin revisioning 

how it positioned itself in these contexts, stepping back 

from viewing itself as a lead agent for change to instead 

recognize that the primary energies and leadership for 

change came from within communities themselves. 

Second, the rise in the seventies and eighties of civil 

society organizations such as farmers’ associations, 

women’s cooperatives, and social service agencies of 

national churches in many parts of the Global South 

pressed MCC to consider how it could support and 

accompany these organizations as they worked to make 

change in their communities. Many MCC programs 

began to shift in this period away from directly 

implementing program towards partnership with local 

churches, church agencies, and community-based 

organizations, partnerships in which MCC looked to 

local actors to set the vision, bring the needed 

knowledge of the community and context, and establish 

and implement plans for humanitarian action. In the 

2000s, MCC began using the language of 

accompaniment to name this partnership stance. 

Third, within broader missiological circles, a 

rethinking of Christian mission was gaining steam, with 

a shift in emphasis away from sending missionaries 

from the Global North to the Global South toward a 

focus on how churches in both the Global North and 

the Global South might together join in the missio Dei, 
God’s reconciling mission in the world. This 

transformation of mission thinking meant a disruption 

of paternalistic relationships between European and 

North American mission agencies, on the one hand, 

and churches in the Global South, on the other, and the 

beginning of halting efforts to develop mutual mission 

partnerships between the churches of the Global North 

and the Global South, with mission moving in 

crisscrossing directions globally.
7

 

Finally, the failure of modernization theory to live 

up to its promises led MCC and other international 

development actors in the seventies and eighties to 

reassess their development models and search for 

alternatives. While modernization theory had held that 

countries of the Global South would accrue steadily 

 
7

 See, for example, Bosch 1991. 
8

 For discussions and analysis of MCC’s community development efforts within the broader context of shifting 

development discourses, see Davis (2010) Guenther and Reimer (2010, 353-74). 

expanding benefits and improved livelihoods through 

the adoption of Western-style institutions in the realms 

of education, health, and economic systems, reality did 

not live up to the heralded vision.
8

 Development 

initiatives informed by modernization theory depended 

on centralized interventions by the state or external 

agencies, such as the United Nations or international 

non-governmental organizations like MCC. As a 

counter to such top-down development, MCC program 

leaders began in the 1970s to champion visions of 

development as emerging from community-led and 

community-owned processes.  

In a series of “Development Monographs” and in 

several Occasional Papers released in the seventies and 

eighties, MCC leaders like Stoesz, Heisey, and Lind 

advanced this bottom-up model of development while 

critiquing the optimism that drove modernization 

theory. For example, in surveying the development 

programs promoted across Africa from the 1950s into 

the 1970s, MCC Africa director Lind highlighted the 

“continuing failure of planning to accurately predict 

consequences of specific actions or to foresee new 

problems created by new technology.” These ongoing 

failures, Lind underscored, should “temper” any 

residual optimism about the efficacy of such centralized 

development measures (Lind 1977-78, 19). Countering 

models that equated development with 

industrialization, modernization, and Westernization, 

MCC program leaders in the seventies and eighties 

drew upon the work of the Brazilian educator, Paulo 

Freire, and his notion of conscientization, a pedagogy 

of popular consciousness-raising in which students, not 

teachers, are viewed as the primary actors in the 

learning process (Freire 1970). 

Reflecting on what she described as the failure of 

school systems set up by missionary and colonial 

authorities in Africa to deliver Western-style 

development, MCC Africa program leader Heisey 

turned to Freire’s idea of conscientization as well as to 

the notion of de-schooling advanced by the Austrian-

Croatian priest and educator, Ivan Illich, to promote an 

understanding of education and development as 

community-led processes, rather than primarily as 

interventions organized by the state or by international 

actors (Heisey 1977 and Illich 1971). 

Stoesz also built on Freire’s work in defining 

development as “a people’s struggle in which the poor 

and oppressed are the active participants and 

beneficiaries,” a “conscientization process by which 

people are awakened to opportunities within their 

reach.” Instead of requiring external intervention, 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Epp Weaver and Smith Cain, “Outside Agencies Do Not Bring Development:” Mennonite Central  

Committee and the Decades-Long Challenge of Decolonizing Aid  14 

development emerging from conscientization, Stoesz 

argued, “begins as an attitude in the hearts and minds 

of people,” building on their existing knowledge and 

driven by their own initiative (Stoesz 1977, 3-4). Merrill 

Ewert, who served as project coordinator for MCC in 

the mid-seventies in what was then Zaire, also drew 

from Freire’s pedagogy of critical consciousness-raising 

in order to articulate a model of development education 

that did not “contribute to domination.” Such a 

Freirean model of development, Ewert explained, 

reconceptualized the role of MCC workers to be 

“facilitators instead of manipulators,” people who did 

“not control decisions or the flow of information,” but 

rather helped “create optimal conditions in which the 

local people can determine their own direction.” In this 

development model, Ewert continued, “there are no 

teachers and learners, advisors and advisees, or experts 

and laypeople—all work together to solve problems” 

(Ewert 1975, 25). 

For MCC, adopting a model of development as 

conscientization meant reconfiguring its own place in 

the development process, taking a step back from 

seeing itself as leading or controlling the development 

process and instead viewing itself as supporting and 

accompanying locally led efforts. “Outside agencies do 

not bring development,” Stoesz emphasized. Rather, he 

continued, development “is an indigenous process 

going on before [agencies like MCC] arrive. At best they 

accelerate its pace; at worst they frustrate it” (Stoesz 

1977, 12). Agencies like MCC, Lind cautioned, “must 

from the very beginning abdicate the executive power 

inherent in its position as implementor or planner” 

(Lind 1977-78, 28). Rather than building up their own 

profile or controlling development processes, Stoesz 

argued, the “highest goal” for MCC and other 

international development organizations should be “to 

strengthen institutions which are locally owned” (Stoesz 

1977, 11). 

 MCC programs in Africa took the lead in adopting 

accompaniment and partnership models of 

development. Beginning in Lesotho in 1980, MCC 

programs in Africa started shifting away from direct 

implementation of relief and development initiatives 

towards what MCC Africa director Lind called 

“relational programming,” or a “community worker 

movement.” Spurred by what Lind and others within 

MCC viewed as the “failure of development activity” 

and by a “disillusionment with development 

institutions,” MCC programming in Africa transitioned 

towards a model of “presence,” involving the long-term 

placement of MCC workers within local communities, 

outside of institutional contexts, and “with an emphasis 

on learning about and developing relationships with 

specific communities and their needs.” These 

“community worker” placements, Lind stressed, were 

not primarily focused on technical implementation of 

projects, but were rather shaped by a “learning stance 

vis-à-vis Africans.” This missiology of presence started 

from the assumption that “program creativity and 

renewal” came not from MCC but rather from African 

communities themselves. MCC’s organizational stance 

within this vision of relational programming was a 

servanthood posture towards African churches. 

Adopting such a posture, Lind stressed, was a “better 

way for us to participate in and respond to problems 

faced by Africans” (Lind 1989, 19). 

If this shift away from implementation toward 

presence and partnership began within MCC’s 

programs in Africa, it quickly expanded to other parts 

of the MCC world. So, for example, the 1980s 

witnessed the establishment of an MCC rural 

development program in the Artibonite Valley in Haiti. 

This program wedded a Freirean pedagogy of 

conscientization with the Haitian tradition of 

communal work days (konbits). Members of MCC’s 

Haitian animation team took on facilitating rather than 

teaching roles as they engaged isolated rural 

communities in Haiti’s rolling mountains and valleys in 

agricultural development initiatives. In a 1989 paper 

describing the MCC Haiti team’s approach, Barry 

Bartel explained that animation entailed a facilitative 

process in which community members themselves 

identified their gifts, resources, and needs and took the 

lead in developing and implementing responses to 

those needs, with MCC playing a supportive role. 

“With their own planning, work, and sacrifice,” Bartel 

contended, “[Haitian communities] will own the 

solution, begin to feel like they can solve their own 

problems, and work to ensure that the solution lasts,” 

with positive impacts continuing long after MCC 

animators had left the community (Bartel 1989, 1-2).  

By the end of the 1980s, this missiology of 

presence and partnership had taken root in MCC 

orientations of new workers and in most MCC 

programs. In his report to the governing board in 1987, 

MCC executive secretary John A. Lapp explained that 

“A ministry of presence suggests that need is best 

defined from the stance of being present rather than by 

strategies inspired by well-developed ideology, media 

headlines or grandiose projects” (Lapp 1987, 2). While 

in modernization models of development the state and 

international aid organizations led the design and 

implementation of large-scale initiatives to improve 

education, health, and livelihoods, in the 

accompaniment and presence models of development, 

MCC took a step back, seeking to support and follow 

the lead of local churches and community-based 

organizations. A desire not to overwhelm and usurp 

local leadership, Reg Toews observed, in turn led to a 

“preference for the small scale. If you make mistakes, 

let them be little mistakes” (Toews 1989). 

 



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Epp Weaver and Smith Cain, “Outside Agencies Do Not Bring Development:” Mennonite Central  

Committee and the Decades-Long Challenge of Decolonizing Aid  15 

Enduring Tensions in Efforts to  

Decolonize Aid 
Embedded within these evolving MCC 

understandings of service and shifting modes of MCC 

programming over the past five decades have been 

questions of power: who holds and exercises power in 

relief, development, and peacebuilding work and how 

can power be shared between an international actor 

such as MCC and the churches and other local and 

national actors it seeks to partner with? Similarly, 

contemporary calls to decolonize aid also involve 

questions of power, including how international NGOs 

(INGOs) might relinquish power and follow the lead of 

local actors. As our historical overview has shown, 

MCC has moved over the past decades, at least in 

principle, to being partner-led. Yet in practice, visions 

of mutually transformative partnerships often take a 

messier form. MCC administrator Lind may have 

called on MCC to “abdicate” leadership of 

development efforts, but efforts to abdicate that power 

run into practical complications and generate multiple 

tensions. 

Over the past two decades, MCC has maintained 

this emphasis on following the lead of local churches 

and community-based organizations in envisioning and 

implementing relief, development, and peacebuilding 

initiatives. Yet following the lead of local partners has 

been complicated by MCC’s adoption of a standardized 

outcomes-based project planning, monitoring, 

evaluation, and reporting (PME) system for the 

purposes of demonstrating the impact of MCC-

supported work and of exercising accountability for the 

use of MCC resources. In this final section, we examine 

some of the tensions that external and internal 

pressures to show impact, demonstrate relevance, and 

ensure compliance with standardized policies and 

procedures have generated within MCC’s efforts to 

follow its partners’ leads. At their root, these tensions 

and complications all arise from the inherent power 

MCC holds by virtue of the financial and other 

resources it controls and to which it has access. These 

complications and tensions, we suggest, have relevance 

beyond MCC—other international actors that seek to 

take the call to decolonize aid seriously will run into 

variations of these challenges. 

 

Pressure to Demonstrate Impact 

Abdicating the executive responsibility for 

implementing development programs, as envisioned by 

Lind in the mid-1970s, meant following the lead of 

communities and local organizations embedded within 

communities in relief, development, and peacebuilding 

 
9

 This standardization requires project plans and reports based on a standard logframe structure. That said, MCC 

looks to partners to identify desired outcomes, indicators, and other elements of the project logframe. 

work, with MCC then accompanying those efforts. How 

would such a partner-led approach fit with results-based 

management (RBM)? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, 

external and internal pressures mounted on MCC to 

adopt an RBM system. Externally, the Canadian 

International Development Agency (CIDA) pushed its 

grantees, like MCC and the Canadian Foodgrains Bank 

(CFGB, an inter-agency body of which MCC Canada 

was a founding member), to plan and report using an 

outcomes-based framework. Internally, MCC’s 

governance boards, along with its donors, increasingly 

wanted more quantifiable information about the impact 

of MCC’s work. As MCC rolled out an RBM system 

for its global relief, development, and peacebuilding 

work in 2004, internal critics worried that that such a 

system would undermine the mutual partnerships 

MCC had sought to cultivate, with RBM viewed as an 

external (perhaps even colonial) imposition on 

partners. “To whom did MCC seek to demonstrate 

impact?,” these critics wondered. “To its boards in 

Canada and the United States? To Mennonite 

churches and individual donors in the Global North? 

To institutional donors, such as the Canadian 

government? What about accountability to partners 

and to project participants?,” some in MCC asked. The 

answers were not obvious. 

MCC program leaders sought to quell anxieties 

about the introduction of RBM by underscoring that 

the development of project plans would be partner-led, 

with local partners identifying the problems they wanted 

to address, developing the plans for initiatives to 

address those problems, identifying the outcomes they 

hoped would materialize through those initiatives and 

setting the indicators they would use to measure 

progress towards those outcomes. Accountability 

fostered by RBM, its defenders argued, was not only or 

even primarily to boards and donors, but to local 

partners and project participants. 

While outcomes-based planning can be (and, at its 

best, is) used in this partner-led way, the inescapable fact 

remains that MCC exercises the power it holds as a 

funder to require that its partners use a standardized 

planning, monitoring, and reporting system they might 

not otherwise choose.
9

 At a minimum, this dynamic 

complicates efforts to decolonize aid. Stated more 

boldly, one could argue that MCC has not found a way 

beyond the tensions (or perhaps contradiction?) 

between standardized outcomes-based planning and 

the effort to decolonize its work. While that fact does 

not completely undercut efforts to decolonize aid, at a 

minimum it complicates those efforts. 

An even greater tension arises in the pressures 

MCC faces to show global impact by aggregating 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Epp Weaver and Smith Cain, “Outside Agencies Do Not Bring Development:” Mennonite Central  

Committee and the Decades-Long Challenge of Decolonizing Aid  16 

outputs and outcomes data across its global programs. 

MCC, like other international NGOs, struggles with an 

industry-wide push for agency-level measurement, with 

charity ratings agencies and institutional and individual 

donors wanting to know not only about the impact of 

specific projects, but of the agency as a whole. Such 

agency-level measurement presses organizations to 

standardize outputs and outcomes, which in turn 

stands, at best, in uneasy tension with a commitment to 

partners identifying outcomes and indicators. Agencies 

that program governmental and intergovernmental 

funding in turn must often use outcomes and indicators 

predetermined by those funders, which can clearly 

undermine partner-led planning. 

Despite these pressures to demonstrate impact, 

MCC has resisted the push to standardize ways of 

measuring impact across all partners, programs, and 

projects. Instead, partners are encouraged to name ways 

of monitoring project progress and measuring the 

impact of their work that is meaningful both to them 

and to the participants in their communities.    

 
Pressure to Demonstrate Relevance 

Within an international aid landscape in which at 

least a rhetorical commitment is given to localization, 

INGOs seek to demonstrate their relevance, making 

the case to governmental and inter-governmental 

donors as to why grants and contracts should continue 

to be channeled through them instead of local actors. 

MCC is funded primarily through donations from 

individuals and Anabaptist churches in North America, 

and MCC has historically chosen not to work with many 

bilateral and multilateral funding agencies in large part 

due to their colonial legacies. MCC leadership, for 

example, chose not to apply for USAID funding in 

Latin America due to the long history of violent 

imperialism in the region by the government of the 

United States. 

Still, MCC does, on a case-by-case basis, apply for 

external grants from other agencies in consortium with 

local partners and in support of local partners’ vision 

for a project. In such cases, MCC is still under pressure 

to demonstrate relevance, especially when local 

partners are implementing the project interventions. 

One way to show such relevance is to highlight how 

INGOs build the capacities of local partners; indeed. 

partner capacity building is one of MCC’s current 

strategic priorities.
10

 Yet when MCC first began 

discussing partner capacity building, many staff viewed 

 
10

 MCC also recognizes that the term “capacity building” has paternalistic connotations. Capacity strengthening and 

capacity bridging are two terms suggested as alternatives by Peace Direct in their 2021 “Time to Decolonise Aid” 

report. In practice, MCC’s efforts to support and strengthen the capacity of partners is prioritized through discussion 

with the local partner. MCC supports exchanges of ideas, practices, and capacity between and among local partners 

through regional and global partner exchanges, which also build MCC’s own capacities. 

it as undermining MCC’s understandings of service as 

presence and partnership. 

In the late 1990s, the Canadian International 

Development Agency (CIDA) critiqued MCC for 

paying insufficient attention to building the capacities of 

the local organizations it worked with. With CIDA 

providing significant resources to MCC’s global 

program, addressing this critique became a pressing 

concern. MCC Canada responded by commissioning 

an external evaluator, Lawrence Cummings, to assess 

MCC’s capacity building work and to make 

recommendations for improving it. Cummings’ study 

uncovered significant tensions within MCC about using 

the language of partner capacity building.  

He noted that the language of “capacity building” 

had in some MCC and broader circles come to be 

viewed as different from “development,” with the latter 

carrying neocolonial connotations that the former 

supposedly avoided. Still, for some MCC staff 

interviewed by Cummings, the discourse of capacity 

building rankled—these staff warned of the danger of 

“imperialistic capacity building.” Was MCC supporting 

partners in building capacities that they themselves 

prioritized? “Who determines the capacity?” 

Cummings asked. “What kind of capacity is being 

imposed?” some worried. Meanwhile, Cummings 

observed that in some parts of MCC an emphasis on 

“presence” meant “giving up rights to establishing” 

direction. A focus on partner capacity building, in 

contrast, seemed to represent an attempt by MCC to set 

direction (Epp Weaver 2021). If the shifts within MCC 

towards presence and partnership represented an 

attempt to avoid replicating colonial patterns of 

operation, a focus on building partner capacity, internal 

MCC critics feared, threatened to revive those colonial 

patterns. 

 

Pressure to Ensure Partner Compliance 

MCC’s status as a funding organization for local 

partner initiatives places legal and moral responsibilities 

upon MCC, responsibilities that in turn complicate the 

vision of mutual partnerships. Whether for preventing 

fraud, promoting safeguards against sexual exploitation 

and abuse, or addressing other vitally important 

matters, MCC must hold partners accountable on 

multiple fronts, taking steps to ensure partner 

compliance. These types of accountability and 

compliance mechanisms are essential for many 

reasons, yet for an INGO like MCC to monitor and 

hold local partners accountable for compliance with 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Epp Weaver and Smith Cain, “Outside Agencies Do Not Bring Development:” Mennonite Central  

Committee and the Decades-Long Challenge of Decolonizing Aid  17 

such fundamental measures as fraud prevention and 

safeguarding underscores the power imbalance 

between MCC and its partners and threatens to foster a 

transactional or even paternalistic relationship between 

MCC and its partners, rather than the desired 

mutuality. MCC seeks to counteract that inevitable 

power imbalance by trying to foster ways in which its 

partners can hold MCC accountable in formal and 

informal ways, yet the power imbalance can prove 

difficult to erase, especially in partnerships for which 

MCC is the sole or primary funder. 

 

Conclusion 
As this case study of MCC’s historical shifts over 

the past half-century has shown, reflections on how 

INGOs can avoid colonial patterns of programming, 

abdicate or share power, and take the lead of local 

actors in relief, development, and peacebuilding work 

are not new, even as explicit calls for decolonizing and 

localizing aid efforts have recently become more 

explicit and pronounced. Yet the vision of the Grand 

Bargain of “a level playing field” within the international 

aid sphere “where all meet as equals” is far from being 

realized. A robust commitment to truly decolonize and 

localize aid work would present INGOs with an 

existential crisis: what role would exist in the future for 

organizations that have grown accustomed to wielding 

power over the design and implementation of relief, 

development, and peacebuilding work? 

While MCC has sought over the past decades to 

take the lead from local actors and to foster 

partnerships marked by mutuality, these efforts to 

decolonize its practice have always been complicated by 

multiple factors, most fundamentally by the power 

MCC holds as a funding agency. The global call to 

decolonize the aid industry is an urgent and crucial 

demand—yet, if MCC’s experience is in any way 

indicative, truly living into a vision of decolonized 

partnerships is a long-term, challenging process. This 

long-term work of decolonization requires patient 

persistence sustained by God’s grace and the 

recognition that international Christian aid 

organizations are not at the center of God’s mission, but 

instead are invited to join alongside and follow the lead 

of God’s Spirit at work in communities around the 

world devastated by colonial legacies. 

 

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Alain Epp Weaver is Director of Planning, Learning, 

and Disaster Response Department at Mennonite 

Central Committee in Akron, Pennsylvania, United 

States. 

 

Emma Smith Cain is Learning & Evaluation 

Coordinator at Mennonite Central Committee in 

Akron, Pennsylvania, United States. Smith Cain is also 

a 2023-2024 Accord Fellow. 

 

Author emails: alaineppweaver@mcc.org and 

emmasmithcain@mcc.org  
 

https://mcc.org/media/document/127481
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