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i 

 

 

Editors’ Introduction to Christian Relief, 

Development, and Advocacy: The Journal of 

the Accord Network 
 

Roland Hoksbergen and Stephen Offutt 

 

 
Is Christian faith relevant to how we address global 

poverty, imagine a better life, and work together to 

ensure that everyone enjoys the opportunity to thrive in 

the world we share together? Does our faith have 

anything to say about economic inequality, ethnic 

conflict, gender discrimination, corruption, 

environmental management, disaster preparedness, 

children’s well-being, health care, social justice, or good 

government? How about political/economic systems 

and political engagement? How important is faith to 

human development itself? Is it true that spiritual 

development is part of human development? For the 

editors and editorial board of this new journal, as well 

as to many others, the answer to these questions is an 

emphatic yes.  

If our Christian faith is indeed relevant, many 

additional questions come to mind. For example, in 

terms of practice, what does our faith say about how we 

should work to fight global ills and promote the global 

good? What ethical guidance does scripture offer? 

What values should underpin and infuse our work? 

Should we work to transform individuals or institutional 

structures? How should Christian NGOs relate to 

governments, and should they accept government 

money? How important is advocacy, and how should 

we go about it? What kinds of partnerships should we 

work in? How do we work together with Christians 

from other theological traditions? How do we work well 

across cultures and with people of other faiths, or no 

faith? 

All of these admittedly complex questions, as well 

as many more, cry out for thoughtful people of faith to 

take them up, research them, reflect on them as 

practitioners, and converse about them with like-

minded people so that we can all grow in our 

knowledge, practice, and, ultimately, our faithfulness. 

True, there is already a huge literature in the field of 

relief, development, and advocacy, but it is rare for this 

literature to take up issues from explicitly faith-based 

perspectives.  

The existence of this large secular literature and its 

associated professional establishment raises another set 

of questions for Christians. How do we interact with the 

relief, development, and advocacy (RDA) world at 

large? What are the pros and cons of different 

theoretical paradigms, like Modernization, the 

Capability Approach, or Postdevelopment? How 

should Christians relate to theories and explanations 

built on philosophical foundations different from those 

of Christianity? To ask a similar question, as Dena 

Freeman does, are we “Christians doing development” 

or are we actually “doing Christian development?” (See 

Offutt and Reynolds in this journal, 2) A professional 

conversation about all these things and more, one that 

engages both scholars and practitioners, is what 

Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy (CRDA) 

hopes to facilitate.  

The idea for this journal arose several years ago 

when one of those small groups of “thoughtful, 

committed citizens” that Margaret Mead famously told 

us about got together to talk things over. The group 

wondered how we might bring about some positive 

change in helping Christian practitioners and scholars 

how to care for and help people in need around the 

world. Led especially by David Bronkema of Eastern 

University, members of the group had all experienced 

how hard it was hard to get explicitly faith-based work 

published in secular journals. We were also aware of 

how committed faith-based organizations were to 

integrating Christian faith into their work, but we also 

knew that the conversation about how to do that needed 

to grow. So, we hatched the basic plan for this journal. 

Since those first conversations, we have joined up with 

the Accord Network to be their official journal, 

organized an editorial board of a dozen knowledgeable 

and experienced Christian RDA professionals, and 

figured out (no small thing) the software we’re using to 

publish CRDA as a semi-annual, online journal. 

This is our inaugural issue. It has two articles, one 

study of best practices, one perspective on how we 

should work together, and five book reviews. We think 

it is a promising start, and hope for a lively, rich, faith-

centered discourse in years ahead. We believe the 

questions raised above require rigorous thought and 

https://www.accordnetwork.org/


Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 1(1),  Summer 2019  

ii 

 

scholarship. We also believe that Christians working in 

the trenches to implement RDA projects and programs 

need answers to these questions that are accessible and 

meaningful in their vocational contexts. Our goal is to 

strike the delicate balance of practical yet rigorous 

scholarship. We thus welcome contributions from 

practitioners in the field, leaders in home offices, 

scholars in universities, and fellow travelers everywhere. 

We also acknowledge that there are areas where we 

need to stretch and grow. For one thing, we need to 

cultivate the diversity of our board, our contributors, 

and our readers, because we know how much identity, 

experience, and perspective matter to how we think 

about faith and all the issues of global relevance that 

need to be addressed. 

If you are doing research on issues in RDA, 

engaging in serious reflection, or working with strategies 

that work well, and if a central part of your work and 

reflections revolves around issues related to the 

Christian faith, then CRDA may be the ideal vehicle to 

get your work to the people with whom it will have the 

most influence. Hopefully, CRDA will put your 

research and reflections into a public discourse that 

contributes to making the world more like the one God 

wants us to have.  

We invite you to join us, to submit your work to 

CRDA, to read the work of other contributors, and thus 

to join the conversation.  
 


