







































Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(1), Summer 2024  

 

   

Bronkema et al., “Spiritual Metrics as a Bulwark Against Secularization:” Responses and Dialogue  4  

 

 

“Spiritual Metrics as a Bulwark Against 

Secularization:”  

Responses and Dialogue 

 
David Bronkema, Jayakumar Christian, James Waters, Katie Toop, 

Subodh Kumar, and Victor Cortez 
 

 

Almost a year and a half ago, on May 4, 2023, the Accord Research Alliance (ARA) community of 

practice of the Accord Network organized a virtual symposium to discuss David Bronkema’s “Spiritual 

Metrics as a Bulwark Against Secularization: Reflections on Jayakumar Christian’s Words at the ARA 

on “Slicing Off” the Spiritual.” The purpose of the symposium, and of Bronkema’s thought piece that 

underpinned it (and published as part of this issue of the journal), was to tackle the critique advanced 

by Jayakumar Christian in the ARA pre-conference intensive of October 2022 on the danger of 

engaging in spiritual metrics in a way that separated out the spiritual from everything else. The 

symposium was moderated by Peter Howard of the Accord Network. The first part consisted of 

introductory remarks by David Bronkema (a professor at Eastern University) and responses to 

Bronkema’s paper by Jayakumar Christian (former National Director, World Vision India), James 

Waters (founder and director Kingdom Impact, Ltd.), Katie Toop (senior director of transformational 

development at World Concern), Subodh Kumar (vice president of mission impact for Food for the 

Hungry), and Victor Cortez (regional director for Latin America at Water Mission). This was followed 

by a discussion in which David Bronkema and Jayakumar Christian responded to the comments that 

had been proffered, after which the respondents were given the opportunity a to add their own 

observations to the discussion. Below is an edited version of the remarks at the symposium. The full 

recording of the symposium can be found at https://vimeo.com/823841424.  

 

 
David Bronkema 
Thanks, Pete and thanks, Jayakumar, James, Katie, 

Subodh, and Victor for all the time and effort you’ve 

put into preparing for this symposium, and welcome to 

everyone who is with us today. 

I trust that everybody has had a chance to look 

through the “thought piece” (Bronkema 2024) you 

received with the link to this webinar in response to 

Jayakumar’s caution at the ARA intensive of October 

2022 against slicing off the spiritual and trying to 

measure it. What I am going to do with these brief 

introductory remarks is to simply summarize the main 

arguments in it. Please feel free to refer to it for more 

details around those arguments.    

Before I do that, however, it might be useful to 

frame this discussion with a bit of context, at least from 

my perspective. It has been twelve years now since we 

convened the Spiritual Metrics conference in 2011. At 

that time, it was not unusual for Christian philanthropic 

organizations and other donors, as well as Christian 

relief, development, and advocacy organizations, to 

think of conversions as their spiritual metric default 

option. I certainly want to continue to uphold the 

fundamental importance of evangelism understood as 

leading people to professing Christ as their Lord and 

Savior, and I can’t make that point strongly enough. But 

seeing conversions as the sole metric or even the most 

important metric is neither biblically nor theologically 

sound; in fact, it tends to be quite counterproductive, as 

Dallas Willard and others have pointed out for quite 

some time. Thankfully, I think it is fair to say that there 

has been a sea change in that respect over these last 

twelve years, due to the faithful, prayerful, and 

discerning work of so many of you participating in this 

event today; in fact, this conversation is one indication 

of that change, and it is so exciting to see. At the same 

time, we are still in the beginning stages of puzzling 

through this area of measuring spiritual impact; the 

struggle of how best to go about planning for and 

assessing spiritual growth and maturity is very much 

alive, with all kinds of uncertainty; as a result, there 

https://vimeo.com/823841424


Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(1), Summer 2024  

 

   

Bronkema et al., “Spiritual Metrics as a Bulwark Against Secularization:” Responses and Dialogue  5  

 

continues to be important work ahead of us in many 

different dimensions of this endeavor.  

Let us now turn to the issue at hand, which has to 

do with Jayakumar’s caution against “slicing off the 

spiritual” from everything else and trying to measure it. 

He fears doing so leads us into propagating a worldview 

and an approach that see and treat the spiritual as 

something separate from everything else. In essence, 

the main question Jayakumar poses for us on a practical 

level is this, How does one ensure that measuring 

spiritual impact and engaging in spiritual metrics 

promote our understanding, and that of the people we 

work with, of seeing God and God’s design, purpose, 

and calling in everything, and that we think, talk, plan, 

and act accordingly? 

The thought piece you received attempts to answer 

that question, with the following points. First, there are 

four main relationships we need to pay attention to; our 

relationship with the triune God, and our relationships 

with ourselves, each other, and creation. The problem 

that Jayakumar alerts us to is that in our relationships 

with ourselves, others, and creation, in those areas 

labeled as mental health, economics, politics, and the 

environment, for example, the world encourages us to 

push God out of the picture, to secularize things, to slice 

off the spiritual dimension and allocate it only to our 

relationship with God, to the “religious” realm. The 

questions become how do we prevent such 

secularization from happening in our programs?, and 

how do we protect and deepen their spiritual 

dimensions? 

This is where spiritual metrics, if done well, show 

their true value; they can act as a bulwark against 

secularization and provide a way to plan for, implement 

appropriate programs, and assess spiritual growth and 

maturity. But to do this well, the process of measuring 

spiritual impact needs to start with the planning phase 

rather than the measurement phase, and in most 

instances such planning is best carried out as a highly 

participatory endeavor with our staff and the people we 

work with. There are two reasons for this: First, broad 

participation forces everyone involved in planning, 

implementing, monitoring, and evaluating to wrestle 

with exactly how what we are doing is spiritual, thereby 

deepening the awareness and understanding of the 

presence of God in all that we are doing. Second, it 

requires us to think, discuss, and pray about what 

increasing levels of spiritual maturity might look like, 

how best to pursue those outcomes, and what the 

evidence might look like as part and parcel of our 

programs and projects. This is why I tend to be cautious 

about using universal spiritual outcome indicators, even 

though they can be a valuable part of the discernment 

discussion. Not only do universal indicators generally 

not fit the particular contextual needs, they also truncate 

the collective organizational and participatory process 

of discussing how the spiritual is and should be 

manifested in that particular context and calling. This 

process in and of itself creates the bulwark against 

secularization that Jayakumar is so concerned about.  

I will stop here and am very interested to hear what 

Jayakumar and others have to say. 

 

Jayakumar Christian 
I enjoyed reading David's reflections and the way 

he framed his question about spiritual metrics and 

secularization. We have been looking at how David 

uses spiritual metrics as a bulwark against 

secularization. I would like to push it a little further and 

say that spiritual metrics should not simply be a defense 

for us but position us to aggressively challenge 

secularization. I suggest this be the purpose of our work 

in framing “spiritual metrics.”  

I fully agree with David's comment that before we 

talk about metrics, it is important for us to start right at 

the beginning with the planning. The challenge before 

faith actors that David refers to in his paper is the 

tendency to slice off the spiritual, reflecting a dualistic 

understanding between the spiritual and the secular. In 

the process we tend to push God out of the picture—

despiritualization. These are frames and labels that 

David uses in his paper. 

I would like to add a few thoughts for our 

consideration.  

The secular ideologies that govern much of our 

humanitarian industry seeks to marginalize and isolate 

the spiritual and branding faith of Christians as being 

irrelevant, discriminatory, and irrational. We are 

constantly being pushed to defend ourselves. It is 

important for us to take an aggressive stance rather than 

simply a defensive stance. The “spiritual,” borrowing 

from the definition in David's paper, is the existence of 

and the possibility of a relationship with the divine, 

which the Christian faith defines as a relationship with 

the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and the consequent 

belief that all things come under the purview of the 

divine and of the Christian faith. We refer to this as our 

continued growing understanding of the Kingdom of 

God and the lordship of Christ. This is our operational 

definition of what “the spiritual” means for our 

conversation.  

There are four myths to be conscious of as we 

develop our spiritual metrics. First, the need to take 

care that we do not assume “spiritual” is simply about 

religion. There is an underlying “spirituality” in all 

domains of relationships including structures, systems, 

institutions, and processes. This tendency to relegate 

spiritual only to the realm of “religion” is often a 

Western problem. The second myth is the 

secular/sacred divide. Strangely, the ones who really 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(1), Summer 2024  

 

   

Bronkema et al., “Spiritual Metrics as a Bulwark Against Secularization:” Responses and Dialogue  6  

 

practice the wholism that we preach about are non-

Christian cultures. It is so seamless with them. They do 

not compartmentalize their lives. Third, we are not 

simply measuring what we define as spiritual aspects of 

our program. We use spiritual metrics to measure the 

whole. The fourth myth is that wholism is about quality 

of well-being and not quantity. We often confuse 

wholistic with being comprehensive. Wholism is not 

about the parts, but the whole.  

The two bookends of our exercise on developing 

these metrics to measure wholism should be embedded 

first, like David says, in our planning: in our 

understanding of the root causes of poverty, 

marginalization, oppression, fragile states, etc. Second, 

we need to ensure our growing and common 

understanding of the kingdom of God, and must mold 

our definitions of impact and influence to it.  

The root causes of poverty are embedded in 

various domains of relationships, and they could be 

social, political, bureaucratic, religious, and economic 

domains. It is important that we understand these 

broken relationships in the context of the 

personal/community, micro/macro, and global levels 

with all its ramifications in the systemic, structural, 

institutional and process dimensions. 

The structures, systems, institutions, and people 

are held together by an “ideology” — the worldview of 

structure, people, and systems. It is important that we 

address the ideology that holds these together. It is not 

enough simply to address structures, people, and 

systems. Borrowing from Walter Wink — in his book 

Engaging the Powers, he calls this ideology the “spiritual 

interiority.” For sustainable, wholistic impact it is 

important to address this “spiritual interiority” — the 

world view that holds structures, systems institutions, 

and processes that marginalize the poor, together. It is 

not enough simply to rearrange structures, people, and 

systems. Our spiritual metrics must also measure the 

impact of our work on these “ideologies-spiritual 

interiority—worldview.” Our advocacy must challenge 

these ideologies that do not recognize the existence of 

God.  

Finally, developing spiritual metrics must be a 

“whole organization” responsibility. It is important to 

embed organizational understanding of the root causes 

of poverty, including flawed spirituality and the 

kingdom of understanding of impact, into at least two 

aspects of the life of an organization—first in the 

organization’s theory of change, and second in the ethos 

of the organization.   

 

James Waters 
In response to David's paper, essentially I agree 

with the theological foundations, and I love that he says 

“spiritual metrics helps us to graft the spiritual 

dimensions back into situations where they are absent 

and nurture and deepen those spiritual dimensions 

where they are already present” (Bronkema 2024). 

What I advocate for is that we definitely should not slice 

off, but, to use an analogy that might fit, we should 

actually bake in certain ingredients that you cannot taste 

elsewhere. We should be able to slice, but not slice off, 

because there is a tension here – yes, everything is 

spiritual, but there should be something “salty” about 

what we are doing, something distinctive. We should be 

pushing back against dualism, but there should also be 

something distinctive about our work. I also believe that 

measuring the spiritual dimensions will affect the rest. 

Therefore, it is not about slicing off, but, as Jayakumar 

said, about acknowledging that the spiritual is a critical 

part of the whole.  

It is about having a holistic and rounded definition 

of well-being or thriving, which may be our ultimate 

goal. Here are some quick examples to make this point: 

International Care Ministries (ICM) has managed to 

capture health and livelihood outcomes and analyze 

those alongside spiritual outcomes. Compassion 

International is doing some great work to validate 

“growth in Christ” metrics. And while David says that 

the world encourages us to push God out of the picture, 

I am actually encouraged that there are elements of the 

world that are not doing that and are instead 

acknowledging the spiritual. For example, McKinsey 

just included the spiritual as a critical dimension of 

measuring health. Harvard is including the spiritual 

when they think about a definition of human 

flourishing. Currently, I am engaging with two secular 

impact platforms that embed well-being, holistic well-

being, and are interested to include , including spiritual 

metrics, in what they are doing as a global reach. I would 

actually argue that the world is asking for and 

acknowledging this [an articulation of spiritual well-

being], and will get to it if we don't get there first. That 

is why our Kingdom Impact Framework (KIF) survey 

measures these three relationships. We need this 

integrated approach where we are measuring one's 

relationship with God, self, and others, and creation.  

One final thought is that only by measuring the 

spiritual as distinct in some way can we see the impact 

and influence of the Spirit at work within us. I don't 

think we've managed to do that well yet, but this will 

allow us to give glory to Christ. We should not slice this 

off, but there should be a slice that is part of an 

integrated and an overall whole.  

 

Katie Toop 
This is such a critical conversation, because I see 

the sacred/secular divide as a key strategy the enemy 

uses to keep us from the fullness and the abundance of 

life that God has designed us for. As Jayakumar pointed 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(1), Summer 2024  

 

   

Bronkema et al., “Spiritual Metrics as a Bulwark Against Secularization:” Responses and Dialogue  7  

 

out, this is especially evident in the Western worldview. 

Indeed, that is why it is so important to consider how 

this view is embedded in our staff. I see a large part of 

this as a discipleship issue, and spiritual metrics as a 

potential discipleship tool or discipline that, like any 

other tool, can be used or misused. One of the most 

helpful things I’ve heard around spiritual metrics and 

the sacred/secular divide was at an Accord research 

intensive years ago when guest speaker Michael 

Woolcock talked about spiritual metrics falling into this 

category of what he called “essentially contested 

concepts.” These are concepts that are not easily 

defined, that are almost impossible to measure, but 

that, most importantly, do their work through the kinds 

of conversations they elicit. That has really stuck with 

me over the years.  

This is part of why I agree with what David said 

about universal indicators in spiritual metrics being less 

helpful; they cut off the conversation. Spiritual metrics 

are a tool to keep the conversation at the forefront and 

centered around Christ and around what the Spirit of 

God is doing, and a tool to guard against separation.  

This conversation brings to mind a young man on 

our staff in one of our creative access contexts who 

recently came to faith from a Buddhist background.  If 

you asked him right now to construct a sacred/secular 

divide in his life, he wouldn't be able to do it. His spirit 

is so responsive to what God has done in his heart. His 

joy is so full. His love for Jesus is so permeating every 

conversation and every interaction that he would not be 

able contain it and cordon it off into a section of his life 

if he tried. He reminds me very much of Mary right now 

when she broke the jar of perfume and anointed Jesus 

as an act of worship. I was looking at that story in 

Scripture and also at Judas's response, and wondering 

whether it reflects in some way this sacred/secular 

divide. Judas is not openly saying “don't worship Jesus,” 

but rather something like “don't let your worship of 

Jesus mess with your efficiency in your ministry 

outcomes. There are better ways to spend this money 

that have a return on investment (ROI) that we'll be able 

to see.” The challenge here is to see ourselves in Judas, 

who also perhaps came from a very genuine first love 

when he decided to follow Jesus.  

In short, I see a lot of this sacred/secular divide as 

a discipleship issue in part, and as a question of how we 

can help one another in our organizations cultivate 

hearts that cling to our first love. How can spiritual 

metrics be part not only, as David said, of guarding 

against this divide but, as Jayakumar talked about, part 

of actively pursuing a growing identity as a Christ-

worshiping people and doing it with humility, 

recognizing while we measure that we likely have very 

little idea of what God is really doing. We are very often 

wrong, as the disciples were all the way to the end. We 

may still be wrong about what God is doing, but we try 

to discern it with faithfulness and humility.  

 

Subodh Kumar 
One of the insights Jayakumar provides is an 

understanding of poverty, emphasizing the impact of 

systems, structures, and relationships. Poverty is not 

simply about broken relationships. Rather, poverty is a 

symptomatic manifestation of broken relationships. It 

is a complex phenomenon that cannot just be put into 

metrics. One of the key reasons we are having this 

conversation today is predominantly around one 

particular phenomenon, which is the missing “why.” 

The missing “why” has fallen victim to the “what,” 

“how,” “when,” and “who.” The key question for 

metrics is “why are we doing this?” or “what are we 

doing this for?”  As Jayakumar said, spiritual formation 

or spiritual impact is not just a programmatic 

phenomenon but an organizational one. It is embedded 

into the overall theory of change, why God has called a 

particular organization to do what it is doing. Most of 

the time, spiritual formation and impact are not readily 

captured by simple metrics. Metrics give this 

connotation of linear causality.  Our programs and 

projects are simply instruments, vehicles that God uses 

to establish his kingdom. If poverty is about broken 

relationships, then our programs should basically 

address and measure the restoration of these broken 

relationships. That is what our impact measurement 

should focus on. The process of doing is thus related to 

the purpose of doing.  

Based on this, I have two thoughts to share with 

you today. One goes back to Jayakumar’s argument that 

all metrics are spiritual metrics. I tend to agree with that 

because one thing missing in our monitoring and 

evaluation (M&E) world is a theological rationale. That 

is, we create indicators and write a developmental 

rationale for each particular indicator, but we forget that 

every metric should also have a theological rationale. As 

I wrote in an earlier article (Kumar 2022), in measuring 

impact everything should start with our theology. Our 

theory and its operationalization are built on theology. 

If our program is about broken relationships, then all 

our metrics should measure that. Any metrics we pick, 

therefore, must have a theological rationale and not just 

the developmental rationale. That will really help us 

focus on what we measure.  

The second thing, referring again to my article, 

starts with the “why” question. A critical element we are 

missing in our M&E world is a hermeneutic that helps 

us interpret the data and connect it to spiritual 

measurement. That is why the theological rationale of 

measurement will help us understand, create a bulwark, 

and thus defend against and address this artificial 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(1), Summer 2024  

 

   

Bronkema et al., “Spiritual Metrics as a Bulwark Against Secularization:” Responses and Dialogue  8  

 

differentiation between spiritual and non-spiritual 

metrics. 

 

Victor Cortez 
Something I would like to emphasize and that 

helped me a lot is that we must be aware that everything 

we do, consciously or unconsciously, communicates a 

philosophy, a belief, a worldview. So, the question our 

organization asks us to ask ourselves is “What kind of 

worldview are we promoting right now with our 

activities and our projects?”  

I agree that even before defining indicators, we 

must plan. But before that, we must make an 

assessment. We need to have the courage to recognize 

that, because of our fallen nature, we have been 

contaminated with the worldviews of the development 

industry, making it likely that we are promoting secular, 

humanistic, mechanistic, reductionist, or dualistic 

worldviews. My question to Jayakumar and to David is 

what they recommend for our organizations to evaluate 

our current activities and projects against a biblical 

worldview. How can we identify the worldviews, ideas, 

and beliefs we are promoting right now?  

Second, talking about indicators, we must define 

interconnected indicators. Right now, the mechanistic 

and reductionist mindset forces us to measure in an 

isolated way. Why don't we define interconnected 

indicators that can help us measure the quantitative and 

qualitative at the same time? For instance, if we measure 

improved agricultural production, why don't we 

measure, at the same time, whether the farmers 

increasing their agricultural production are 

understanding, from the biblical perspective, their 

identity and vocation? We should also ask about 

farmers’ motivations. These farmers are now improving 

their agricultural production because they understand 

that they need to provide for their families, but also to 

bless their neighbors, and to do this as part of God's full 

mandate to honor God. It is not just the “what,” but also 

the “who.” We, with our direct interventions, can help 

farmers recover that identity and vocation and 

understanding that what they are doing is part of the 

mandate they received from God.  

Finally, I like the idea of how we can transfer power 

to the most vulnerable. We need to accept with humility 

that we are all in a process of mutual transformation. 

Therefore, we are not just agents of transformation, but 

also subjects of transformation. When we start a 

relationship with the most vulnerable communities, it is 

because we understand that they are poor, but we also 

have our own poverty. Transformation must happen in 

the communities, but also in our organizations and the 

staff of our organizations, and even in the donors. 

Monitoring and evaluation processes should be mutual, 

which is to say that communities should have the agency 

to evaluate us. In this way, we need to promote two-way 

monitoring and evaluation.  

 

David Bronkema 
Let me pick up on what Victor just finished saying, 

because it ties in with a couple of things, and what Victor 

is saying is so important. Sometimes it seems there is a 

default belief that the poor are also spiritually poor and 

that we don't have much to learn from them on the 

spiritual side, which is of course problematic. That 

would be an aspect of the kind of worldview and the 

ideology that we succumb to, as Victor said; that the 

poor are inferior technically in terms of knowledge and 

other ways. 

Victor also asked how to construct in each 

organization a process by which one evaluates and 

assesses how we are doing discipleship-wise in terms of 

our worldview and our ideology. While I have no 

concrete answers, I would point out that it is a 

contextual issue as well, a process that an organizational 

community needs to undertake. Just asking that 

question, just putting the question out there, launches 

the process. How best to carry that out would be up to 

each organization.  

In terms of the definition of poverty and the focus 

on relationships, this might be provocative, but it may 

be useful to make a distinction between defining 

poverty and understanding poverty. Obviously, they are 

related, but when I look at Scripture, and I may be 

wrong about this, what I see is that the word “poverty” 

is used almost exclusively to talk about material poverty, 

as in “the rich” versus “the poor.” If we start there, it 

points us to what James was saying, that we are flesh and 

spirit, that there is a biological, a material element 

involved. While not separate from the spiritual, these 

biological and material aspects do have a life of their 

own, which is why we struggle both with the flesh and 

the lack of material resources. In summary, while it is 

useful to see the causes of poverty as rooted in broken 

relationships, I am not so sure it is as useful to define 

poverty as consisting of broken relationships, because 

that can lead us to ignore certain aspects of poverty that 

are crucial.  

Finally, somebody commented in the chat that “all 

metrics are spiritual metrics.” I wish and hope that were 

the case, but I’m not so sure. I agree that everything has 

a spiritual dimension to it, but if we are not focusing on 

those spiritual dimensions and the extent to which 

people are aware of those or not, then I am not so sure 

we can say we are engaging in spiritual metrics. In other 

words, the way I would put it is that all our spiritual 

metrics should carry an intentionality around spiritual 

dimensions, and it seems to me that there is quite a ways 

to go for us to get there. 

 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(1), Summer 2024  

 

   

Bronkema et al., “Spiritual Metrics as a Bulwark Against Secularization:” Responses and Dialogue  9  

 

Jayakumar Christian 
A few additional thoughts. First, I fully agree that 

understanding the root causes of poverty and the 

interpretation of data are important organizational 

disciplines. That is because we are about providing 

thought leadership, not simply fulfilling “a checklist.”  

All Christian NGOs are called to be thought leaders, 

because we are dealing with worldview issues, not just 

simple nuts and bolts. So how do we equip Christian 

organizations to be thought leaders if we do not invest 

time to interpret and understand the root causes of 

poverty and interpret the data that come out of our 

various evaluations to connect the dots?  

Second, it is important that we ground our 

programming, advocacy, and everything else that goes 

with it, in our theology. Without theology, without 

ideology, we cannot be thought leaders, and our 

ideology comes from faith, which is why we refer to it 

as “theology.” Unfortunately, the poverty of Christian 

NGOs does not position us to be thought leaders, 

because we have not done our homework to be 

grounded ideologically on the theology. We don't really 

do due diligence on grounding our response and 

everything else in our ideology.  

The third thing I wanted to flag is that there is no 

way we can pursue kingdom impact, which includes 

everything in its scope, without being multidimensional. 

That is the function of the kingdom of God. It is not the 

function of our metrics. Metrics that seek to measure 

kingdom quality impact will, of necessity, have to be 

multidimensional. We cannot say we are about the 

kingdom of God unless we agree with what David says 

in Psalm 24:1, “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness 

thereof” or as missiologist Abraham Kuyper says 

“there's no time, breadth, or space about which God 

doesn't say ‘that belongs to me’.” The secularization 

process addresses this fragmentation by giving lip 

service to the spiritual and slicing it off and saying it 

deals with religion. It might deal with a few values here 

and there, but it does not cover the whole. The 

kingdom of God challenges that assumption. The 

kingdom of God says our God is the God over all 

aspects of human life, over every relationship. 

Naturally, then, the metrics we develop will have to be 

multidimensional. There is no way we can be about the 

kingdom and not be multidimensional.  

What is coming through is not simply how to keep 

bridging the spiritual and the secular. What is coming 

through is that the roots of that bridge might be in 

addressing worldview issues. It is not just doing some 

artificial bridging between the secular and the spiritual; 

the root of that fragmentation, unfortunately, is an 

inability to address worldview issues, and, once we 

acknowledge that, we can start addressing the real issue. 

We also need to acknowledge that we have a flawed 

worldview, or that our worldview is not perfect. We 

ourselves are candidates for transformation, which 

brings integrity into our model of transformation. If 

Jayakumar is not transformed, there is no integrity in 

our model of transformation.  

Finally, that last issue concerns the multi-faith 

context. There is no way we can enter multi-faith 

contexts as ones who have no bias. We do have a bias, 

and we need to be transparent about the bias. The 

Hindu poor will be suspicious of someone who claims 

and says, “I have no bias.” They will say, “You're not 

being transparent.” It is important to declare our bias, 

to be honest with our bias, not arrogant with our bias, 

to be secure with our bias, and to be out front by being 

servants, as the Bible says. It is important for us to 

recognize that it is precisely our multi-faith context that 

demands that Christians do not play hide-and-seek with 

our bias. We have a worldview. We have an ideology. 

We have a faith. When we play hide-and-seek with our 

faith issues, the Hindu poor will say, “There's much 

more. We need to know the whole story.” 

 

David Bronkema 
Just to jump in on that last point, certain 

organizations, both mission organizations as well as 

Christian development organizations, working in multi-

faith contexts or especially in restricted area contexts, 

are taking some cues from what is called the “Engel 

scale.” Jim Engel created a scale where he said, and I 

am paraphrasing, that we are on a scale from complete 

hostility to Christ all the way up to completely 

submitting ourselves to Christ’s lordship. What it helps 

us see is that when we enter restricted area contexts, the 

labor of missionaries is not simply to gain converts. It is 

also, and perhaps even more, about relationships that 

may eventually lead others to reap the harvest. When 

they leave the context, it may be that the local people 

from that restricted area context are now saying “Hey, 

these Christians are really nice people.” According to 

the Engel scale, they bumped up from a situation of 

hostility to Christians to being open to engaging in 

relationships with them, which then opens more doors 

to what Jayakumar said is so important, that we don't 

want to hide the fact that we are Christian and that we 

know that the Lord is leading us in particular ways. The 

Engel scale, therefore, is sometimes helpful as 

programs prayerfully discern and assess the change they 

might be able to achieve, plan the activities to achieve 

it, and finally assess and evaluate progress toward it in a 

way that helps us improve what we are doing.  

 

James Waters 
A few quick thoughts. First, I was also going to push 

back on “all metrics are spiritual metrics.” There is a 

real possibility with that kind of approach that we will 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(1), Summer 2024  

 

   

Bronkema et al., “Spiritual Metrics as a Bulwark Against Secularization:” Responses and Dialogue  10  

 

just end up going around in circles. I've proposed that 

there are tensions here that we need to acknowledge, 

just as there are tensions in the Bible that Jesus talks 

about as being “mysteries.” One of them is present 

here, which is that while there needs to be something 

distinctive about what we are doing, at the same time it 

will influence everything else, that it will be 

multidimensional. I love the point that Jayakumar made 

about how we need multidimensional metrics. If we can 

acknowledge this as a tension, we probably won’t need 

to be talking about this in ten years, although we 

probably still will be. 

Second, a quick pushback around the case against 

universal spiritual metrics, which David put forward. 

(Some of this outworks in how we define “metrics” – it 

is important to separate outcomes, indicators, and 

metrics/questions.) I am obviously passionate about 

universal metrics, and don't think it necessarily 

truncates the participatory processes. I would love a 

follow up conversation on this to get a little bit more 

practical; there are quite a few comments in the chat 

about what these metrics actually look like. That would 

seem to be a next step conversation, and I would love 

to get into the weeds with this. The contextualization 

happens in the process; it happens in the planning, in 

the strategy, in the choosing and the adapting of metrics. 

If I've learned anything from other places in the world, 

it is that having best practices already validated and 

identified helps people who don't have the capacity to 

engage research institutions or universities and validate 

their own scales. [Later comment added from thinking 

and discussions since: For instance, you can have 

helpful outcomes categories of spiritual well-being that 

have robust theological and sociological underpinning. 

But you can also go through a grounded, bottom-up 

process to listen to local articulations of impact that 

shape how you measure those categories, and indeed if 

there are categories that you have missed. I don’t think 

it has to be top-down or bottom-up; There can be a 

healthy combination of both.] I have actually proposed 

that kind of universal multidimensional tool. David and 

I both want to engage in this conversation and are 

proposing the creation of a learning community where 

these kinds of conversations can get into the types of 

details. It is not so much whether a tool should be 

universal or not, but about the application of how we 

make this process of spiritual metrics really possible, 

especially for some of the smaller organizations or the 

lower capacity organizations in this space.  

Finally, I agree with something already said here: 

we found recently a huge interest in uptake in thinking 

about the spiritual health of organizations internally. As 

we think about this as leaders, staff, and organizations, 

it is quite a kingdom model to think about the inside-

out nature of the kingdom, in this case of the 

organizations. Let's think about ourselves and our 

cultures, and then the implications for how we go 

beyond that, including with donors.  

 

Katie Toop 
Yes, and amen. I do think we will be talking about 

it in ten years. This conversation is always going to be 

rich; it is always going to be part of the beauty and the 

mystery of seeking to discern what the Spirit of God is 

doing among us; and then how we celebrate, how we 

respond, how we worship, and how we partner with 

what we see the Lord doing, and how we repent.  

And I love this question about multi-faith contexts. 

For us, this has been a place where being able to do our 

own spiritual metrics, our own assessment, how we are 

doing spiritually, has been an opportunity to share good 

news with those in our organizations who are not yet 

followers of Jesus. In part, that is where we see people 

choose to follow him. This process can be a beautiful 

and transformational discipline itself.  

 

Subodh Kumar 
I want quickly to mention few things. The first is 

what David also mentions in his paper, how critical the 

elements of designing and planning are. I also endorse 

what Victor said about going back to the assessment, 

because if our bias in assessment is towards the 

development side of things, then our programing will 

not address the spiritual aspect of the root causes.   

Second, we have been working in development for 

years and use this deficit, linear-based approach of 

inputs to outputs to outcomes to impacts. As a 

monitoring and evaluation person, I am beginning to 

wonder if that linearity still works in a context of systems 

when we are dealing with poverty. Maybe we need an 

approach that helps us understand things in a different 

way, because these are complex relationships we are 

talking about. Using a systems-based approach to view 

things solely through a deficit lens and as a metric for 

understanding does not prove effective. 

 

Victor Cortez 
I will advocate for people in the community 

because it feels like we are looking at them first as 

objects of our study, and then we define what we have 

to know and what we have to accomplish. In our 

participatory system, their role is just to bring us 

information. I do not see efforts to help them become 

the ones to define things as well. Why don't we present 

the indicators to them and discuss with them if these are 

the appropriate indicators to measure in that 

community? We must start thinking how we can make 

sure the families and poorer communities have more 

agency in the things we define.  

 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 6(1), Summer 2024  

 

   

Bronkema et al., “Spiritual Metrics as a Bulwark Against Secularization:” Responses and Dialogue  11  

 

David Bronkema 
Just a couple of quick points to help point us 

forward. First, many of the issues we addressed today 

and those in the chat have quite a bit of work that has 

been done around them. Please be in touch with me or 

Pete if you are interested in those resources. Second, 

Katie mentioned humility, Victor and others 

mentioned participation, and I so appreciate how all the 

presenters today are seeking the same thing, which is to 

follow where God is leading. There may be some 

differences of opinion on certain things, but as Katie 

said, as we work through these things, that is where the 

richness lies, and that is where we continue to learn 

from each other. Hopefully that is how we all keep 

ourselves humble and open to God's leading.  

 

 

References 
Bronkema, David. 2024.  “Spiritual Metrics as a 

Bulwark Against Secularization: Reflections on 

Jayakumar Christian’s Comments on ‘Slicing Off’ 

the Spiritual.” Christian Relief, Development, and 

Advocacy: The Journal of the Accord Network, 

6(1), 23-26. 

Kumar, Subodh. (2022). “Toward Building Evidence 

of Kingdom Impact.” Christian Relief, 

Development, and Advocacy: The Journal of the 

Accord Network, 3(2), 24–36. 

https://crdajournal.org/index.php/crda/article/view/

507. 

 
 

 

David Bronkema is a professor at Eastern University 

in the PhD in Organizational Leadership program and 

an editor of this journal. Before coming to Eastern in 

2006, he worked in the field of international 

development for 13 years, and enjoys the continuing 

process of working with and learning from colleagues 

directly involved in that work.  

 

Author email: dbronkem@eastern.edu  

 

 

 

Vidhya & Jayakumar Christian live in Chennai, India. 

They worship at Emmanuel Methodist Church. 

Jayakumar served World Vision in various roles until 

August 2017. 

 

Author email: jayakumarchristian@gmail.com  

 

James Waters is the founder and director of Kingdom 

Impact Ltd. Previously he worked as an international 

development consultant and completed a PhD on the 

resilience of slum-dwellers in Uganda. 

  

Author email: james@kingdomimpact.co.uk 

 

Katie Toop is Senior Director of Transformational 

Development at World Concern, and one of the 

Accord Network Fellows for 2024. She has served in 

disaster response and community development work 

internationally for 18 years. Her current role focuses on 

staff capacity building and strategic approaches to 

community engagement. 

 

Author email: katiet@worldconcern.org  

 

Subodh Kumar is Senior Vice President of Theology, 

Innovation, and Data4Good at Food for the Hungry. 

He is passionate about data-informed transformation, 

integrating theology, system thinking, and human-

centered design to tackle poverty and injustice. 

 

Author email: mamtasubodh1703@gmail.com  

 

Victor Cortez is originally from Bolivia and serves as 

Senior Director for the Latin America and Caribbean 

Region at Water Mission. He has more than 35 years 

of experience in the design, implementation, and 

evaluation of holistic transformational development 

projects. 

 

Author email: vcortez@watermission.org  
 

 

 

 

 

https://crdajournal.org/index.php/crda/article/view/507
https://crdajournal.org/index.php/crda/article/view/507
mailto:dbronkem@eastern.edu
mailto:jayakumarchristian@gmail.com
mailto:james@kingdomimpact.co.uk
mailto:katiet@worldconcern.org
mailto:mamtasubodh1703@gmail.com
mailto:vcortez@watermission.org

