







































Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(1),  Summer 2020  

Fyfe, Liturgies of Development: Formation for Working Among the Poor  13 
 

 

Liturgies of Development: Formation for 

Working Among the Poor 
Rosie Fyfe 

 

 
Mainstream discourses of international development are deeply rooted in secular ways of imagining 

the world, enclosed within an immanent frame. Therefore, as Christians engage in the development 

field, they will face tensions between the embedded secular assumptions of the field and their faith 

commitment. Some theorists have sought to resolve this dissonance through articulating ideal 

Christian models of development. In practice, however, Christians who work in the field operate 

within the synergies and tensions emerging from these different underlying assumptions. Christian 

development practitioners are at risk of becoming formed by the rituals and practices of the field and 

thus inculcated into secular ways of viewing their work. Based on a practical theology approach, this 

article argues that Christians should be formed for their work in development through participating in 

corporate worship and illustrates this by outlining how one expression of liturgical worship can be 

formational for Christian development practitioners. 

 

 
In his book Walking with the Poor, Bryant Myers 

argues that Christians working in the field of 

international development are at risk of becoming 

“functional atheists” in their work (Myers 2014, 222). 

The reason for this is that mainstream development 

discourses are rooted in a secular understanding of the 

world, where humanity is assumed to be enclosed 

within the material world without reference to the 

divine. As Christians engage in the field of 

development, they are in danger of adopting these 

secular assumptions, or at least encountering a fraught 

tension between their work and their faith. The goal of 

this paper is to articulate a practical theology for 

Christian development practitioners. I do not attempt 

to conceptualize a singular Christian approach to 

international development that can be directly 

compared to secular approaches. Rather, I argue that 

Christian development work takes places within the 

synergies and tensions emerging from these differences. 

As Christians engage in the field of development, they 

can become formed by its rituals and practices, and 

inculcated into secular ways of viewing their work. I 

describe these practices as “developmentalist liturgies,” 

and argue that Christian development practitioners 

should resist this formation by making explicit the 

secular assumptions underlying these practices. 

Additionally, Christians are called to see their 

participation in regular corporate worship as forming 

them to work as development practitioners in a way that 

is aligned with their faith. 

 

Tensions Experienced by Christian 

Development Practitioners 

I personally experienced tensions between the 

assumptions of the development field and Christian 

faith when writing funding proposals for church-based 

development projects in the Middle East. In order to 

be successful in fundraising, project proposals must be 

targeted to meet the priorities of the donor 

organizations. Therefore, for the same project I would 

write multiple versions to ensure that the proposal 

matched the ethos and criteria of each funding 

organization. For example, one funding proposal I 

wrote for the construction of a new clinic at a Christian 

hospital emphasized the quality and accessibility of 

medical care. A separate proposal written for a 

Christian organization was framed in a different way, 

with an emphasis both on the medical care and the 

Christian witness to the patients at the hospital. While 

both proposals accurately reflected the hospital’s ethos 

and practice, the act of creating different proposals 

exemplifies the sense of dissonance Christian 

practitioners may encounter as they engage in 

development work. This requirement to be fluent in the 

languages of secular development and one’s own faith 

tradition can feel at times to border on a kind of cultural 

schizophrenia. 

Tensions also surfaced for me in a subsequent 

decision about post-graduate study. My motivation for 

pursuing study was to be equipped for future roles in 

development, and I was presented with the choice 

between studying either international development or 

Christian theology. Because I felt drawn to continue 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(1),  Summer 2020  

Fyfe, Liturgies of Development: Formation for Working Among the Poor  14 
 

working at a grassroots level, rather than roles designing 

development projects from a distant office, I chose to 

study theology at a residential seminary. Studying 

theology seemed to offer a better opportunity to 

address the deeper questions I had around poverty and 

suffering, and I hoped the spiritual formation would 

equip me to work in challenging places without feeling 

overwhelmed or experiencing burn-out. As soon as I 

started studying, however, I experienced doubts about 

this choice. At times, Western academic theology felt 

distant and abstracted from the contexts I had been 

working in. Conversely, I felt sure that if I had studied 

international development, I would have felt frustrated 

with the secular assumptions of the field and the lack of 

engagement with the theological questions I wanted to 

address. I explored this tension through writing a thesis 

using the lens of practical theology (Swinton and Mowat 

2016). This paper builds on that initial work, which 

reflects on how theology both affirms and subverts 

mainstream development discourses and how 

Christians can seek to faithfully engage in the field (Fyfe 

2018). 

 

Assumptions of Mainstream Development 

Discourses 
The field of international development is so 

comprehensive that it may be constitutive of a social 

imaginary (Taylor 2007, 171-172). Development has 

become a lens through which societies and individuals 

have come to define themselves and others. While 

development is often imagined to be a neutral moral 

good, the discourses of the field carry within them 

implicit assumptions about human flourishing, and the 

telos, or better future, that development activities seek 

to achieve. For example, while some discourses focus 

on increasing overall GDP or meeting individual’s basic 

needs, recent approaches emphasize increasing 

people’s freedom and capacity to choose. Development 

discourses also carry within them assumptions about 

the pathways to a better future. In theological terms, 

these questions relate to eschatology: what is our final 

hope and how do we get there? In what or whom do we 

place our trust?  

The assumptions of mainstream development 

discourses are consonant with the inventive notion of 

the secular. In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor 

defines a particular usage of the term secular to describe 

this current period in the West in which the conditions 

of belief have changed (Taylor 2007). Religious belief is 

now one of many options and is therefore both 

contestable and contested (Berger 1980). This context 

 
1
Smith argues that liturgies, whether “sacred” or “secular” shape and constitute our identities by forming our most 

fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world. He defines liturgies as “rituals of ultimate concern: 

makes exclusive humanism possible, a social imaginary 

that accounts for meaning and significance without any 

appeal to the divine. Development discourses are 

secular in this sense; they inhabit an immanent frame 

that limits the scope of reality to the material world 

closed to the possibility of transcendence. This social 

imaginary profoundly impacts the way that humans are 

viewed: the self is seen as contained to the natural order 

and closed off to the transcendent. The telos towards 

which development discourses are therefore oriented is 

limited within an immanent frame, and humans are 

consequently viewed as only material beings with no 

reference to the transcendent. Furthermore, 

development discourses carry within them a secularized 

eschatology; they hold an implicit belief in the ability of 

human agency to end global poverty (Anderson 1999, 

110). 

This social construction of the immanent frame 

contrasts with a biblical view of the world and the role 

of humanity. The world described in Scripture is 

enchanted; there is a porous boundary between the 

spiritual and material (Taylor 2007). The better future, 

or telos, revealed in Scripture is the kingdom of God. 

Rather than defining our own telos, humanity receives 

a telos from outside of ourselves, a better future that 

ultimately comes about through God’s agency. 

Although we have a mandate to bring about signs of 

God’s kingdom on earth, it is God who ushers in his 

kingdom when Jesus Christ returns to earth. Thus, the 

implicit telos within predominant ideologies of 

international development run counter to the 

teleological orientation given in Scripture. An 

implication of this is that Christians working in the field 

of international development can become inculcated 

into secular ways of imaging the world; catechized into 

an understanding of the world and the role of humanity 

therein, which runs counter to the reality of the 

kingdom of God. 

 

Shaped by Developmentalist Liturgies 

One means by which development practitioners 

can come to adopt the secular assumptions of 

mainstream discourses is through participating in the 

liturgies of development practices. Liturgies are rituals 

and practices that shape and form us. All liturgy, 

whether sacred or secular, is identity forming (Harrison 

Warren 2019, 28–29). As congregants gather for 

Sunday worship, they are shaped and formed according 

the telos of God’s kingdom. Liturgies can also form us 

for a telos antithetical to the kingdom of God, which 

James K. A. Smith labels as “secular liturgies” (2009).
1

 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(1),  Summer 2020  

Fyfe, Liturgies of Development: Formation for Working Among the Poor  15 
 

Smith argues that humans are essentially teleological 

creatures, formed and shaped by their vision of the 

good life. Each person carries a vision of what human 

flourishing looks like, and one’s actions and decisions 

flow out of this: “we begin to live into this vision of the 

good life and start to look like the citizens who inhabit 

the world that we picture” (Smith 2009, 54). Smith 

maintains that people’s affective desires influence their 

actions more than cognitive thought; “we are what we 

love,” he says (Smith 2009, 40). Therefore, people are 

formed by their visions of the good life, and the 

kingdoms that they desire, more than they are by ideas 

or theories (Schmemann 1963, 15).
2

 People’s visions of 

the good life are profoundly shaped by the liturgies, the 

everyday rituals and practices, which they participate in. 

The liturgies of many mainstream development 

practices, which I refer to as “developmentalist 

liturgies,” fit into Smith’s category of secular liturgies. 

They are rooted within secular ways of imagining the 

world, and with a telos other than the kingdom of God. 

When Christian practitioners engage in 

developmentalist liturgies they are at risk of adopting 

the teleological orientation and the view of humanity 

implicit within them. They can be influenced to see the 

world as limited within an immanent frame and forget 

the porous boundary between the natural and 

supernatural world. Christian development 

organizations, or Christians working within secular 

organizations, cannot avoid participating in these 

practices. One Christian NGO leader claims that “to 

gain credibility, legitimacy, or funding in the secular 

development world, faith based organizations must 

operate in a way that is consistent with its secular 

discourse” (Mitchell 2017, 5).
3

 An example of a 

developmentalist liturgy, described in the introduction, 

is the act of writing funding proposals to meet particular 

sets of criteria. If these criteria are embedded in secular 

ways of imagining the world, then writing proposals can 

inculcate development practitioners with visions of 

human flourishing limited within an immanent frame. 

Engaging in development work can lead practitioners to 

assume that human agency can ultimately solve the 

problem of poverty. This can be contrasted with the 

 
rituals that are formative for identity, that inculcate particular visions of the good life, and do so in a way that means to 

trump other ritual formations.” 
2
 Schmemann similarly argues that homo sapiens are “first of all, homo adorans,” that is primarily humanity was 

created to worship. 
3
 Mitchell describes the purpose of reporting as merely “to report quantifiable results in industry approved language,” 

and argues that the “result is a mechanistic and perfunctory exercise that has the effect of excluding any deeper 

consideration of the interplay between religious beliefs and development practice or outcomes.” 
4
 Logical framework analysis (logframe) is a measurement tool which sets out program activities, short term outputs, 

medium term outcomes, and long-term goals in a table. The goal is to show the logic of how the activities will lead to 

the outputs, which in turn lead to the outcomes, and ultimately the long-term goals. 

transcendent eschatology described in Scripture, where 

ultimately poverty and suffering will cease when God 

ushers in His kingdom and the effects of sin and death 

are finally ended.  

Another example of a developmentalist liturgy are 

the tools used to assess the effectiveness of 

development projects. Reporting becomes a way of 

defining what development is, and invariably excludes 

any spiritual impacts (Mitchell 2017, 5). Additionally, 

while tools such as logframes
4

 are effective in measuring 

if projects have met their predefined outcomes and 

outputs, they can be used in an overly mechanistic way. 

For example, if they are used as the sole arbiter of 

whether or not projects are successful, particularly in 

the absence of relationships between donor 

organizations and project implementers, these tools fail 

to describe the full picture. Abstracted metrics cannot 

convey the complexity of implementing projects. For 

example, for a project I worked on in Ethiopia, the 

Western donor organization outsourced the evaluation 

process to a third party in the United States which had 

no relationship to those implementing the project. 

While this process was designed to ensure neutrality, 

the results did not adequately consider the complexities 

on the ground, which included ethnic violence, the 

influx of refugees and shortages of materials. Such a 

reductionist approach, which places sole value on 

measurement tools, stands in contrast to normative 

assumptions about giving and the nature of the Church 

found in Scripture. The apostle Paul describes the 

Church as the body of Christ, united in the Holy Spirit. 

This unity of belonging means that if one part of the 

body suffers then all suffer (1 Cor 12: 26). Christian 

partnership is deeper than donor/donee relationships 

governed by measurable goals and indicators but rooted 

in our shared identity that we are part of the same body. 

This does not exclude the use of measurement tools, 

but for Christians they should be used in the context of 

partnerships rooted in a familial unity under the 

headship of Christ.  

I have argued that Christian practitioners working 

within international development systems and 

organizations are at risk of being shaped by the secular 

liturgies of the field. The Augustinian distinction of the 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(1),  Summer 2020  

Fyfe, Liturgies of Development: Formation for Working Among the Poor  16 
 

earthly city and the heavenly city, based on New 

Testament writings, provides a helpful framework for 

Christian development practitioners who want to live 

out their faith in their work.
5

 While Christians live their 

earthly lives in what is known as “the saeculum,” the 

time between the fall and the coming kingdom in which 

the Church and the world live intermingled together, 

they live as resident aliens. They reside in the earthly 

city, but live out their citizenship of the heavenly city 

(Smith 2017). This means that even while engaging in 

international development practices, Christians should 

resist being shaped by the secular assumptions of the 

field. They should live with a posture of hope; not a 

futile hope formed from within humanity, but a hope in 

God’s kingdom. One way of resisting the formational 

influence of cultural liturgies is to make explicit the 

secular visions of human flourishing embedded in the 

practices of the field. Alongside resistance and critique, 

Christians are called to participate in corporate worship 

and be formed for all their life and work in the world 

(Schmemann 1963, 11-17).
6

 The following section 

describes how church liturgies form Christian 

development practitioners and compares these with 

assumptions embedded within developmentalist 

liturgies.  

 

Christian Liturgy: For the Life of the World 

Christian worship is an act of allegiance that forms 

citizens of the kingdom of God to live their lives in 

obedience to the one true king. Christian worship is an 

act of defiance to the spirit of this age, as Christians 

instead focus their worship and hope on the Spirit who 

is ageless (Iddings Bell 1944). Instead of seeking 

kingdoms created by human hands and imagined 

within the human mind, Christian worship orients 

people toward the kingdom of God. Participating in 

liturgy shapes identity. Liturgies used in Sunday 

worship at churches shape worshippers into alternative 

social imaginaries, based on the assumptions of 

Scripture (Smith 2009, 134). The worship enacted by 

Christians on a weekly basis shapes the lens through 

which all the world is seen. All church worship is 

liturgical, regardless of whether formal written liturgy is 

used. The underlying question is what kind of people is 

the liturgy forming us to be (Harrison Warren 2019, 

30). This section suggests how the liturgy of Sunday 

worship forms Christians working in the field of 

 
5 For example, Philippians 3:20; Hebrews 12:22-24. 
6
In this seminal work, Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann highlights that Christians are in danger of either 

becoming ‘spiritualists,’ where the spiritual life is place as solely important, or ‘activists’ who focus on social action. He 

highlights the importance of liturgy in forming Christians for their life in the world.  
7 Ekklēsia is the Greek work translated as “church” in most English translations of Scripture. 

 

international development, and counteracts the 

formative power of secular liturgies (The Episcopal 

Church 1979). This is based on my own tradition within 

the Anglican Church, specifically I examine the liturgy 

of the Holy Eucharist from the 1979 Book of Common 

Prayer, according to the use of the Episcopal Church of 

the USA.  

Christian liturgy is enacted by the ekklēsia, the 

called-out ones: people who have been called out of the 

world in order to live according to a different telos 

shaped by Scripture.
7

 The congregation gathers 

together to become the body of Christ, a transformed 

community engaged in the redemptive task of Christ in 

the world. The purpose of gathering at church is to be 

shaped for the life of the world: to see the reality of the 

world more clearly, in the light of Christ, and to be sent 

back into the world as witnesses to that Light. The 

liturgy can be understood as a journey that brings those 

gathered into the life of the triune God. The destination 

of this journey is announced at the beginning of the 

service: “Blessed be God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. 

And blessed be his kingdom, now and for ever. Amen” 

(The Episcopal Church 1979, 355). The Church is the 

gathering of those to whom the destination of all life has 

been revealed, and who choose to re-orient their lives 

toward the kingdom of God. The kingdom is not a 

utopian vision derived from within humanity; it is a telos 

imparted by God and accepted by humanity as a gift. 

For those working in international development, this 

declaration signifies an acceptance of the kingdom of 

God as the master discourse that trumps the teleological 

claims of all other ideologies. 

After declaring the telos of the kingdom, the 

congregation kneels in repentance, confessing 

individual and corporate failures to live in alignment 

with God’s kingdom. Mainstream development 

discourses have an inadequate explanation of the 

human condition, as they do not recognize the power 

of sin. This results in an underestimation of the 

brokenness of the world, and an over-reliance on 

systems and techniques to bring about solutions. The 

confession is a reminder that even if the best possible 

system or program is implemented, the human 

condition remains broken and under the power of sin 

and death. Therefore, confession of sin counters 

secular liturgies of self-reliance and human progress. 

Through confession, there is an acknowledgement that 

the problem lies within the human heart, which is 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(1),  Summer 2020  

Fyfe, Liturgies of Development: Formation for Working Among the Poor  17 
 

deceitful above all things (Jer 17:9). The sin of the 

congregation is absolved through the declaration that all 

sins are forgiven “through our Lord Jesus Christ” (The 

Episcopal Church 1979, 353. Sin is met by grace, 

because Jesus Christ absorbed all of human brokenness 

in himself, and defeated the powers of sin and death. 

Christ did not come to offer a program for a world gone 

wrong, but offered his own body as a sacrifice for sin, 

and his transformative presence to create new hearts. 

Confession and absolution remind the congregation 

both of their own complicity in the brokenness of the 

world, and the promise of the transforming power of 

Christ, given through the Holy Spirit.  

During the prayers of the people, the congregation 

intercedes for the Church and for the whole world. 

Through the act of prayer, God’s people acknowledge 

that they cannot fix all the problems of the world, let 

alone their own selves, and thus place themselves and 

the world into the hands of the Almighty God. The 

Lord’s Prayer, the prayer taught by Jesus to his 

disciples, guides the life of Christians in the world. The 

petition “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on 

earth as in heaven” undermines the activist mentality 

that human agency can save the world. The Lord’s 

Prayer also undermines an over-spiritualized view of the 

world, as the congregation are asking God for his 

kingdom and his reign to come “on earth as in heaven.”  

The central part of the liturgy is the Eucharistic 

prayers, which bring the congregation both to look back 

to Christ’s death and resurrection, and look forward to 

the marriage supper of the Lamb, the eschatological 

feast that will take place at the consummation of God’s 

kingdom (Rev 19). The Eucharistic prayer begins with 

the sursum corda: the celebrant declares “lift up your 

hearts,” and the congregation responds “we lift them to 

the Lord” (The Episcopal Church, 361). In the lifting 

up of their hearts to the Lord, the congregation are 

“stretched out of the comforts of immanence” (Smith 

2009, 298). They acknowledge that communion with 

the transcendent God is possible, because the 

transcendent has already entered the material world. 

This liturgical action counters development ideologies, 

which enclose humanity within the immanent frame of 

the material world. 

The prayer of anamnesis, “we celebrate the 

memorial of our redemption, O Father, in this sacrifice 

of praise and thanksgiving,” recalls Christ’s command 

and invitation to eat the bread and drink the cup “in 

remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) (The Episcopal 

Church 1979 363). Looking back to Christ’s death, 

resurrection and ascension, frames the next part of the 

liturgy where worshippers offer up the gifts of bread and 

wine, and their whole lives, to God. As the worshippers 

offer up themselves, they remember that Christ has 

already offered all. The myth that humans can save the 

world, or that the end of poverty will come about 

through human agency alone, is shattered in the 

remembrance that Jesus Christ has already won the 

victory. This puts any engagement in the field of 

development within a framework that in an ultimate 

sense the suffering of poverty will be resolved when 

God ushers in his kingdom at the eschaton. 

The Eucharistic liturgy continues with the prayer of 

epiclesis: “sanctify them [the bread and wine] by your 

Holy Spirit to be for your people the Body and Blood 

of your Son, the holy food and drink of new and 

unending life in him” (The Episcopal Church 1979 

363). The invocation of the Holy Spirit underscores the 

eschatological nature of the sacrament. The Holy Spirit 

is a sign that the powers of the age to come have broken 

into the present age (Heb 6:5). The celebrant then calls 

down the Holy Spirit on the gathered people: “sanctify 

us also that we may faithfully receive this holy 

Sacrament, and serve you in unity, constancy and 

peace” (The Episcopal Church 1979 363). They now 

invite the Holy Spirit to empower their life in the world 

so as to be used in service to God. While development 

ideologies place their hope in technocratic programs 

and systems to transform the world, the promise given 

in the liturgy is that all suffering will end when God 

ushers in his kingdom. In this present time, Christians 

are given the Holy Spirit, a sign of new creation, to 

empower them as they engage in God’s work in the 

world. 

At the Eucharistic table, the congregation is invited 

to partake in the bread and wine, the Body and Blood 

of Christ. In consuming the elements, communicants 

are in fact being consumed by God (Cavanaugh 2009). 

They are taken up into the life of the triune God, united 

with Christ through his Spirit, and united with each 

other, transformed into the body of Christ. The 

individual self is decentred and put in context of a much 

wider community of participation with others in the 

divine life (Cavanaugh 2009, 54). Aquinas argued that 

in the consumption of the Eucharist, God’s people 

cease to become “other” to each other. Pope John Paul 

II described the Eucharist as “the school of active love 

for neighbour”: the Eucharist both requires and affects 

reconciliation, painting a normative picture of how the 

world should be (Pope John Paul II 1980). The 

Eucharist proclaims that in God’s kingdom none will go 

hungry, and none will have surplus; it is a feast where 

all are filled, a feast of forgiveness and reconciliation. 

 After partaking in the life of the risen Christ in 

the Eucharist, members of the congregation are sent to 

witness to that light. The congregation petitions God: 

“send us now into the world in peace, and grant us 

strength and courage to love and serve you with 

gladness and singleness of heart through Christ our 

Lord” (The Episcopal Church 1979, 365). Participation 

in the Eucharist is not an end in itself, but it forms 

people to engage in the redemptive task of bringing 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(1),  Summer 2020  

Fyfe, Liturgies of Development: Formation for Working Among the Poor  18 
 

signs of God’s kingdom in the world. After the 

congregation shares the broken body of Christ, 

participants are then sent out to be broken for others. 

They are blessed to be a blessing to others. Monika 

Hellwig argues that a person cannot be one with Jesus 

in the Eucharist and then ignore the cries of the poor: 

“to accept the bread of the Eucharist is to accept to be 

bread and sustenance for the poor of the world.” 

(Hellwig 1976, 78). The Eucharist undermines the 

notion that “the world is ours to save,” as communicants 

are reminded that the world has already been saved by 

Jesus Christ. The Eucharist also challenges an over-

spiritualized understanding of the world, as the 

Eucharist forms believers for the life of the world, not 

to escape from it. 

 

Conclusions 

The goal of this paper is to offer a practical 

theology for Christians working in the field of 

international development. I have not sought to create 

a tidy conceptual model for what Christian 

development should ideally look like. I have argued 

instead that Christians engaged in the field, whether 

they work for Christian or secular organizations, 

inevitably face tension. These tensions arise from the 

differences between a biblical view of the world, and the 

secular assumptions underlying mainstream 

development discourses. As Christian development 

practitioners engage in the discourses and practices of 

the field, they are at risk of adopting these underlying 

assumptions. One way to resist this formation is by 

exposing and naming these tensions. There is great 

value in Christians participating in conversations which 

identify both the synergies and the dissonances that 

arise from being people of faith engaging in a field 

governed by secular assumptions. Forums like this 

journal provide valuable places for a community of 

practitioners and theorists to wrestle with these 

tensions. These conversations help to build both critical 

analysis of mainstream discourses and encourage 

Christians towards faithful participation in their 

development work. 

In addition to resisting malformation through 

naming and describing the dissonances, Christian 

development practitioners are called to see their 

participation in corporate worship as formational for 

their vocation. Christians can sometimes see Sunday 

corporate worship as separate from their vocation, 

while I argue that participation in corporate worship 

forms Christians as an alternate people with a specific 

calling to live out in the world. It offers a reminder of 

the missional calling of every Christian and shapes the 

desires of worshippers towards God’s kingdom. The 

final section of the paper illustrates how a particular 

form of liturgical worship shapes Christians to engage 

in the field of international development. I describe 

how the liturgy forms worshippers with an alternative 

telos and understanding of our role in the world, a 

naming which counteracts the formative power of 

developmentalist liturgies. It is important to note that 

enacting liturgy does not automatically lead to 

transformation. Ultimately it is the Holy Spirit that 

transforms our hearts and minds as we worship, 

forming us as Christ’s ambassadors tasked with bringing 

signs of God’s kingdom into a broken world. 

The question this paper has sought to address is 

how Christians can engage in the field of international 

development in a way that is aligned with their faith. I 

have argued that in the complexity of actual practice, it 

is not possible to follow a singular idealistic model of 

Christian development. Yet Christians should also be 

careful not to adopt wholesale the discourses and 

practices of mainstream development, because they are 

rooted in secular ways of imagining the world. Rather, 

Christians can acknowledge that as they engage with the 

tools, practices, and discourses of the field, they 

inevitably face tension. Christians are called both to 

participate whole-heartedly in the goals of international 

development of decreasing poverty in the world, but 

also, as they engage in the field, to remain at a critical 

and subversive distance and work in a way that is faithful 

to their faith. This is not easy, but this is in fact the call 

of every follower of Jesus Christ, as we wait for Christ 

to return and God’s kingdom to come in its fullness. As 

we live in the midst of a broken world, in the earthly 

city, we are called to faithfulness to live out our calling 

as citizens of the kingdom of God, and to let our hearts 

and vocations be shaped by this calling.  

 

 

References 
 

Anderson, Kenneth. 1999. “Secular Eschatologies and 

Class Interests of the Internationalized New 

Class,” in Peter H. Juviler and Carrie Gustafson, 

Eds. Religion and Human Rights: Competing 

Claims? Armonk, N.Y., London: M.E. Sharpe. 

Iddings Bell, Bernard. 1944. The Altar and the 

World; Social Implications of the Liturgy. New 

York: Harper & Bros. 

Berger, Peter L. 1980. The Heretical Imperative: 

Contemporary Possibilities of Religious 

Affirmation. London: Collins. 

Cavanaugh, William T. 2009. Being Consumed: 

Economics and Christian Desire. Grand Rapids, 

MI: William B. Eerdmans. 

The Episcopal Church (USA). 1979. The Book of 

Common Prayer and Administration of the 

Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of 

the Church: Together with the Psalter or Psalms 

of David According to the Use of the Episcopal 

Church. New York: Seabury Press.  



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(1),  Summer 2020  

Fyfe, Liturgies of Development: Formation for Working Among the Poor  19 
 

Fyfe, Rosie. 2018. The Immanency of the Eschaton: 

International Development as Secular 

Eschatology [Unpublished master’s thesis]. 

Trinity School for Ministry. 

Harrison Warren, Tish. 2019. Liturgy of the 

Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life. 

Downers Grove: IVP Books. 

Hellwig, Monika. 1976. The Eucharist and the 

Hunger of the World. New York: Paulist Press. 

Mitchell, Bob. 2017. Faith-Based Development: How 

Christian Organizations Can Make a Difference? 

Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. 

Myers, Bryant L. 2014, Second Edition. Walking with 

the Poor: Principles and Practices of 

Transformational Development. Maryknoll, N.Y.: 

Orbis Books. 

Pope John Paul II. February 24, 1980. Dominicae 

Cenae. https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-

ii/en/letters/1980/documents/hf_jp-

ii_let_19800224_dominicae-cenae.html.  

Schmemann, Alexander. 1963. For the Life of the 

World. New York: National Student Christian 

Federation. 

Smith, James K. A. 2009. Desiring the Kingdom: 

Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. 

Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. 

Smith, James K. A. 2017. Awaiting the King: 

Reforming Public Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: 

Baker Academic. 

Swinton, John and Mowat, Harriet. 2016. Practical 

Theology and Qualitative Research. London: 

SCM Press. 

Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, 

MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. 

 

 
 

 

 

 

Rosie Fyfe is the National Director of the New 

Zealand Church Missionary Society. She previously 

worked in a community development role in North 

Africa, before studying for a master’s at Trinity School 

for Ministry in the USA and writing a thesis on a 

practical theology of international development. 

 

Author email: rosie.fyfe@gmail.com  

 

https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/letters/1980/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19800224_dominicae-cenae.html
https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/letters/1980/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19800224_dominicae-cenae.html
https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/letters/1980/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19800224_dominicae-cenae.html
mailto:rosie.fyfe@gmail.com

