







































Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(2), Winter 2024  

Powell/Slimbach, Tough Questions on Faith and Political Economy:  A Reflection         138 

  

 

Tough Questions on Faith and Political 

Economy: A Commentary 
 

Philip Powell and Richard Slimbach 
 

 

The following is a response by Philip Powell (co-director of the Justice Conference, UK, and also 

Theology and Network Engagement Manager with Tearfund, UK) to the five questions Richard 

Slimbach poses on faith and political economy in his article “Asking Tough Questions About 

Transformational Development,” published in this journal in the summer of 2023 (Slimbach 2023). 

A follow up comment by Slimbach appears at the end.  Both of these contributions were part of a 

webinar on June 27, 2023 discussing that article; the rest of the webinar content, consisting of two 

other responses and discussion around them, is published in this issue as well. The full recording of 

the webinar can be found at https://vimeo.com/844345288/e970fe8826?share=copy. The specific 

questions to which Philip Powell responds are:  

 

1. In what ways have your family background, theological education, and ideological leanings 

shaped your perspectives on US foreign policy and the global US American military 

‘footprint’?  

2. Are policy advocacy, community organizing, and other actions that prioritize economic justice, 

environmental sustainability, and human rights legitimate areas of public engagement for 

Christian NGOs?  

3. What does our theology say about the importance of environmental responsibility? Why must 

the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor be heard together? What keeps Christian 

organizations from tackling big environmental issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, 

deforestation, and resource (oil, gas, and mineral) depletion? What goals might Christian 

NGOs set for themselves in these areas?  

4. Given the realities of global poverty, increasing income/wealth inequality, and excessive levels 

of consumption and material waste in the Global North, what is expected of Christian 

organizations committed to the welfare of the poor and dispossessed?  

5. Our current economic system works to create immense wealth and to grow economies, but 

morally, how does it work? What does it do to people and planet, not just for them? Do the 

internal mechanisms of capitalism act to preserve and protect the earth’s ecological processes 

and biodiversity? Do they enable people to live in caring relation to animals, plants, and the 

world of nature? Do they encourage people to desire and delight in God? Do they strengthen 

the world’s cultural and religious traditions and identities that provide meaning, direction, and 

joy in life? In other words, in what ways does advanced capitalism nurture and/or hinder 

transformational development?   

 

 
Philip Powell  

Thank you to the Accord Network for inviting me 

to respond. And thank you, Richard, for writing this 

challenging article, asking tough questions about 

transformation and development. I thought the title 

should have been extended to say something like 

asking tough questions about transformation and 

development and learning to live without the answers 

in the short and medium term. I want to agree with you 

that this is about having a conversation, and sometimes 

it is about developing a spirituality to live with, while 

not having the answers, because any rush to give 

answers is going to be shallow and short-sighted, 

because these are very complex issues that Rich has 

touched on, things like militarism and capitalism. I am 

going to try throwing a few ideas out for us, and 

hopefully we can discuss this later when there are 

questions.  

I wholeheartedly agree with Rich that we need to 

go beyond where we have been in terms of thinking 

https://crdajournal.org/index.php/crda/article/view/547
https://crdajournal.org/index.php/crda/article/view/547
https://vimeo.com/844345288/e970fe8826?share=copy


Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(2), Winter 2024  

Powell/Slimbach, Tough Questions on Faith and Political Economy:  A Reflection         139 

  

about issues.  I read the line you wrote about what 

young adults from evangelical backgrounds are feeling. 

You wrote that what they find maddening is the 

avoidance, or silence, they experience within churches 

on issues of greatest consequence to the planet's future. 

I am largely sympathetic to their complaints. I find a lot 

of millennials unable to cope with being in a church 

that is talking about some sort of spiritual stuff while 

the world is on fire. And yet I do not see how turning 

away from the church is going to deal with some of the 

big issues we are facing. Because ultimately, I agree 

with what the late Bishop Lesslie Newbigin says, that 

the church, God's people, is still the foretaste, the sign, 

and the instrument of God's kingdom. We need God's 

solutions to some of these problems. Newbigin also 

said that the alternative to the current order that is 

falling apart is the church itself. We are the 

embodiment of a different kind of world. This does not 

go into the view that we would withdraw and just live in 

a Christian bubble.  

To respond to some of these questions you pose, 

which are very challenging, I am just going to give my 

viewpoint. The first question is about my own sort of 

background and where I come from. I grew up in 

India. Both my grandfathers served in the armed 

forces, one in the British Army, the other in the Air 

Force. I grew up in a home that was very pro-

missionaries and pro-Americans. A lot of Indian 

Christians grew up being quite pro-American. In fact, 

two of my favorite films growing up were a film called 

Hatari with John Wayne, and the other was the film 

Patton about the US Army General Patton during the 

Second World War. Indeed, when the first Gulf War 

was happening, I was actually collecting photos of the 

news in the newspaper, black and white photos from 

an Indian newspaper, and sticking them in a book to 

have images of the US military victories. Because my 

grandfather was in the Army I had that sort of love for 

the Army. And yet, a decade or so later, when the 

second Gulf War was happening, on the 15th of 

February, I was in London marching against the second 

Gulf War. Something changed in my outlook, 

especially because of leaving India and coming to live 

in the UK. I began to see the problems with what some 

call “US imperialism.” I think what I am grappling with 

is how to bear witness to who Christ is, God's self-

disclosure in history, in the midst of our complex 

world. My own academic background is in 

international relations, which helped me understand 

that there are no easy answers. One of the things to say 

about my personal background is that I feel I have had 

to overcome in my own journey the divide that I felt 

growing up with a quite a pietistic faith—prayer, 

evangelism, doing mercy ministry—but had very little 

vision for engaging politics, for engaging the sphere of 

public life. And so this is a little bit about my own 

journey. 

To the question about legitimate areas of public 

engagement for Christians NGOs, of course the answer 

is “yes, yes, yes.” But it is really about the details of what 

that “yes” means. So often young adults who are against 

injustice, and who want justice, seem to know better 

about what we do not want, while finding it difficult to 

articulate what we are for. So, yes, we're against 

economic exploitation, but how do you get to having a 

world in which there is economic justice? What are we 

for? I’d like to introduce the writings of someone here 

in Cambridge (UK), Michael Schluter 

(https://www.jubilee-centre.org/founder-dr-michael-

schluter), who has been writing a lot about relational 

thinking and how to transform capitalism from within. 

It has more of a vision of what kind of society we want 

than just saying what we do not want.  

Coming to the question of theology, let me first 

read a quote. The reason I want to read this quote is 

because it again refers to Lesslie Newbigin, who I have 

found very helpful. The quote is by David W. Smith of 

Great Britain, from his book Transforming the World: 

The Social Impact of British Evangelicalism (2004). 

Toward the end of the book, he writes these words:  

 

And yet, as evangelicalism changed over time, so 

its understanding of the nature and 

consequences of conversion was modified in all 

kinds of ways, with the result that the biblical 

promise of the new humanity was watered down 

to an offer of personal peace and happiness. 

Gutted of its spiritual content, conversion was 

reduced to an experience which required no 

radical break with the values of our secular 

culture. Indeed, conversion became a purely 

private affair, bearing so little relevance to the 

public sphere that a widespread resurgence of 

born-again religion, revival, could occur without 

posing the remotest threat to a society whose 

prosperity is built on a justification of greed and 

whose security rests upon a willingness to 

commit genocide and turn God's earth into an 

uninhabitable wasteland. Evangelicalism, no less 

than liberalism and Catholicism, ceased to have 

critical contact with Western culture and became 

party to the veneration of modern forms of the 

sacred, the nation state, the ideology of 

guaranteed security and, above all, the cult of 

mammon, which the Bible frankly calls idols. 

Conversion became a means of personal 

psychological release from the historical 

situation, and those who experienced it were left, 

in activist words, totally integrated with society, 

religiously degraded and reduced to one 

dimension. The resultant peaceful coexistence 

https://www.jubilee-centre.org/founder-dr-michael-schluter
https://www.jubilee-centre.org/founder-dr-michael-schluter


Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(2), Winter 2024  

Powell/Slimbach, Tough Questions on Faith and Political Economy:  A Reflection         140 

  

between the church in the West and the culture 

of the Enlightenment has led Newbigin to 

describe European Christianity as the most 

advanced case of syncretism.  

 

That was David W. Smith pointing out what is 

happening in our world in terms of Christianity in the 

West. That is when I decided to read more about this 

man, Lesslie Newbigin. Let me read one of the quotes 

from Mark Noll, and I am then going to say a couple 

things about the other questions. This what Noll writes 

in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (2001): 

 

Among Evangelicals of all varieties, there was 

little evidence of any felt need for systematic, 

theoretical reflection, for a theology applied self-

consciously to politics, and for a critical historical 

study in aid of political theory. Concern for 

political involvement was replaced with an 

almost exclusive focus on personal evangelism 

and personal piety. Current events evoked 

interpretation of prophecy instead of either 

reforming activism or political analysis.  

 

Noll’s book shows that the kind of Christianity 

exported to the parts of the world where I grew up was 

very much about one’s personal salvation. I never 

heard the idea that the gospel was good news for public 

life. I wonder how we recover a theology that 

overcomes the public/private division? I can mention 

many names, but I'll mention one simply because he is 

from the United States. This is E. Stanley Jones, who 

was committed to personal evangelism, but who also 

saw himself as a statesman. He was engaged, for 

example, in trying to prevent the United States going to 

war with Japan. We have these examples, but in the 

circles where I move with young leaders, if I mention 

E. Stanley Jones, most of them do not know who he is.  

Coming to the last of the questions, I want to refer 

to the Micah Network Declaration on Integral Mission 

(2001). This declaration says many things about 

structural injustice. Here is one of the lines from the 

Micah Declaration. “We affirm that the struggle against 

injustice is spiritual. We commit ourselves to prayer, 

advocating on behalf of the poor, not only before the 

rulers of this world, but also before the judge of all 

nations.” The most complicated and challenging thing 

for Christian development agencies to deal with is how 

to find a way forward in reforming the kind of capitalist 

economic global system we have. Until we find a way 

forward out of this debt-based system, driven primarily 

by increasing returns on capital, I do not see any way 

that we can deal with inequality, and also, as you suggest 

in your paper, what Martin Luther King Jr., if he were 

around today, would likely call “ecocide.” That is the 

big question for us. To conclude, my challenge is to 

find a kind of formation that allows people to live some 

degree of Christlikeness in a world that is so far away 

from what God intends, while also finding ways to 

engage with systems and structures.  

 

Richard Slimbach 
Philip, I very much appreciate, and agree with, 

your quotes from the British commentator David W. 

Smith, who is honoring Newbigin and Mark Noll. I 

agree that a big part of the problem is traceable to what 

has been a major contribution of Evangelicalism, which 

is the stress on personal piety. But when it never leaves 

the congregational setting, there is then an 

overemphasis, even an exclusive emphasis, on 

personal salvation, on a way of reading the Bible, on a 

colorblind kind of racial identity, and on an association 

with various political movements like the Moral 

Majority in the United States or Tea Party Trumpism, 

which, to outsiders, transforms the community into 

little more than a political block. That is the great 

obstacle we face in the United States right now in 

relation to radical discipleship. Lastly in relation to 

ecocide, reforming capitalism in the short term, that is 

in the next thirty years, according to IPCC 

(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 

estimates is an unrealistic endeavor and carbon 

emissions continue to rise year by year. There is no 

slowing down. And in my view, the mechanisms of 

global capitalism, which is the air every country 

breathes economically, politically, culturally, and 

socially, it becomes a question of regulating or 

transforming it with protections, which I tried to 

highlight by giving the Nordic examples. Finland, 

Sweden, and Denmark are capitalist societies, but they 

are social democratic capitalist, and have significant 

safety nets and protections for both people and planet.  

 

References 

 
Jubilee Centre. n.d. “Founder: Dr Michael Schluter.” 

https://www.jubilee-centre.org/founder-dr-michael-

schluter. 

Micah Network. 2001. “Micah Network Declaration 

on Integral Mission.” 

https://d1c2gz5q23tkk0.cloudfront.net/assets/uplo

ads/3390139/asset/Micah_Network_Declaration_

on_Integral_Mission.pdf?1662641257.  

Noll, Mark A. 1994. The Scandal of the Evangelical 

Mind. Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans. 

Smith, David W. 2004. Transforming the World: 

The Social Impact of British Evangelicalism. 

Paternoster Digital Library). 
 

 

https://d1c2gz5q23tkk0.cloudfront.net/assets/uploads/3390139/asset/Micah_Network_Declaration_on_Integral_Mission.pdf?1662641257
https://www.jubilee-centre.org/founder-dr-michael-schluter
https://www.jubilee-centre.org/founder-dr-michael-schluter
https://d1c2gz5q23tkk0.cloudfront.net/assets/uploads/3390139/asset/Micah_Network_Declaration_on_Integral_Mission.pdf?1662641257
https://d1c2gz5q23tkk0.cloudfront.net/assets/uploads/3390139/asset/Micah_Network_Declaration_on_Integral_Mission.pdf?1662641257
https://d1c2gz5q23tkk0.cloudfront.net/assets/uploads/3390139/asset/Micah_Network_Declaration_on_Integral_Mission.pdf?1662641257


Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(2), Winter 2024  

Powell/Slimbach, Tough Questions on Faith and Political Economy:  A Reflection         141 

  

Philip Powell is the Theology and Network 

Engagement Manager at Tearfund UK and previously 

the Co-director of the Justice Conference (2021-23). 

He also worked for the Cambridge-based think tank 

Jubilee Centre (2013-21), where he developed and led 

training programmes like the Bible and Public Life 

online course and the SAGE Graduate Leadership 

Programme. He is a member of the Advisory Group 

for the UK student movement Just Love and a 

Trustee at Global Action UK. 

 

Author email: philip.powell@tearfund.org  

 

Richard Slimbach is Professor Emeritus of Global 

Studies at Azusa Pacific University. He founded 

APU’s Global Studies Program and co-founded the 

MA in Transformational Urban Leadership 

(MATUL), which focuses exclusively on the planet’s 

one billion slum dwellers. Slimbach holds a PhD in 

comparative and international education and is the 

author of Becoming World Wise and The Art of 

World Learning. He lives with Leslie, his life partner 

of 40 years, and their two children in Monrovia, 

California. 

 

Author email: rslimbach1@gmail.com  
 

mailto:philip.powell@tearfund.org
mailto:rslimbach1@gmail.com

