Continuum of Care (mistakes of the past)

We in the West have done a great disservice to Christian ministries and pastors in the developing world.

Through many decades of missionary involvement, and an underlying history of imperialism and associated colonial rule, we have trained indigenous Christian leaders to believe that large orphanages are the clear solution to the burgeoning numbers of orphaned and abandoned children in their societies.

Multiple generations have now witnessed the model where hundreds of kids are crammed into large melancholy buildings that hold them for a time, only to churn them out unprepared into an unfamiliar world.

For most indigenous pastors, they now don’t know any different. They have grown up thinking that this approach is the approach. Unfortunately, they’ve also seen that it’s the approach associated with the greatest influx of western funding.

Even worse, so many of these institutions have been set up and run by foreign para-church organizations from the developed world, that many indigenous pastors have now shunned the responsibility altogether. They simply wait for westerners to build and oversee orphanages in their communities.

World Orphans is committed to great care in assessing the cultures it works in. Where culture is not contrary to the Gospel and teachings of Christ, we want to complement it, not replace, destroy or minimize it. After all, this is part of God’s beautiful mosaic and how He is most gloried – through a diversity of ethnic groups, languages and customs coming to together in unified worship.

As far as rescued children are concerned, their culturally-relevant teaching and socialization obviously falls squarely upon the shoulders of those who are part of the culture. We want to honor the forms and functions accordingly.

There is indeed a place for us (and it is incumbent upon us) in the West to share new knowledge about health and nutrition, helpful technologies, trauma counseling and psychological strengthening, spiritual development approaches, and discipleship methods in general, but we are not to impress our cultural preferences on others unless it’s part of a process of destroying indigenous cultural elements that are not honoring to God, according to His nature and word.

We do now have another responsibility, though. There exist many instances where we have to break what is now accepted by others cultures - and deeply ingrained within them - that are the result of our faulty involvements in the past. We have to retract the assimilated elements that we originally inserted in error.

This includes the acceptance and proliferation of institutional orphanages.

Institutional orphanages were very rarely a construct of the developing-world cultures we now engage. More often than not, this model was an export of developed-world societies during the industrial revolution and age of colonialism. We have therefore replaced "it’s takes a village" scenarios with "it takes the Westerners" or "it takes institutions."

It’s a wrong that we now have to right. We have to use or withhold funding for the opposite intent and purpose - to help pastors identify other points of entry and involvement in the full continuum of care for children.

This concludes the series of Continuum of Care entries that I wrote last year in Burundi. The Continuum of Care posts that follow contain material that has been written since that time.