Brian Fikkert: When Helping Hurts and How Best to Tackle Poverty
Summary:
In this episode, we speak with Brian Fikkert, who is an economist and professor at Covenant College. We speak about his influential book When Helping Hurts, and how Christians can make the greatest possible positive impact in the lives of the poor.
Some things we touch on in this episode:
Why short-term missions often make things worse for the poor.
How wealthy Americans define “poverty”.
“Relief” vs. “Development” work, and where Christians are most needed.
Balancing insights from the Bible and economic experiments.
Career advice for Christians looking to tackle global poverty.
Articles, organizations, and other media related to this episode
Brian’s publications When Helping Hurts and Becoming Whole.
The Chalmers Center helps churches and nonprofits think about poverty.
The One Accord Conference discusses issues in Christian relief and development.
A pioneering RCT Study: Randomizing Religion: The Impact of Protestant Evangelism on Economic Outcomes, by International Care Ministries
Esther Duflo’s experimental approach to addressing poverty gaps.
Daniel Kahneman’s research and Andrew Webb’s research on how much money you need to be happy.
James Waters and EIDO’s Kingdom Impact Framework for spiritual metrics.
Episode Highlights:
The poor define their poverty in spiritual terms
[00:17:01] “Many of us are coming out of a material framework of what poverty is. And so if I ask the average American what is poverty. They'll define it this way poverty is about a lack of income, lack of housing, a lack of food, a lack of clothing […] The problem is, if you ask poor people around the world, what is poverty? They'll say something like this: “I feel shame. I feel less than human. I feel like I'm not part of society. I feel like trash that everybody wants to get rid of.” They define their poverty, yes, in material terms. But in addition, they define it in psychological, social, and even spiritual terms.”
The negative impact of short-term mission trips
[00:19:42] “What we're arguing, and when helping hurts again, is that poverty is rooted in broken relationships with God, with ourselves, with others, and with creation. I don't know if you've ever experienced a strained relationship in your life, but I have, and it's not usually fixed within a week of having the other person come and give me money and then leaving […] You can't solve the deep seedness in those broken relationships through handing out shoes in a week. It doesn't work. And in fact, it makes it worse.”
On academic experiments and randomized trials
[00:35:43] “Folks, empirical research is really, really messy. And so kind of this idea that we're going to collect this data and truth is going to emerge from this experiment that we can run with is simply not how the scientific process works. It's way messier than that [...] The problem is we tend to view scientific research and RCTs as this sort of magical process that's not open to questioning, and it's open to all kinds of questioning.”
Balancing insights from scripture with science
[00:41:20] “There's a lot of balls we have to keep in the air all at the same time intellectually and experientially. What I mean by that is this do I think we should do RCTs (randomized control trials)? Of course I do it's. Great. Let's do them. But we tend to put all of our eggs in one basket. What I'd like to see us do is to think about various forms of knowledge, and various forms of acquiring truth. One of them is actually the Bible. So I actually think the Bible gives us a lot of indication about what fosters transformation. And so I'm as interested in the inputs and activities that we use as I am in measuring the outputs, because I think Scripture has actually told us something about what kinds of [programs work].”
Career advice for Christians seeking to make an impact
[00:54:34] “Learn theology. Get some practical skills, get some experience in the field early because later in your career you won't be able to do it. [...] Learn as you go. Don't think you're leaving college with all the answers. Learn as you go about who you are, about who the world is.[...] Economics is a great major, but it's also a very dangerous major because it reduces the human being to homo economicus. But it's a great major. Just do it differently.”
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In today's podcast, I speak with Brian Fikkert. Brian is a professor of economics at Covenant College and he directs the Chalmer's Center, which focuses on Christian approaches to development and relief. I was really looking forward to this conversation with Brian today. Brian is a thought leader in the Christian evangelical world about alleviating poverty, and he got there because of his influential book When Helping Hurts, which was for me and many others in my church growing up. A watershed moment reading that book, realizing that many of the things we do to try to help the poor actually end up hurting them and perpetuating dependency. And we need to be a lot more careful about how we go about this and having a positive impact. So we talk about that here today. What methods work, what methods don't, and I hope you enjoy it.
Brian, so good to see you.
[00:01:11.500] - Brian
So good to be with you, JD.
[00:01:13.070] - JD
Yeah. How is your conference, Ben? We're here at the One Accord Conference in North Carolina. Beautiful fall weather. How has it been for you?
[00:01:19.130] - Brian
It's been spectacular. You know, the truth of the matter is, when I got here, I was pretty worn out. I've been under a lot of stress, a lot of pressure, and it's been just precious to be here with God's people, to be here with God's people and learning and growing together. It's been really refreshing for me.
[00:01:35.550] - JD
That's so good. Do you want to share maybe 30 seconds, what this conference has been about for those who haven't been apart?
[00:01:41.130] - Brian
Yeah. The accord used to be called ERDO. The association of Evangelical Relief and Development Organizations. They changed their name to Accord. It's basically the gathering of Christian relief and development organizations that are based in the US. For the most part. And so it's a time of learning and growing and sharing ideas, making connections. And so this year, much of it has been centered around the idea of knowing, being and doing. And I think that's a brilliant way of thinking about really what the human being is like. We're made to know, to be and to do.
[00:02:18.970] - JD
Yes, definitely. Could you please give the listeners a bit more about your background, what it is you do, and also your background of studies, what you studied, where you studied, and how that plays into what you're doing now?
[00:02:30.450] - Brian
It's my whole life story quickly, so I'll try to be succinct, but the story really, I think, matters, I think, for our listeners. So I'm a pastor's kid. I grew up in a rural village in Wisconsin and pretty humble beginnings, went to a small Christian college. And I really felt called from the time I was a youth, to do something to try to address global poverty. But I had a problem. I was really good at math, so I couldn't figure out, what am I going to do? I'm really good at math. I want to help poor people. So when I was in college, I discovered the field of economics, which uses lots of math, but you can ask questions about poverty and its alleviation. And so I really got drawn into this idea of using economics to improve the lives of poor people. And so when I left college, my professor said to me, we hope that you'll come back here someday and be a professor. And I said, I will never, ever teach a small Christian college. Don't ever tell God what you're not going to do because he sends these grapey whales to swallow you up and spit you out on beaches.
[00:03:37.410] - Brian
So I went off in God's grace alone, was able to get a PhD in economics, focusing on international economics, international trade and finance, and also economic development in the majority world of Africa, Asia and Latin America. When I was finishing graduate school, covenant College, lookout Mountain, Georgia contacted me and said, we'd love you to apply to be a professor here. And I said, I will never, ever teach at a small Christian college, especially not yours, on top of mountain in Georgia. So I had no beautiful mountain. It's a beautiful place.
[00:04:07.570] - JD
I went there for camps growing up.
[00:04:08.940] - Brian
Beautiful place?
[00:04:09.490] - JD
Yeah.
[00:04:09.710] - Brian
That's awesome. So I did not want to go there. I wanted to play on a bigger pond, to be honest with you. So I wanted to do global consulting. I wanted to work at the World Bank. For example, the International Monetary Fund. And so when I finished graduate school, the Lord provided a job for me at the University of Maryland, which was just outside of Washington, D. C. And so it's a major research university. There were 45,000 students there when I was a professor. Great computer on my desk. I could have launched the nuclear arsenal. I could have been at the White House in 20 minutes. They never called. But if they called, I could have been there. And so so I was actually doing some consulting for the World Bank. And so I really had this great mix of academic work, but also applied research and policy work. Life was good. Life was great.
[00:04:58.240] - JD
What were some of the specific issues you were working on with your consulting?
[00:05:01.230] - Brian
Yes. So my area of expertise at the time was very focused on both trade policies but also technology policies. So I has studying things like what kinds of policies can a country like India, for example, that was my doctoral dissertation what kind of policies can a country use to foster innovation and technological change? So it's a lot of research on intellectual property rights and R and D and technology transfer. But very empirical, I was basically an applied statistician. So a lot of stuff in the space of how do we generate knowledge, because as we generate new knowledge, new technology, we can promote economic growth and that can help people to lift out of poverty. That was kind of the focus.
[00:05:46.220] - JD
Yes. It seems like in India, especially starting in the 90s, there's this great reform that led to massive wins with regards.
[00:05:52.450] - Brian
To increases in wellbeing, how do you know all that? That's exactly right, JD. That's exactly right.
[00:05:56.370] - JD
So you must have been on the front line.
[00:05:57.640] - Brian
I don't know if I was on the front lines, but I was studying India at that time. And actually I did read a paper about what would be the likely impacts of those reforms on productivity in Indian firms. And so all of that reform, ara in India always played a little, tiny, tiny, tiny role in doing some research about that.
[00:06:20.520] - JD
There's huge wins there. I'm sure you're familiar with Lant Pritchett's work about just big wins from increasing growth. Let's talk about where the growth isn't happening. Let's talk about the pressing problems in global development. What do you also, as a Christian, see as the world's most pressing problem? You talk about it in When Helping Hurts. I'm sure a lot of the listeners have read this book, but could you please maybe share a bit of the thesis of that book and what Christians who are looking to impact the world should know?
[00:06:47.960] - Brian
Yeah, so I want to continue my story a little bit because my story is the answer to your question. I think I grew increasingly frustrated with the framework of mainstream economics. And so basically, mainstream economics views the human being as this creature, homo, economicus, a rational, materialistic creature. And if that's true, then promoting economic growth is the fundamental thing we need to do. The problem is that human beings are more than that. And so I was frustrated with the fact that I didn't really believe my discipline was really tapping into the real nature of what a human being is. That has a second problem, because my church was caring for the poor, but they were making the polar opposite mistake. They were reducing the poor to spiritual beings, and the poor just repent of their sins. All would be well. So you might say I'm not really believing in the anthropology of either my discipline or my church. And then the third thing happened. I taught a Sunday school class on the doctrine of the local church. What the Bible teaches. It's just the local church is the very embodiment of Jesus Christ.
[00:08:00.960] - JD
All good things start in Sunday school.
[00:08:02.360] - Brian
All good things start in Sunday school, even Presbyterian Sunday schools, as long as they are. So I fell in love with the local church because it embodies Jesus Christ, who ministered to body and soul. And so he really christ and the church bring together the tensions I was feeling in my profession and in kind of the false doctrines of my church. And so I kind of had a crisis a little bit. And so I wrote a letter to Covenant College and said some reason to start a program that would help students to think about poverty and human beings in a more biblical framework. And somebody should start a center that equipped churches all over the world to live into a more biblical understanding of what a human being actually is, what human flourishing looks like.
[00:08:50.490] - JD
So if I can react yeah, there's this problem where mainstream economics maybe over focuses or puts too much emphasis on meeting material needs, and then the church is maybe historically focused too much on strictly meeting spiritual needs, but neither is the optimal solution.
[00:09:04.500] - Brian
You've got it. Not bad for a Hillsdale College graduate. That's exactly right. And so you ask, what problems was I seen? The problem I was seeing was that we were promoting economic growth, but people actually aren't flourishing from economic growth alone.
[00:09:20.150] - JD
Let's talk about this a bit. I know in your talk the other day you showed a graph of China and as incomes have risen that there's still this consistent high rate of depression, especially among young people. There could be a lot of causes of this. But what do you think is the cause of this? What do you think this picture is telling us if this data is true?
[00:09:39.580] - Brian
Yeah, that was actually a picture of the United States, but I was saying similar things were happening in China. Just want to clarify a little bit.
[00:09:45.150] - JD
Thanks.
[00:09:45.440] - Brian
But basically the slide that I showed was that in America, incomes have gone up and up and up and up. But self reported happiness in America has not been going up, and it's actually been declining since the 70s. Or the particular diagram I showed, I think has started in 1972, but I actually showed another diagram that showed that anxiety and depression from the 1930s to the present have steadily increased in the west and so in America in this particular case. So we've got the situation in which incomes are going up and up and up. And as a mainstream economist, I'm supposed to say, oh, if incomes are going up and up and up, then people are happier. They're flourishing more because they've got higher incomes, they can buy more stuff. But it's not true. We've got more and more income, and we're less and less happy.
[00:10:40.970] - JD
It reminds me of what Ravi Zachariah says about the problem not of pain but of pleasure, that even when we have so much, we can still feel this emptiness in our hearts. If we don't know Jesus.
[00:10:50.850] - Brian
That’s it. And so it really comes down to us not understanding the nature of what a human being is and the nature of what human flourishing looks like. And so again, my profession says the human being is immaterial creature. The church often says we're spiritual creatures. What the Bible suggests is something very different. We're highly integrated bodies and souls but then there's more. We're also created for relationship with God, with ourselves, with others, and with creation. And so we're not just bodies. We're not just bodies that contain souls. We're highly integrated body, soul, relational thingies. And we need to create a world in which body, soul, relational thingies can flourish.
[00:11:34.670] - JD
Yes. So there's also been a lot of other secular research that have shown similar had similar implications. Like, for instance, the 2010 paper with Daniel Kahneman, nobel Prize winning behavioral economist, who showed that happiness, self reported happiness, seems to top off at around $75,000 for a family of four in the US. And I know there's a recent study about 2018 that showed a similar top off at a higher dollar figure. But still, it's not consistent with this American Dream that if you just have more and more wealth, all will be wealth.
[00:12:09.590] - Brian
That's exactly correct. And so if you actually look at research from around the world now, we're starting to see similar patterns as globalization is bringing market based capitalism from the west. And now all of your listeners are getting nervous, does he believe in markets and capitalism? I'm an economist. I love markets and capitalism. But there's something about the way we're doing it that's not quite right. Because as markets are spreading through the process of globalization, we're seeing similar patterns. As we've seen in the west, incomes go up, wealth goes up, and self reported happiness doesn't go up the way we expect it to. And anxiety and depression increase. We're actually seeing that in China right now.
[00:12:51.290] - JD
So let me push back against this a bit, because I know that on the upper end of the income scale, you do see this. The difference between living a middle class lifestyle, living a really upper class lifestyle is really marginal, and there's a lot more stress that comes with having all that money. Right, but let's talk a bit about those who are living in extreme poverty. Technical definition under dollar 90 a day. Right? I get nervous when I hear what you're saying, and I think maybe the implication is that we shouldn't care about growth for those who are living under $2 a day. Is that what you're saying?
[00:13:27.110] - Brian
I'm not saying that. Thank you for asking that question. I very much believe that the way that God has created his world is for us to again live and right relationship with God, self, others and the rest of creation. That relationship with creation is a relationship that should look something like this, that we should work to unfold and unpack the created order as an act of worship to God and service to others. And as we do that, we ought to be able to generate enough income to support ourselves. Then we can talk about what level of support and all of that. But there's a rhythm in the Garden of Eden that you work and then you get to reap the rewards of that work through being able to consume. And so consumption isn't bad in its own right. Increasing incomes are a good thing. The image of the new creation is not that we're all going to be sitting around hugging each other, but starving to death. The images of a work we're going to be sitting around hugging each other around the great banquet feast. And so please don't hear me say that rising the incomes don't matter.
[00:14:36.160] - Brian
They really matter. But it is interesting to find out that even in China, where the percentage of people living below the poverty line has decreased dramatically, we're actually seeing increases in anxiety and depression, even for pretty poor people. Stop and think about it. So I'm two parents living in a village in rural China, and I moved to a coastal city because I want to have a higher income. I have to leave my kids back in the village with Grandma and Grandpa. Well, now my family is separated. And so I'm in the city, my income is going up. I don't even know my kids. They're back in the village. And I'm having a lot of stress in my life trying to manage all of this. That's not clearly a better life. And so that's the problem. It's how we grow. Can we promote growth with community?
[00:15:30.170] - JD
Right? I think China is a special case where we saw, in combination with the one child policy, this certain breakdown of the family. And we also saw, of course, lots of oppression of human rights in many different ways. So how much of the China story do you think is because of these, because of the fact it's in a totalitarian regime?
[00:15:54.210] - Brian
And how much of it is terrific question. And certainly there's a need for a whole lot more research in this space. But I think if you start to look at the research, you're going to find out similar patterns in other parts of the world that there's something about the way that growth is happening that promotes a highly individualistic kind of way of being in the world, a highly self centered, a highly materialistic way of being in the world. It does generate more income, but there's a loss of relationship with others in that that to some degree offsets the benefits of the increase in incomes. We've got to find a way of promoting economic growth that doesn't lose community, that doesn't lose relationship. That's what I'm trying to say. It's a different kind of world.
[00:16:47.250] - JD
So let's talk a little bit more about when helping hurts. And what exactly would you say is the key problem you're addressing in this book? And I'd also love to hear your thoughts of how this has shaped the evangelical church since it's been published.
[00:17:01.010] - Brian
Great question. So the basic point of when helping hurts is that many of us are coming out of a material framework of what poverty is. And so if I ask the average American what is poverty. They'll define it this way poverty is about a lack of income, lack of housing, a lack of food, a lack of clothing. Americans tend to find poverty as a lack of some material thing, and it comes out of all we've been talking about this conversation so far. Americans are very materialistic creatures. The problem is, if you ask poor people around the world, what is poverty? They'll say something like this I feel shame. I feel less than human. I feel like I'm not part of society. I feel like trash that everybody wants to get rid of. They define their poverty, yes, in material terms. But in addition, they define it in psychological, social, and even spiritual terms. And so we're coming at people out of materialistic framework who are actually experiencing brokenness in their humanness it goes back to what I said earlier. We are body, soul, relational creatures. And so because we're coming at a relational creature with money, it doesn't work.
[00:18:07.790] - Brian
It's kind of like when you're in junior high and the bully on the playground beats the tar out of you and you've got a bloody nose and you've got to look at your face. You've had this experience, so you come home and you got a bloody nose and a black eye. What if your mom handed you $10 and said, there, now you're better? That doesn't address what's going on. In addition to the fact that you've got a black eye and a bloody nose, your entire sense of dignity has been shattered. You've lost confidence. You're fearful of oppression. You can't solve that by your mom giving you $10. And so the remedy doesn't fix what's broken. And that's so often what's going on with the American church. As we work amongst the poor, we're applying a remedy that doesn't fit the underlying problem.
[00:19:00.610] - JD
So we're speaking very much in broad, broad scope here. Let's make it a little bit more specific. Are there specific programs that you think misconstrue what it means to alleviate poverty and therefore are less effective? Because at the end of the day, maybe we define poverty one way or another. And it sounds like you're saying even how we define poverty is a very important problem. But let's talk specifically about programs. I know in church growing up, I was warned about just giving money away or just going on a short term mission trip without actually caring about the needs of local people unless I do harm. Right. Can you talk about some programs where maybe we actually do more harm than good?
[00:19:42.010] - Brian
Yeah, well, short term's missions is a great example. And so what we're arguing, and when helping hurts again, is that poverty is rooted in broken relationships with God, with ourselves, with others, and with creation. I don't know if you've ever experienced a strained relationship in your life, but I have, and it's not usually fixed within a week of having the other person come and give me money and then leaving. It's going to take a different kind of approach. And so when we go to on a short term missions trip, we're going to a setting where people have been living in poverty in many instances for generations. And the level of brokenness in the relationships is profound. And we run in and we give a bunch of shoes out or something and then leave. You can't solve the deep seatedness in those broken relationships through handing out shoes in a week. It doesn't work. And in fact, it makes it worse.
[00:20:37.330] - JD
Tom's tried.
[00:20:42.110] - Brian
Tom's tried that. But what I want you to hear is it's not just that you can't make it better that way. You can actually make it worse. Because the nature of poverty is that it creates a broken relationship with self that manifests itself in a marred identity, a poor self image, a sense that I'm less than human and I can't affect change in the world, and that outside forces control me. Well, a short term mission strip actually reinforces that message that you can't do anything and you need me, the outside force, to come and fix you. And so it's not that the short term's mission strip is neutral. It actually does real harm by communicating to the poor. You're right, you are broken, you're less than human, you can't do anything. You need me, the outsider, to fix you. And the outsider might be a twelve year old American. So imagine you're a 50 year old farmer in Paraguay who's been struggling to raise his family. And a twelve year old, in a mission trip comes in as the hero in the story, as he's handing out things that's going to further mar your identity.
[00:21:52.190] - Brian
Does that make any sense? Yes.
[00:21:54.040] - JD
I think there's a lot of things going on here at this critique of short term mission trips. One critique seems to be this misunderstanding of what poverty is and only looking to meet material needs. Another critique is this complete disregard for systems. I know you don't like saying your book, you don't like systems and products processes, but maybe disregarding how systems work and how economic development works and how you can shift incentives when you come in and completely disrupt it with some kind of supply shock, like dropping a ton of shoes, completely destroying the local shoe market. Right. It sounds like there's also an issue here in terms of measurement, how you actually measuring what works and what doesn't work. So it's a great analogy. It sounds like there's really a lot here happening, and I'd like to dig a bit deeper in that as well. In what circumstances do you think it is okay to come in and provide material assistance? What are the requirements for that? And as a follow up question, what are the best ways to measure that?
[00:22:56.280] - Brian
Terrific. So one of the things we talk about in Helping Hurts is that it's important to distinguish whether people need relief or rehabilitation or development. Relief is essentially providing a handout to somebody because they're incapable of helping themselves. And so this was not the point of the parable. But the Good Samaritan is a great illustration of relief applied appropriately. The duty lying on the side of the road bleeding to death can help himself. The Good Samaritan applied relief well, but once the bleeding has stopped, we want to get into rehabilitation, which is essentially trying to restore the individual or the community to pre crisis conditions. And so it's getting that gentleman off the side of the road and starting to get him so he can walk. Again, as we shift from relief to rehabilitation, we're going to ask the individual or the community to contribute to their own improvement. It's not going to be a pure handout. It's not going to be me doing things to them or for them, it's going to be doing things with them. The reason for that is we're trying to restore them as image bearers. And what image bearers do is use their gifts to steward the creation.
[00:24:08.690] - Brian
And so we want to help people to move into that. And then development is helping individuals and communities to move towards higher degrees of humanness and flourishing than ever before. And again, that's a walking with people across time. In both rehab and development, you're often going to be bringing in outside resources, outside knowledge, outside technology. But you're going to do it if you're doing it well, you're going to do it in a way that complements people's own use of their own gifts, their own resources, so that you're not undermining human flourishing, you're trying to help them have a cooperative process, using their assets to grow. And that's it. I just met with a person here who is asking about scholarship funds to send somebody to college. Well, that's a developmental approach. She is saying to me, this person can do college, this person is able to contribute something to their college education, but she can't do it all. Could you help that's development work? You're bringing in outside help, the scholarship to complement the person's use of their own gifts and their own resources. That's what it should look like. Measurement.
[00:25:22.070] - JD
So let's go to measurement in a second. I want to ask a bit about this distinction between relief, rehabilitation and development. Because when I think about helping people, for instance, in extreme poverty, living under $1.90 a day, I think in the broader literature this is described as development. Helping these people, though, I think this is kind of like relief. I mean, if I imagine what it's like to live under $2 a day, you know, lifespan shortened by 2030 years, many fewer years of education, broken, relationships have come out of living in really horrible conditions. It seems to me like a relief situation. But this framing of relief, rehabilitation, development, it makes it sound like this is not a relief situation? Because when I hear relief, I think helping disaster relief victims, right? So when you think about helping those in extreme poverty, where does that fit in this threefold paradigm?
[00:26:22.980] - Brian
Great question. It depends, of course. I'm a professor, so there's never an has answer. It depends. So if a person has just experienced a tsunami and they are homeless and destitute from the tsunami and perhaps injured and can't contribute to their improvement, it's pure relief. You go in, you bandage wounds, you help resuscitate them. But most people who are in poverty are not in poverty from a recent crisis. They're in poverty from a chronic condition that involves broken systems, broken individuals, demonic forces. They're in a chronic state. It's not a crisis, it's a chronic state. And they're not helpless. They actually can do something. So we would not want to decide.
[00:27:12.320] - JD
So the notion of a poverty trap that some economists let's take Duflo, for instance, somewhat pricing economists, esther Duflo, would you take issue with this idea that people fall into a kind of poverty trap and they need initial capital to get out of it?
[00:27:26.480] - Brian
No, I believe in poverty traps. But to be in a poverty trap is not the same thing as being completely helpless. So again, the person on the side of the road in the Good Samaritan story is completely helpless. He he's bleeding to death, he's unconscious. I hope I don't read the parable for a while. So he's in a coma. Let's go with that one. That is different from a person who actually can work, can function. It is possible to be caught in a poverty trap and to need a boost. But the boost isn't just here's a bunch of stuff. The boost is to come around the person in a supportive and empowering community to help them out of that poverty trap. It might include injection of outside resources, but it's going to require more than that. Because fundamentally, relationships that are broken can't be solved through money. Money is part of it, but it's not the whole of what's needed. So I agree with poverty traps, but the fact that you're in a poverty trap doesn't mean you need relief. It might mean you need development, which includes outside resources and the person and the community working to do what they can as well.
[00:28:45.560] - JD
I'd love to ask another question about this, if that's okay, and also about how we measure this. I know a lot when it comes to holistically bringing people out of extreme poverty into more secure positions, not only materially, but also with regards to relationships, to themselves, to others, to God, and to creation. There's a lot of questions about what really works, and economists are more or less skeptical on this. You have some who insist that we need to do rigorous experimentation to figure out what works. And a lot of these approaches seem to do hit space development. Let's try to try a. Lot of different things, see what works, measure relative to a control group and then scale up those effective solutions. Do you think that that kind of approach respects the kind of approach that you would want?
[00:29:40.190] - Brian
On my word, what a question. So, first of all, great question. Again, I think the world is complex. So do I like RCTs? I do. What a blast. I mean, like if I could do anything in life, I would just hang around to RCTs all day long. Some do, some do. What a great what so much fun. And I do think that they can uncover unique insights and that there's incredible things that we can learn from RCTs. But my word to think that that's the only way of learning doesn't make any sense to me at all. This gets into what do you mean? Yes, deep questions about epistemology and so on. And fundamentally God has given us empirical tools to try to understand his world, but he's given us other kinds of tools as well, like the Bible, for example. So I don't need to do an RCT to find out that the gospel is true. And in fact, I'm not sure what.
[00:30:42.940] - JD
That would look like.
[00:30:43.810] - Brian
Well, actually I was at a conference about that once. There's many things that are true that you can't discover through an RCT, like the Trinity, for example, while you wait for breakfast. Yes, exactly. So I would say the RCT is one tool of many that belong in our epistemological arsenal. Did that help you? Not in your head? Like what does that mean? It means you try different things, but a lot of humility ought to be part of it. A lot of humility about going, okay, here's one tool. I'm going to use this one tool. It's going to give me some insight on one facet of God's creation. But to think that you can get the whole from that is just simply not true.
[00:31:33.630] - JD
So let's take this paradigm of helping one's self or yeah, relationship to oneself, relationship to God, relationship to others in creation. It seems to me like we can put these relationships in some kind of a metric, broken as they are. I was just talking with Dr. James Waters who has this kingdom impact framework for measuring spiritual impact and how people feel with regards to being loved by God. And you can survey them over time, like with other subjective wellbeing measures, and get a sense of maybe how that one relationship to God has changed as a result of a program hopefully caught it. Do you think that quantifying these four relationships in some way is something that Christians should be supportive of?
[00:32:17.760] - Brian
Yes. So I'm just getting to know James, but he is so much fun and he and I had a zoom call about a month ago and he sent me a bunch of stuff. I printed it all out, it's sitting in my briefcase. And every time I reach into my briefcase to get something else out of it. I run into all of the stack of papers of James in my hand I can't wait to get to read. I do believe that it is helpful to try to measure progress in these four relationships for a number of reasons. One is, and this is actually the primary reason if we want to tell God's story, we want to bear witness to what God is doing in the world. And part of telling his story is to bear witness too when transformation really happens. I just had a wonderful breakfast with another brother here at Sudokomark today and he said Brian data is about looking at the face of God. What a great answer. What? Oh, my word. And he's like, Brian, that's what the.
[00:33:20.140] - JD
Math major says to the theologian.
[00:33:21.610] - Brian
Exactly. What a brilliant idea. He said, we're called to bear witness to God's transforming story, and part of how we do that is to measure the story and then tell the story.
[00:33:33.410] - JD
So all in because otherwise stories can be very misleading. Right. You have so many cases in development where a wonderful story is told, millions of dollars are raised, programs are run, and the poor aren't helped.
[00:33:45.250] - Brian
Totally, completely agree with that. We also want to measure, to see does it look like our programs are being effective? So I can believe that we're supposed to promote flourishing in terms of these four relationships, but that doesn't mean that my program is doing it very well. Right? And so we want to improve our program. So I'm in on all of that. I think at the same time, we need to be very careful. So, for example, RCTs tend to be conduct over very short periods of time. So I don't know about you, but transformation in my life is going pretty slowly. So I'm 58 and it feels like every day I discover another dimension of my brokenness, another dimension of how I have to grow. And if we had simply did an RCT of me between the time I was 18, the time that I was 18 and a half, I'm not sure how much transformation we would have seen yet. And so the short time interval of.
[00:34:43.130] - JD
Many RCTs, well, otherwise, also quite hard to measure. What's happened to you since you were 18?
[00:34:49.110] - Brian
Oh, completely.
[00:34:49.850] - JD
There's the isolated variable.
[00:34:51.330] - Brian
There's a million issues here. On the one hand, I love RCTs. On the other hand, the fact that that has become the thing that we have to do to prove things, I think is a terrible mistake.
[00:35:04.070] - JD
But has it become the thing I think about? International Care Ministries and the Randomizing Religion paper published and was also featured in The Economist, where they did an RCT showing actually that faith based programs do work relative to their secular counterparts, at least in their example. I think Bruce Weidek with Compassionate International did RCTs to measure the effectiveness of child sponsorship, but otherwise I'm really not too familiar with many other RCTs in the Christian world. Do you think they're really that popular in the Christian world?
[00:35:40.460] - Brian
In the Christian world, they're not very popular.
[00:35:41.940] - JD
You're correct.
[00:35:43.150] - Brian
They've become very popular in the secular world, if you will, and lots of decisions are being made on the basis of those RCT results that shouldn't be made that quickly. So one example, everybody thought that microfinance was the greatest thing ever, and some RCTs came out and said, oh, it's not really working. Billions of dollars got dried up, and now we're going, oh, another RCT came out that says it does work. Well, wow. So billions of dollars got diverted because a few studies said it wasn't working. And now our final studies were wrong. Folks, empirical research is really, really messy. And so kind of this idea that we're going to collect this data and truth is going to emerge from this experiment that we can run with is simply not how the scientific process works. It's way messier than that. Measuring almost anything is extremely difficult. Think about how difficult just to measure household income. Just one variable, household income. It's extremely complicated. We're working in context where there's no receipts, where oftentimes income is payment in kind, rather in terms of cash. There's a lot going on here. And so, again, a lot more humility.
[00:37:05.600] - Brian
The example you're giving of ICM in the Philippines is actually a really funny example.
[00:37:16.410] - JD
That's International Care Ministry, I guess. Yeah.
[00:37:18.580] - Brian
And these are wonderful people. I love them. So there was a study done by three professors at Yale about the work in the Philippines, dean Carlin and two others, and there was a big kind of research reveal conference that I went to at Yale. And so it was the greatest thing.
[00:37:41.270] - JD
Was this eight years ago? Is this oh, I don't remember how.
[00:37:43.350] - Brian
Long ago, but it was so my memory is kind of so for me, it was the Super Bowl of my life, you know, in God's grace, had a chance to go to Yale.
[00:37:52.780] - JD
You were born for this.
[00:37:53.990] - Brian
I was like, this is the greatest thing. And so I brought a bunch of students with me. My son was with me, who was in college at the time. And here I am with all my students, and we're at Yale where I went, and there's all these social scientists in the room. Some of my old former professors at Yale, the ICM people. Ara a bunch of donors are in the room, many of whom are donating to the Chalmer's Center. My whole life in one room. And the night before the big reveal, one of the major researchers said, I failed to make a statistical correction. When I make the statistical correction, all the impacts of the gospel are gone. So now you're ICM, and you're standing there on the main stage. Your entire universe has been brought into the room. And the world class researcher has just told you the night before whoops, I made a mistake.
[00:38:42.990] - JD
This is after the paper, before it.
[00:38:44.340] - Brian
Was published, before it was published. But this is the big coming out party. So now there's this funny scenario where you're in the room and I'm speaking hyperbole here a little bit. But basically we are all expecting to find out that the resurrection really happened, and in fact, it didn't. There's this funny scenario where the main researcher is running around the room hugging, and he professes to be an agnostic Jewish fellow. He's running around the room hugging all the Christians, saying, it's okay, it's okay, nothing, whatever works. It's the funniest thing I've ever seen. Now, apparently they went back and did another correction and found out, in fact, the resurrection did happen. The gospel is true. What I want you to hear in that story is how fragile statistical work is and how complicated it is. And so literally, the same body of research went from being this is the greatest finding ever, to the night before, discovering that there is no finding to then make another correction discovery. And there is a finding. It's not this hard neutral, but truth.
[00:39:55.250] - JD
Is never like a hard, clean set.
[00:39:57.660] - Brian
We treat it that way, right?
[00:40:00.050] - JD
Even. Let's just take the disciples. When they saw Jesus crucified, they went from abandoning him to praising Him as Lord within a few days. It doesn't surprise me if for a given piece of research, we change our view.
[00:40:13.090] - Brian
I'm with you. The problem is we tend to view scientific research and RCTs as this sort of magical process that's not open to questioning, and it's open to all kinds of questioning. So I want to tell you the rest of the story. I'm at this conference and literally we've just discovered empirically the resurrection didn't happen, which is ridiculous. I'm speaking here hyperbole. So I went to one of the largest donors in the room who'd been funding the project in the Philippines. He's also a donor to the Charmer Center. So I said to him, Brother, how does this affect he goes, Ah, none of this matters to me. He says, I know good and well that in God's theory of change, it's about God plus community plus time equals transformation. And there's no empirical study that is going to change that one iota. My son, who's with me, we're very close. He looked at me and said, dad, you mean we spent millions of dollars on research to ask whether the gospel is true or not? Is that a good stewardship of our time and money? I think that's an important question. I think a lot of us, all human beings, including Christians, we have a hard time holding things and ideas and tension.
[00:41:20.950] - Brian
There's a lot of balls we have to keep in the air all at the same time intellectually experientially. What I mean by that is this do I think we should do RCTs? Of course I do it's. Great. Let's do them. But we tend to put all of our eggs in one basket. What I'd like to see us do is to think about various forms of knowledge, various forms of acquiring truth. One of them is actually the Bible. So I actually think the Bible gives us a lot of indication about what fosters transformation. And so I'm as interested in the inputs and activities that we use as I am in measuring the outputs, because I think Scripture has actually told us something about what kinds of about who.
[00:42:09.050] - JD
People are and what people need and where we're going and how to get them there.
[00:42:12.730] - Brian
That's it. And I don't need an RCT to tell me that. The Bible tells me some of that. And so I'm as interested right now in us developing a theory of change, a logic model, if you will, in which the input side is more informed by Scripture than we're often seeing.
[00:42:31.330] - JD
So can you provide some alternative models? RCTs are certainly not the only tool in development, but so many people look at global development and they're just and I think this is also one response that you had to correct from a misreading of when helping hurts, which is, it's so hard. There's so many things that hurt. It's so hard to help. And there are also so many efforts to help. How do I choose among them all? Like, how do I know which ones are working best are most effective? How do you find the ones that are most effective?
[00:43:05.310] - Brian
Well, first of all, there's no easy answer to the question, right? I'd like to mention that more recently, I've co authored a book called Becoming Whole and then An Associated Field Guide to Becoming Whole. And the reason that we wrote that was partly to answer the question that you're asking, how do we know? Are these good programs or not? I think it might be interesting for us to reflect on the idea that in those books, we're actually not very focused on the impact measurement. We're more focused on what is God's story of change and how can we, as Christians, live into that story? So, for example, we know that God created human beings in a certain way, and he put them into an environment in which they could flourish. And that environment was the Garden of Eden. We have thousands of years of scholarship on what the conditions in the Garden of Eden looked like. It doesn't come from RCTs, it comes from the Bible. And so I actually think that we can get a long ways by simply asking ourselves, what were the conditions in the Garden of Eden? And that's where it's all going.
[00:44:13.300] - Brian
The story of Scripture is the restoration of human beings to the restored Garden of Eden in the New Jerusalem. So I don't need an RCT to tell me that.
[00:44:25.850] - JD
So let's take that as the tell us, right? We're trying to redeem creation, restore, renew creation as agents of renewal in this world, but it still doesn't answer the question of maybe how best we bring about that renewal, right? We have the tell us, we have Eden or the Escaton as the vision, but then what exactly is the theory of change and how do we find the most effective ones?
[00:44:47.340] - Brian
Praise God. So again, hear me. I actually believe we want to do some empirical research, but let's back up. What were the conditions in the Garden of Eden? Well, human beings dwelt in deep communion with God. Okay, well, how can we replicate deep communion with God? The Bible tells us that God dwells in the local church. So suddenly I know that the local church needs to have a central part of part of the story. It's part of my program design. How am I going to design a program in such a way that the end of the day, the poor are saying to themselves, I want to be in the front row when the word of God is being preached and the Lord's Supper is being served, because I want that God. That's a program design implication deep communion with others has present in the Garden. Okay, so now I've got a choice in how I'm going to design my program. Am I going to use an individual approach or a community based approach? Go for community. There's program implications of reflecting on the conditions in the Garden of Eden, and that informs how we design our ministries, how we design our interventions.
[00:45:55.630] - Brian
It doesn't give us all the exhaust.
[00:45:57.990] - JD
It gives us a pattern. If we follow the biblical storyline and what God's doing through the church in the New Testament and through his relationship with people throughout Scripture, and we replicate that kind of redemptive process in our ministry that that has very effective results is what I'm hearing.
[00:46:16.240] - Brian
And I'm telling you that we are very far away from doing that right now because we don't know the story. So I did this at the conference here, but in the past, there's sort of a little exercise I do to try to get people to reveal some of their program design choices. And the program I've done it with donors, for example, and I've given them scenarios, and I say, which grant would you fund? The kinds of grants they fund are grants that are inconsistent with the story of the Garden of Eden being restored. I've given the same exercise here to the folks here, and I haven't had a chance to tabulate the results yet, but just scanning them. We're not living into the right story. We don't. We're Western individuals.
[00:47:03.040] - JD
What does it mean to not live to the right story? Like, very concrete.
[00:47:05.520] - Brian
Sorry. So thank you for asking that. I gave out an exercise and I said to people, imagine you $100,000, and I'm going to give you three grant proposals, how would you allocate the $100,000 amongst the three grant proposals, how do.
[00:47:20.680] - JD
You donate the money most?
[00:47:22.110] - Brian
How do you donate the money most effectively? And everybody chooses the grants that I think are the least consistent with God's story. So for example, the very first grant says there's a ministry that has people in groups who are learning about better business practices and that organization discovers that they can actually impart the information via cell phones and so the groups don't have to mean anymore. So we went from group based learning to individuals out in their fields getting information via cell phones, it turns out it's way more efficient and you can scale that. Scaling groups is hard. Scaling information transfer through cell phones is really cheap.
[00:48:11.090] - JD
Every texture reminder, all that stuff, all that stuff.
[00:48:14.050] - Brian
Every donor loves that one. Well, but what if we're credited for community? We just blew apart. One of the primary conditions for human flourishing is deep community. And it's very true for poor people in particular. One of the primary things they're dealing with is social isolation. So we've taken away the healing of the garden of gospel centered community and we blast it apart with technology into a highly individualistic knowledge transfer. It doesn't work. It works for knowledge transfer, it doesn't work for human flourishing. And so it's just a very practical example. Now. Do I need an RCT? Has shown me that I don't.
[00:48:53.910] - JD
So it seems like if you want to have holistic change in a multi dimensional way, you need to do it in community. That would fit this stylized example. Aren't there also examples though, where you do want to make individual changes? You're not saying that we want to.
[00:49:13.040] - Brian
Make individual changes, but they don't happen outside of community. That's why we have the local church.
[00:49:18.050] - JD
Would you be against any kind of individual change that happens?
[00:49:22.390] - Brian
I just believe that individual changes come out of communities of God's people where God is dwelling with us. And that does rule itself in individual transformation. But the transformation doesn't individual transformation doesn't come from simply knowledge beamed through cyberspace onto iPhones. That's not where how human transformation happens. I wish it did because it'd be really easy. But God didn't just say, well, let's.
[00:49:52.610] - JD
Take like text reminders about the benefits from education. But do you see that as part of the redemptive story? Even if the gospel isn't mentioned in the text reminder, that's a different issue.
[00:50:06.770] - Brian
I'm not opposed to text messages, but God didn't just send us disembodied information. He sent Jesus Christ, his Son incarnate to live in deep relationship with us. So the Bible tells us something about how human transformation happens. It's not through disembodied knowledge alone, it's through deep relationship with knowledge brought into that. There's knowledge in it. Jesus is the word, but he's the living word. He's a relational word and that informs program design. I'm not afraid of what research will tell us about what I'm saying because right now all the social science research, all the psychological research, all the signs of happiness research would say you know what? Human beings are deeply wired for relationship with God's, self, others and the rest of creation science is supporting what I'm saying. But I'm telling you we can get there even faster from recognizing we have truth revealed to us in scripture. Yes, we want to use science as well. It's not either or, it's both. And God reveals himself to us that way. But we don't want to reduce our epistemology to research methods. There's other ways of knowing and learning and being as well.
[00:51:19.980] - JD
It's both and right I think herein lies the point you were making about evangelical narcissism. Can you please articulate what you mean by that and maybe an example of an evangelical gnostic approach, maybe using the giving example you mentioned earlier where an evangelical gnostic would give great question.
[00:51:39.020] - Brian
So first of all I'm very indebted to a gentleman named Darryl Miller from the Discipline Nations Alliance for teaching the term evangelical gnosticism. So I just want to give a shout out to him. Gnosticism is an ancient heresy that much of the New Testament was trying to address and it basically says the spirit is good and the material rule is bad. And so basically it's a get the soul out of here because real flourishing comes from releasing the soul from its encapsulation the material realm. The Western church is essentially syncretized evangelical gnosticism with the gospel. And so what we have is a view of God that basically says god is Lord of our spiritual lives. But the universe Monday through Saturday runs basically according to naturalistic means. It's similar to theism do you think.
[00:52:27.980] - JD
It'S wrapped up with this enlightenment notion?
[00:52:29.850] - Brian
Totally.
[00:52:30.530] - JD
Science is showing us the mind of God.
[00:52:32.690] - Brian
Totally. And I do believe that science gives us insights to the mind of God. Again, it's not either or, it's both. And so you end up with God being relegated to the spiritual realm. But Monday through Saturday the world runs like a machine and quite frankly the believer has no epistemological advantages, no knowledge insights that help us Monday through Saturday. There's no advantage to being a Christian Monday through Saturday in terms of knowledge, in terms of being, in terms of doing. Because the world Monday through Saturday works the same for believers and unbelievers. It comes down then in our program designs to approaches that say this let's just use best practices from the world and then have a Bible study on Sunday to get people's souls to heaven. It means we give handouts to people to get the hook, to be able to share the gospel with them. We reduce the gospel to getting your soul to heaven. It's a separation of the material from the spiritual and the real goal is getting the soul to heaven for all of eternity to float around like a ghost every church in America has a really dumb ministry.
[00:53:41.870] - Brian
I don't know what it is, but every church has one and it's basically some kind of handout ministry. And what we if you talk to people running that ministry, this is what you're going to hear. You say to them, why are you doing this ministry? The same people have been sitting here for 30 years getting soup fed to them and they'll say, well, we just want to show them the love of Jesus so that we can share the gospel, so they can get their soul to heaven. So we're willing to do really dumb things that don't promote human flourishing to get a chance to share the tract to get the soul to heaven. That's not the gospel. The gospel is the kingdom of God is at hand. It's bring restoration to all things, including to human beings. That we can be fully human and be fully human is more than getting my soul beamed up to heaven. To be fully human is to be a highly integrated body, soul, relational creature.
[00:54:29.040] - JD
That's living in all these four aspects. Any quick career advice for Christians who want to make a large kingdom impact?
[00:54:34.940] - Brian
Learn theology. Learn theology. Get some practical skills, get some experience in the field early because later in your career you won't be able to do it.
[00:54:43.920] - JD
Internships, just trying things out and then.
[00:54:46.110] - Brian
Learn as you go. Don't think you're leaving college with all the answers. Learn as you go about who you are, about who the world is.
[00:54:53.230] - JD
Listen well, economics a good major for.
[00:54:56.000] - Brian
Those economics great major, but it's also a very dangerous major because it reduces the human being to homo economicus. But it's a great major. Just do it differently.
