Home Grown Glory: Parables of Developmental Aid to the World's Impoverished

By Scott Worley

In response to the myriad of complexly interconnected health and socioeconomic problems that wreak their worst destruction in the worlds poorest communities, an equally complex developmental-aid industry powered by the West has arisen. While appearing enormously beneficial in intent, expertise, and finances, it often perpetuates dependence and yields mediocre long-term results, due to its massive systemic, impersonal, autocratic, self-enhancing, and shallow programmatic nature.

The most indispensable resources for catalyzing transformative development among impoverished communities lies within their own borders, where God has sown infinite prosperity in less-visible forms. Home-Grown Glory conveys the spirit of discerning and building upon such treasure, using prose-poetic stories that depict:

Gods heart for liberation of the impoverished into freedom and prosperity. Limited impact of global best practices often used with HIV-related developmental aid. The power of reaching and inspiring individual and collective hearts with love, hope, and creative dreaming. Hidden wealth and opportunity amid the overwhelming tragedy of poor communities. Gods creative and unpredictable means of sparking transformational development in a shanty town community. The call of the church toward unity, humility, and honor in its developmental aid practices, rather than reinforcing damaging power dynamics and further division.

As eyes and minds of rich and poor are opened to such potential, the latter will lead the way toward unprecedented and unimaginable change, as together they experience heaven on earth in the most unlikely of places.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Aug 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449758561

Scott Worley

Scott Worley (PhD, MPH) is founder and coordinator of Land of the Living—a holistic community-development ministry of God Adventure Church in East London, South Africa. He is passionate about working with Spirit-filled, visionary leaders in local impoverished townships and informal settlements toward wide-scale community transformation. He lives with his wife, Yolanda, and their daughter, Olivia, in East London.

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Copyright © 2012 by Scott Worley.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-4497-5856-1 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-5855-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-5854-7 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012912168

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Cover design by Gary Murray

Interior photographs by Lungi Mkosi and Scott Worley

WestBow Press rev. date: 08/07/12

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part 1 Without…

Introduction Night Songs

Chapter 1 Inner Voice, Outer Noise

Chapter 2 Climbing Trees

Chapter 3 Get Your Peanuts!

Chapter 4 ABC and XYZ

Chapter 5 Any Questions?

Part 2 Within…

Chapter 6 Open Letter across the Atlantic

Chapter 7 Home Grown Glory

Chapter 8 A Mother’s Heart

Chapter 9 A Guide to Garbage Dumps

Chapter 10 Surely

About the Author

For my beautiful wife Yolanda

And our precious daughter Olivia,

You are my love,

My joy and inspiration;

With you

Life grows richer and more meaningful

Day after day…

Foreword

I recently read of a family who decided to sell some things they had stored around the house. While doing so they discovered that the old, dusty bric-a-brac that they had sought to get rid of held a secret value far beyond their wildest imagination. All that was needed was for the right eyes to see and recognize the fortune in what had lain around the house neglected for generations. In that moment this family, previously down on its luck, found itself transformed, with a whole new set of possibilities, a new future ahead and hope renewed.

The stories you are about to read are similar in many ways to the one above. My friend Scott Worley is a man gifted by God to recognize and draw out treasure in people and in communities. Where others only see and react to poverty, lack, sorrow, suffering, despair and hopelessness, he sees and builds upon abundance, value, potential, love and hope. When you are with him, whether in person or on the pages he writes, you get to see it too.

There is a love revolution coming. God is reviving and reforming nations, and Scott is on the forefront of that revolution. It has been said that the two greatest questions of our lives are: Who is God? and equally importantly Who am I? The answers to these questions will absolutely define our lives and determine our destinies. The reformation that many are working and praying for will be born from seeds of hope scattered across nations, as people see God as He truly is and see themselves as they truly are.

As long as it is believed that people are only as valuable or as powerful as their bank balances, their education levels or their skill sets, nothing will change. However once nations begin to recognize and embrace the goodness of God, once they find hope in the knowledge that God has unique and good plans for them and their families, and once they begin to value themselves and those around them as beautiful and powerful image bearers of God, a new world will begin to arise.

In the following pages Scott has written a series of power filled parables which bring out not only the beauty of God but the value of man made in the image of God. This book is quite simply a hope hand grenade! Get ready to be moved, touched, challenged and entertained as you journey through places you once believed to be the poorest among the poor, only to discover hidden wealth that has been there all along, holding the key to newfound prosperity.

Nigel Desmond

Senior Pastor, God Adventure

East London, South Africa

Preface

Several years ago I was passing through New York and met up with an old friend and mentor from my days in public health school. Over a beer in a local pub, he listened as I likely bombarded him with a deluge of ideas and frustrations, all of which I was experiencing in my new job as a technical advisor for an AIDS care and treatment organization in South Africa. On one hand, there was so much potential for what could be achieved. Yet on the other, I was getting first-hand exposure to a system that seemed to shoot itself in the foot, in many ways defying the very ideals it was supposedly trying to push. I had no idea what to do with all this, and he simply encouraged me to write about it, to get it out there for others to read and consider. That marked the beginning of a journey that would take me places I could not have imagined.

I began with what I knew based on my own limited experiences and studies. Yet as I slowly progressed over the next few years, I had an uneasy feeling that this would merely be another fairly dry, long-winded exposition on international developmental aid, its problems, and what needs to be done to correct them. And in this ever swiftly changing field, I wondered if my discussions would likewise be rendered redundant or obsolete.

At the same time, something incredible happened in my life in early 2005, as for the first time I experienced an intimate relationship with God through the person of Jesus. This challenged my every belief and conviction and pulled me in directions that seemed so contrary to what had been instilled in me during more than ten years of higher education. Yet simultaneously what was unfolding in my heart so strikingly resounded with my past and present experiences, truths about development I had felt all along but never known how to grasp or define.

And what was the great revelation, the truth to which it all seemed to point? A life of love, plainly and simply. The joke was seemingly on me, as years of academic pontification suddenly seemed to run long circles around this central truth that I had really wanted to convey all along.

Then one day in 2010, while taking part in a worship arts conference, I felt God prompt me to do something refreshingly new. I let go of all the worrying about covering every angle, researching every reference, and getting all the statistics right to prove my points. And I began to express all my thoughts and experiences in prose poetic form, painting mental images and portraying widely diverse points of view. Home Grown Glory is the result of this.

I can say with conviction that it deeply resonates with what I have seen, heard, felt and experienced during over a decade of work in international health and development – first as a community health volunteer in rural Eastern Zambia, where I was deeply submerged in local life yet had few financial resources and no substantive faith to stand upon; then in the above-mentioned position in Eastern Cape, South Africa for six years, during which I had tons of financial resources at my disposal, yet with a growing faith that made me question the need and use of the very same abundance; and finally as a minister pursuing holistic community development with visionary leaders in local townships of East London, South Africa, with relatively few financial resources yet with a strong faith, vision and resulting hope that makes all the difference.

I do not pretend to have captured a full picture of such a vast and far-reaching social, economic, and political phenomenon as international developmental aid. In fact I readily admit that I have made many mistakes in my own work, and have in the past contributed to and profited in some ways from a system that largely sets me ill at ease. But I cannot do so anymore. One can only live against his conscience and in continued compromise of his ideals for so long, before he grows skeptical, stagnates in thinking, loses hope, and grows hard of heart, at which point he has no real life or inspiration left to offer those he reaches out to help.

As such, all I have are my experiences and resulting perceptions, primarily in the field of HIV/AIDS programming, along with God’s imparted revelation. My heart is to communicate this with a world in desperate need for more wisdom and understanding in addressing basic health and other developmental challenges of impoverished nations. I thus hope to both glorify God and be of some inherent value to anyone working in this broad field.

It is so easy for