The conclusions of "Discerning the Way Together" on such issues as poverty in the North, gender, education, health, agriculture and population do not amount to a single, unified vision of the future, its goals or strategies. This is partly because all involved were wary of global answers, believing that the way forward would differ from place to place. But many of the conclusions do show continuity with our own review of the ecumenical response to poverty over the last twenty years and do address the unfinished agenda of the wider ecumenical family. The same can be said of a special issue of The Ecumenical Review called "Ecumenical Diakonia: New Challenges, New Responses", published in July 1994 to "mark the fiftieth anniversary of sharing and service within the worldwide ecumenical movement".

We shall refer to it in this chapter as "Ecumenical Diakonia". Three obvious examples of following up the unfinished agenda have to do with partnership, empowerment and theology.

Partnership

The ideals and rhetoric of partnership are rehearsed in the "Discerning the Way Together" documents as they were in the ecumenical family's previous attempts to define diakonia, in the Guidelines for Sharing drawn up at El Escorial and in its talk of "ecumenical discipline". Partnership is still characterized by equality between those who share a common faith and common objectives, by mutual trust, by giving and recciving and by accountability to each other. Relationships between partners will be open (or "transparent"). There are to be no secrets. Decisions will be shared. An underlying or special family commitment will bind the partners together and prove stronger in the long term than failures and disappointments along the way.

But if the ideals are still there, so is the recognition of repeated failure to achieve them. Old "colonial" attitudes have re-emerged if they ever went away. The mistakes of the missionary movements are repeated. Agency staff can be overbearing. The South is not really party to decisions. Shared decision-making is said to be difficult in practice. The presence of agency offices and expatriate staff in Southern countries spells for many the very opposite of trust. North and South do not always share the same faith or priorities, or even know each other all that well. The North regards the South as inefficient. The fact that the word "partner" is used far more often by the North of the South than by the South of the North reveals unequal rather than equal relationships.

With the recognition of failure comes the acknowledgment that there is little point in simply exhorting the guilty parties to do better. A more realistic response is required, and both "Discerning the Way Together" and "Ecumenical Diakonia" have suggestions to make. 2

One possibility is to accept that the funding agencies of the North simply cannot sustain the sort of relationships being described, and certainly not so many of them as they have pretended to do in the past. Many in future will have to be far more superficial and more like business contracts with clients. Agencies will then be free to develop a few relationships at a deeper level. This will involve ending some partnerships and withdrawing from some countries. The implication is that, given time and opportunity, partnership can succeed. It is probably a false hope.

Another possibility is reflected in recent discussions about national councils of churches. What they have been offered is "capacity building", which is something less than partnership. It largely amounts to training to manage their staff and programmes and to account for the money they spend in ways more acceptable and reassuring to Northern agencies and governments, who are insisting more and more on knowing that "their" money is being well spent. If these demands are not met, then the funds the councils are said to need desperately will not be made available. Realism suggests that they cut their losses and agree to the donors' terms.

At this point history may well repeat itself. Early in the story of the ecumenical response to poverty, national councils of churches were shaped to meet the needs of the Northern churches and agencies. Projects had to be assessed and the agencies needed channels for their aid. In a discussion about projects at the Swanwick consultation in 1966, for example, proposals were put forward to deal with "the present weakness of many NCCs", partly by encouraging their member churches to support them and partly by offering help from outside: "The strengthening of staff for more effective dealing with projects may well demand additional support from the oikoumene."3

Then as now NCCs were supported and shaped as instruments of the North, equipped to do what the North required. Then as now they were potentially diverted from an holistic task to a specialized task, from what they might have done if left to themselves to what they did do at the behest of others. Then as now funding and capacity-building from the North made the support of the local member churches more difficult to win and self-reliance more difficult to achieve. Then as now councils of churches co-operated half-approving since there was aid and development work to be done for which funds were needed, half-disapproving of being dictated to and diverted, however benevolently, by outside forces. They came to terms, if reluctantly, with the power of the donors.

But if realism is the way forward it has yet another step to take. Of the many reasons why partnerships do not work lack of time to foster them, practical pressures, differences of culture and approach - one remains fundamental: the fact that the partners remain "asymmetrical", as "Discerning the Way Together" describes them. They are unequal rather than mutual because they are and always will be undermined by the global imbalance of resources of which the ecumenical imbalance is but a tiny part. And this gap between the rich and the poor is not diminishing but growing. Although this does not rule out people treating one another with a measure of respect, it does make partnership as it is so often described virtually impossible. To quote "Discerning the Way Together": "Money generates power and dependence generates resentment." There is a direct causal link between unequal resources and difficult relationships, which is why simply cutting down the number of partnerships which agencies and their Southern partners attempt to sustain is unlikely to change very much at all. Realism suggests that equal partnership will remain a dream for as long as unequal access to the earth's resources remains a fact.

The ecumenical family must be extremely cautious about pursuing what will always be vitiated. The quest for "partnership", "ecumenical resource-sharing", "ecumenical discipline" or simply "ecamenism" tends to be over-preoccupied with achieving the kind of internal relations which are jeopardized from the start by the context in which they are pursued. The realistic and therefore the more "Christian" alternative is a threefold strategy. First, to be clear that the main aim is to shift or share out more justly global resources rather than ecumenical ones. This must be the acid test applied to projects and programmes, movements, organizations and advocacy. Will they contribute to shifting resources from the rich to the poor? Second, to deploy (rather than "share") our very limited ecumenical resources as strategically as we know how to that end, acting together or separately according to common agreements. Third, to forge alliances, make working agreements, draw up and sign contracts (avoiding the language of partnership) between North and South, rich and poor counterpart organizations, which stand or fall on whether or not they see some part of the strategy through. To say that both partners, North and South, will have something to contribute to such agreements is true. To say they are equal is romantic. The poor sell their souls not when they bow to an unequal relationship in giving and receiving or even in decision-making, but when they agree to cooperate where they do not believe the overall strategy will be advanced.

Relationships then will tend towards the instrumental, designed to get things done, rather than the idealistic, aspiring to ways in which human beings ought to live together especially as a Christian community but which are not possible given the world as it is.

The debate about partnership has sometimes been presented as a dilemma or choice between ecumenism and efficiency. Ecumenism, we are told, requires us to respect the special relationship which binds together the ecumenical family through thick and thin, and to choose to stay with ecumenical partners even where they are judged to be less than efficient when it comes to aid and development and the struggle against poverty and for life. Efficiency, it is said, declares that our first loyalty is to the poorest of the poor and that we must work with whoever we judge will most effectively address our overriding concern, whether they are ecumenical partners or not. The dilemma is not easily resolved. But we must make every effort to achieve what might be called ecumenical efficiency or efficient ecumenism. It is not ecumenism for its own sake any more than it is partnership for its own sake. It commits us instead to do all we can to use ecumenical resources to shift global resources, and to fashion ecumenical instruments among others for shifting them as effectively and efficiently as we can.

One other aspect of the partnership debate is picked up by "Discerning the Way Together". Much of the debate assumes that partners are institutions - councils of churches, agencies or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and it mistakenly assumes that relationships between institutions can be modeled on personal relationships. Formally constituted corporate bodies cannot behave like individual people or aspire to the almost intimate relationships that partnership language implies. Institutions, with their necessary procedures and bureaucracies, will find it doubly difficult to embody the ideal of mutuality, and it is thus doubly important for them to be realistic.

But "Discerning the Way Together" asks about the people behind these institutions. Southern contributors questioned the NGOs in the South about how far they speak for the people and the people's movements they claim to represent and whether or not they serve the people's interests. Similar questions are raised within the ecumenical family as to how far councils of churches represent member churches and their local congregations. From the agency point of view, Christian Aid recently discovered that although it was created by the churches to enable them to respond to the challenge of world poverty, it did not enable and support the people in the churches all that well. 4

In general, people felt disabled and overwhelmed by the enormity of the task and the demands being made of them.

In the end the partners in the struggle against poverty are not just the institutions, and not even primarily the institutions, no matter how necessary institutions may be. The primary partners are people in local churches and communities in both North and South, who are sometimes distanced from each other rather than brought more closely in touch by "professional" agencies thinking they know best. Perhaps agencies, councils of churches and NGOs have been too busy discussing their own partnerships when they ought to have been discussing those of the people they are created to serve. Local congregations do not necessarily know best, any more than agencies, but it is worth seeking legitimate ways to put people in touch across the divides of the world and afford them the opportunity to give and receive in the mutuality which is less possible and less relevant at the institutional level. Has the key insight of Larnaca 1986 that Christian service belongs essentially to the local church and at the level of highly personal, people-to-people relationships yet been taken seriously into account?

Empowerment

Both "Discerning the Way Together" and "Ecumenical Diakonia" are clear about the need for structural change. If poverty is to be eradicated, the underlying causes, rooted in the way the world is organized, must be removed. The best that "Discerning the Way Together" can say of the present neo-liberal free market system is that it doubts its ability to overcome poverty. The prospects for creating wealth, let alone redistributing it, are not bright. At worst it sees the system as entirely given over to the gods of individualism, selfishness and competition. It requires all too many people to be sacrificial victims. They must remain poor and pay the price so that a minority can grow rich. This unjust order of things must be transformed into a global resource-sharing system.

What seems equally clear, however, is that the system is here to stay. Those who run it have an almost fundamentalist faith in its power to set the world right. Those who vote them into power seem unwilling to vote for anything else. Free-market capitalism has triumphed. Evidence of its success in overcoming poverty and creating productive economies is found in "Asian Tigers" and "Newly Industrialized Countries" like South Korea, Thailand and Taiwan. With the collapse of communism and the loss of confidence in socialism and the programmes of the left, there appears to be no alternative and no need for one. The system which the ecumenical family insists must be changed only tightens its grip, despite our attempts to be strategic and in solidarity with one another.

If the analysis is correct, one consequence is that occasions of desperate need calling for immediate relief are likely to remain as familiar features of the landscape. Whereas the imagined scenario at one stage of ecumenical history was to move from relief to development, it will not now be possible to leave behind disasters and emergencies and refugee crises in that way if it ever was. They are more than likely to grow in number or in size or both and to deepen. The reasons for such crises are many. Conflict and environmental degradation are prominent among them. But underlying all such factors is the completely indefensible failure to distribute the world's resources, taking too much from one place and forcing those who are left there to deplete further and fight over the little that remains. Such dynamics are far more likely to be continued than to be reversed under the present system.

Two consequences are said to follow. First, an emergency can be so large in scale that it rapidly outstrips the capacity of local organizations, including the churches. They do not have the wherewithal to cope. They may in any case be overwhelmed by it themselves. It requires the ecumenical family to organize itself to move in and take sensitive and supportive, but also far more direct and effective action often referred to as "operational". Second, the vast majority of emergencies cannot be seen as unfortunate interruptions to the mainstream, ongoing work of development. They are not abnormal; they are normal for as long as the present non-distributive economic system lasts. If at one time emergency work took great care to incorporate the principles of development, avoiding dependency and heading as rapidly as possible towards self-reliance and rehabilitation, development work must now incorporate measures to prepare the poor for the almost inevitable disasters that will continue to come their way. It must plan for setbacks. It must develop stratogies for survival as well as for advance. 5

A third consequence of the persistence of disaster and emergency situations is that the ecumenical family should be unapologetic about offering relief or "aid" to people who will live and die long before the systems which create the emergencies and keep people poor are changed. This immediate response to human need is easily thrown on the defensive. It can be criticized for dealing with symptoms and not causes, for changing nothing and for being a fairly cheap way by which the better-off can ease their consciences. All of this may be true. But it is not the whole truth, and it does not remove the need or the duty to feed the hungry today and not tomorrow. Such compassion, often costly and courageous, cannot be automatically dismissed as mere charity.

Perhaps more than anything else, this sense of having to come to terms with the status quo in the form of an entrenched economic order shifts the debate about empowerment. The change that seems to be required is not just a matter of empowering people in a different way, for example, by giving them the power of the vote in the new democracies instead of the power of organized peoplets movements or even the power of the gun. Some ways of empowering, such as community-organizing, will remain the same. The change now required is much more a matter of empowering people for a different purpose. Some describe it as moving from liberation to reconstruction. With the old oppressors overthrown - at least in some countries new and more democratic societies must now be built, and the poor given the opportunity to build them.

There may be a better way of describing the change of purpose, especially if we are correct in believing that the present order of things is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Empowerment is no longer designed to overthrow the system, taking the mighty from their thrones, taking over the seats of the powerful and replacing the system with another. Empowerment is rather for exploiting the system and surviving within it. Strategies for change must give way to strategies for survival. They must be at least as useful for survival and for wresting out of the system what people can get as they must be promising for change.

Gaining access for poor people to markets or extending the markets to include them is one of the newer forms of empowerment. By definition this is a way of changing the system, since it would otherwise leave them out. At the same time, it accepts the system. It comes to terms with the market. It looks for ways in which the poor can produce and sell and gain credit so that they can benefit from the market as it now exists.

Organizing people is a more traditional form of empowerment. If people work together there is some hope that they may be able to stand, whereas separate they will certainly fall. "Discerning the Way Together" believes organization needs to be extended beyond local groups, creating networks of churches and other organizations and a lively and varied civil society with national influence. It is a form of changing the system, giving a voice and a platform to those who would otherwise be ignored. But equally it makes use of the growing space within the system to campaign and negotiate and to claim from governments whatever benefits and legal rights it can, including better health care, roads and schools.

For example, the National Campaign Against Hunger in Brazil provides millions of people with food. It helps them to survive. But it has also mobilized vast numbers of people from all social groups in a joint effort in favour of the poor. It has revived solidarity in the midst of unprecedented individualism. It has defied selfishness and greed as the driving forces of the system in favour of a more traditional culture of community and cooperation. 6

The need to claim benefits and rights partly inspires the emphasis of "Discerning the Way Together" on advocacy in the South, which agencies have supported far less than in the North. Advocacy is often associated with campaigning about the global issues that make people poor, such as trade and debt. But it has the double character of drawing attention to the needs of people within the system and how they could be met, as well as setting out to change it. It gives people the power both to cry out against the structures that harm them in North and South and to ask for what they need to go on struggling for as long as the structures persist.

Self-reliance and sustainability as forms of empowerment implicitly accept the system. They recognize that people have extremely limited resources and that the situation is unlikely to change. They set out to devise ways in which poor people can use whatever is to hand that is productive, sustaining and sustainable (in agriculture, for example) in order to survive. They discover how people can live as far as possible within their resources, since new ones of any great significance are unlikely to come their way. But this ability or power to be self-sufficient is also a strategy for changing the system by building up self-reliant pockets of resistance less beholden to the market and less vulnerable to its power. It is one context in which "Discerning the Way Together" accepts the nced for the agencies to pay far more attention to income-generating projects that are not forever relying on outside funding or renewed credit.

Empowering people to exploit systems as much as to change them is controversial. Many of the Southern contributors to "Discerning the Way Together" can be read as boing strongly against it. For them this is the time "to be excluded from the present order" and to build an "international civil society" outside organized society as we know it. Their anti-systemic approach is not against all systems as such but is firmly opposed to this one "which produces and excludes the poor at the same time". They are also suspicious of a possible shift by Northern agencies away from a clear commitment to transformation towards a more pragmatic attack on poverty. There is a fine line between playing by Western rules adopting Western tactics and Western efficiency in order to "beat the system" and being finally co-opted into it.

The danger against which these Southern voices warn is real enough all of Christian history teaches how difficult it is to be in the world but not of it but there are counter-arguments. If such an approach is regarded as little more than compromise and betrayal, settling for what is rather than for what ought to be, it could also be said that not doing what is possible to bend the system in favour of the poor is equally to betray them, especially if no alternative strategy is on offer. The Southern contribution recognizes along with the North that "people are looking for practical answers to their daily problems, even when structural problems or root causes have not been resolved".

Another counter-argument is that it is not at all clear what opting out of the system into an alternative "international civil society" would mean. Does it mean modifying the system with a bias towards subsidiarity and self-reliance? Does it mean building well-connected and mutually supportive international networks? Does it mean being forthright and persistent in exposing the demonic nature of the economic order? Does it mean not being reverential and not allowing hoped-for favours to silence criticism? All these are ways of being anti-systemic, for all the risks of compromise which go with them, and at times these sorts of tactics appear to be what is in mind. But if being anti-systemic means that agencies and churches in North and South are to opt out of the system altogether, no longer taking resources from governments and financial institutions like the World Bank and using them as best they can in the interests of the poor, no longer engaging constructively with those who shape and run the systems in an attempt to modify them in the interests of the poor, but rejecting them wholesale, would it actually enhance the ability to bring about change? Or would it simply be a rather empty gesture of principle, leaving them marginalized with even fewer resources and less influence and thus less potential for good?

Theology

The Southern contribution to "Discerning the Way Together", some of it echoed in "Ecumenical Diakonia", actually does some theology rather than merely discussing how to do it. For example, it is hi ghly critical of the present economic order as " sacrificial" in a way that is entirely unacceptable from a Christian point of view. Christianity affirms suffering and sacrifice when it is self-giving and redemptive, expressing a willingness to serve and love in a costly way for the healing of the world's pain. It is exemplified in the sacrifice of Christ. But Christianity is not willing to accept that the lives of some human beings, in this case the poor of the earth, are expendable or fit to be "sacrificed" to satisfy the avarice of others.

Again, the Southern contributors to "Discerning the Way Together" are clear that the Christian faith is "anti-systemic" by nature. This is not to say that it is against all systems social, political, economic or whatever but that every system is by definition open to question. First, it is a human system, with all the inevitable limitations which that implies. It cannot take every need or every eventuality into account or solve every problem. Second, it is a sinful system, because the men and women who construct and maintain it not only have limited insights and capacities but also have vested interests. Fearful as they are, they are out to protect and to benefit themselves. They are not equally committed to the good of all. Such theological insights, based on the Christian understanding of human nature, should produce caution and scepticism in relation not only to existing systems but also to anything that takes their place. They should most certainly challenge the fundamentalism which sometimes surrounds the present economic order.

That having been said, "Discerning the Way Togethei' displays much the same lack of confidence when it comes to theology as we have seen in so much of the ecomenical family's response to poverty. This shows through at three points in particular. The first is the agencies' nervousness about engaging with other theological traditions that inspire different approaches to the challenge of world poverty and the task of development, which are said to be increasingly influential. The "conservative" or "fundamentalist" tradition is specifically mentioned. This might mean a sectarian and anti-ecumenical approach setting Protestant communities against Catholics for example. It might mean an approach which rejects any serious engagement with the injustices of the present order in favour of escapist hopes for an other-worldly resolution of this world's problems. It might mean the conservative theology that goes with right-wing politics. Less pejoratively, it could mean a theological approach, found in many Pentecostal groups, which takes more seriously the way in which spirituality can in fact sustain people in circumstances unlikely to change much in their lifetime. Or again it could mean a theological approach which looks for a more open and obvious alliance between development and mission, between offering the hungry bread and offering them the gospel which is the bread of life. Only at this point, incidentally, is the classic ecumenical debate about "holism" (discussed in chapter 2 above) in any sense referred to in "Discerning the Way Together".

This reluctance to join in debate with those who take a very different theological stance may be due to a feeling on the part of the ecumenical agencies that it would be largely unproductive. It may be due to a failure to recognize how destructive conservative influences could be in a world where we need common ground between peoples of different faiths and traditions rather than a polarized debate. It may be born of the feeling that there is as much to gain as to oppose in these other approaches. It rather assumes that such encounters must be antagonistic; but there is little chance of reinvigorating our faith and theology without them.

The chief explanation of the reluctance to engage probably relates to a second point at which a lack of confidence is seen, namely in the admission that agencies lack the resources for engaging in theological reflection. This is frankly admitted in the response of the four directors:

A radical scepticism with regard to the present neo-liberal model of development, and an insistence on the importance of theology, emerged from both the Northern and Southern reports as interrelated and fundamental issues. Important as they are, such issues are well beyond the present capacities of the agencies to respond to in any adequate way. Here agencies look to the churches to undergird our work with critical and creative thinking on Christian approaches to the economic order.

Third, if agencies are to engage in the pastoral cycle of theological reflection on practice and practice in the light of theological reflection, the problem of methodology remains. Agencies must gain confidence first in asking the three basic questions (see chapter 5 above) about what they are dealing with, what they want to achieve and how to achieve it; and then in trawling the Bible and the traditions of the churches for relevant insights and using them (along with those of other disciplines) to nourish their thinking as they make up their minds about the next appropriate steps to take.

Finally, it is feared that the theological approaches of the ecumenical agencies themselves and their different opinions as to how any theology relates to development are so diverse that any consensus would be extremely difficult to achieve. If one of the objects of the exercise is "discerning the way together", different internal approaches to the implications of Christian faith may not prove all that unifying.

Despite this lack of confidence, the importance of doing theology is not called into question but underlined. Several arguments are advanced as to why more should be done while acknowledging that in general it remains peripheral within the agencies.

Is it possible for this debate about theology not to become, like the debate about partnership, another case of endlessly aspiring to an ideal which cannot be fulfilled? Here are three suggestions.

First, if the agencies lack the resources to do the theology which they believe to be important for their work, they must take steps to obtain these resources. The most obvious direction in which to look is to those who have more confidence not that they have all the answers in relating faith to the issues and challenges and questions with which world poverty confronts us. Agencies need to build good working relations with the individuals and institutions that possess such confidence. In the North, for example, there is a flourishing tradition of Christian social ethics. It could play a significant role in relating faith to development; and it is pursued as a discipline by people who believe they know what they are about. Why is there so little contact at a working level between them and the practitioners? Or again, if there is scant interest in the North in an expression of Christian faith, mission and obedience which focuses on the concern of a Christ-like God for the poor of the earth, that is certainly not true of the churches of the South. Liberation and contextual theologies, the base Christian communities, associations of Third World theologians, kairos documents, to mention but a few examples, demonstrate that the resources and the confidence are there. Agencies are supposed to be skilled at making links. Why then are so few links made at a working level to ensure that the theologies of the South are used to inform the policies, programmes and procedures of the North?

Second, there is an understandable but somewhat vicious circle that has to be broken. In general the engagement of the Northern churches with world poverty has come to be seen as a fairly specialized, professional and technical affair. As a result, the technical and professional qualifications and practical experience of staff members are rated more highly than whether or not they are people of active Christian faith or members of local congregations. It is agreed that many of the jobs that need to be done can be done perfectly well regardless of a person's religious commitments. But if those employed by the agencies are there more by virtue of their professional and technical abilities than by virtue of their Christian commitments, it is inevitable that they will see less and less reason for bringing faith and theological reflection into their work. They will only reinforce the perception of a technical rather than theological enterprise and begin to go round the "vicious" circle all over again.

To say that the circle should be broken could be heard as discounting the need for professional and technical expertise or as wrongly suggesting that theology is equally relevant at every level of work which it is not or as implying that people who are not practising Christians will not be so good at their jobs in either a technical or moral sense as those who are. No such implications necessarily follow.

Breaking the circle means making a choice. On the one hand, development agencies, like banks and industrial enterprises, can be seen as highly specialized, working largely within their own autonomous disciplines and defined in those terms. This does not make theological considerations irrelevant. We always need to be asking about their purposes, about the motives of those involved, about the values being upheld and their effects on human communities. But we shall not forever demand that as institutions they do theology. Instead, the church will want to expose them from time to time to its own theological critique from the outside, and support with good opportunities for reflection and formation those Christian individuals who feel called to work in them.

On the other hand, Christian agencies which are called to enable the churches to make the best possible response to poverty could, like mission agencies, be seen as "faith communities" in which it is only to be expected that Christian believers, committed to the church (though not uncritical of it), active in worship and Christian witness and service, will be very much in evidence. Precisely because of their faith, they do not have to be urged continuously to take faith into account. They see the point of taking it into account, and want to discover how best to do so in order to be true to what they claim to believe. Only then does theological reflection cease to be an unreasonable and unnecessary duty and become a matter of their own integrity and self-expression.

Third, we have already argued that theological reflection is unlikely to gain much ground until people are convinced that Christian faith is actually talking about the real live issues that they face and has relevant and useful contributions to make. The language of the questions they ask and the language of the responses they seek from theology have to be the same. In a sense, theology has to prove that it is worth doing. Nothing will change very much until theology becomes attractive and useful rather than a question of duty or integrity.

In this connection those who plead the cause of theology should take note of a number of puzzling contemporary issues that agencies and others have to face and seize their chance to demonstrate what help theology and theologians can offer in supporting and shaping the ecumenical response to poverty. Out of many I mention three.

The first is the question of the persistence of poverty. It is surprising how seldom this is seen in the ecumenical documents as cause for a fundamental challenge to faith in a powerful God of love and to traditional Christian explanations of why there is so much suffering in the world (technically referred to by the theologians as "theodicies"). But beyond that we are confronted with the question as to why poverty persists. Is it because we do not know, even in the modern world, how to be rid of it? Or is it because we know how to be rid of it but lack what is often referred to as the "political will" to do so? And if it is a matter of the will, what is the likely explanation and what if anything can be done about it?

Several theological "explanations" are to hand. Some refer to "the powers of this dark world" which are greater and stronger than our human power, individual or collective, and to which we are enslaved. Others talk about human disobedience. We deliberately choose to ignore the claims of God and of justice, or the rules for taking proper care of the earth and its resources. Still others deepen the question and ask why we disobey or act in self-serving and destructive ways. Is it sheer perversity or is it fear which warps our lives and drives us to short-sighted measures of self-protection?

A coherent theological answer to such questions is important and potentially productive. There is little point in persistently exhorting people to do what they persistently refuse to do or in expecting the world to change its behaviour on demand. We need the best understanding we can arrive at as to why it behaves as it does, so that we can then act accordingly. Helpful responses depend on good analysis. It could well bring to the fore two insights which the response to poverty has tended to ignore. One is the fundamental human need for security: it is difficult to care for others if we do not feel reasonably safe or taken care of ourselves. We behave badly largely out of fear. The other has to do with the more personal and spiritual dimensions of material wealth and poverty and their actual and perceived relationships to the quality of our lives.

A second area in which theology could be of help is on the question of compromise. We have talked about the need to empower the poor to work within exploitative systems rather than overturn them. We have seen how national councils of churches must bow to the pressures of Northern donors if they are to win resources. If we improve structural adjustment policies we may ease the worst of their effects on the poor while taking all too seriously the very economic structures that tend to make them poor. Agencies likewise have to deal with governments and social groups which prosper at the expense of the poor. They must play according to their rules at home and abroad, including the rule that the poor must account in detail to the rich while the rich need give little if any account of themselves to the poor. At a quite different level, the need to find common ground with people of other faiths may require us to soft-pedal some of the more distinctive aspects of our own.

Is this sort of compromise simply storing up trouble for the future, refusing to confront what ought to be confronted now? Is it far too pragmatic and unprincipled, agreeing to whatever may achieve the immediate results we are looking for? Or is it in fact highly principled, in that it looks for the way which will best serve our neighbours and reap the most benefit for the poor, and so acts out of the kind of Christian love which goes beyond sentiment to maximizing the good of those it claims to love. Some sorting out as to what is the moral high ground and what is the slippery slope, of how Christian compromise is saved from being mere co-optation, of how we can live effectively in the world and not become merely part of it, of the merits and weaknesses of what are called idealism and realism, of how to compromise with a good conscience all of this could be extremely supportive of the contemporary debate about development, where instead of turning the world upside-down there seem to be plenty of reasons for coming to terms with it more or less as it is.

Third, theology might help us to seize the opportunity provided by the current interest in ideology, values, culture and civil society to win wider acceptance and support for the institutional churches as serious players in the field of development, worthy of public support. Up to now churches have been suspect as reliable partners in development precisely because of their interest in some of these matters. Rather than promoting economic growth they could be peddling a faith and busy proselytizing. Rather than serving society in general they could be strengthening their own institutions. But the understanding of development has widened and deepened. The values and beliefs which hold communities together (or drive them apart) and inform their ways of doing things, and the cultural patterns and rituals which bind them to one another, have to be treated just as seriously as any techniques for agriculture or health care when improving the quality of life. And "participation" is everything, not only through the ballot box but through the institutions of civil society, including voluntary organizations, trade unions and churches, where people can belong and have a sense of ownership and can contribute and have their say. This richer understanding of development coincides with a good deal of talk about holism within the ecumenical family. But what is required is a theological account of the church which, rather than merely echoing or conforming to what is being said about development, shows where the tasks of the church and the aims of development legitimately converge and can be mutually supportive. Running right through the church's rituals and training programmes, synods and councils and institution-building, as well as through its service and witness in the world, could be the desire to promote the human values, responsive and self-reliant people and strong participatory communities and institutions which the development world could now welcome and support across the board. But such a holistic theology of mission needs careful and competent articulation in a fresh apologia for the church.

An imaginative leap

In discussing the future, "Discerning the Way Together" contains few real surprises. Its proposals remain very much within the familiar parameters of the debate about aid and development and the ecumenical response to poverty. They feel like inching forward, not leaping ahead. The recipe is much the same as before even if, as is hoped, much improved. None of this is necessarily cause for criticism. Indeed, short of anything blindingly new, we are required to inch forward as best we can, persevering with what we know rather than giving up or drawing back out of impatience or cynicism. This is the steady, responsible obedience required of us.

It does not however prevent us feeling disappointed and wanting something more. The achievements of the last fifty years are considerable. They are reflected above all in the struggles of poor people themselves and in their abilities, courage and hope. But there remains a huge sense of dismay even for those who have known such people and seen their achievements. At the end of the day, whatever the improvements, the absolute number of poor people in the world is growing. There are more than there were fifty years ago; and the gap between rich and poor is getting wider. The earth's resources continue to flow relentlessly towards those who already have and away from the have-nots.

And if the battle against poverty does not seem to have progressed all that much, neither has the ecumenical response to poverty. We seem to have learned all too little by immersing ourselves in practical obedience and reflecting on our experience. We seem to repeat the same mistakes, as we noted when comparing the record of development agencies with that of missionary societies. We re-invent what our ecumenical memory forgets. The arguments about mission and politics and power and theology, the four themes examined in this book, do not advance all that much. Many of the insights came as early as the days of the International Missionary Council, and are then repeated. Even our inching forward can collapse into the familiar syndrome of the same old issues and attitudes dressed up in new forms.

From time to time the ecumenical documents reflect this sense of dismay. Commenting on the WCC's Nairobi assembly in 1975, David Paton said that there was "nothing specially new in the way of ideas. The ideas and causes were still for the most part those that had erupted at Uppsala or earlier". 7 Ten years later, Harry de Lange concluded that

one of the dangers in the ecumenical social ethics debate is that we repeat ourselves too often, especially in the development discussions. In this respect we mirror the secular debate. The second Brandt Report is more or less a repetition of the first. There is no real progress, and the agenda of UNCTAD VI is almost identical with the agenda of UNCTAD I! 8