The first few editions of Do Good Better will be free. However, soon the newsletter will be moved behind a paywall. Check out the About page for more about why I’ve made that choice and how you can join.
Two articles capture much of what Do Good Better is for. If you have an extra thirty minutes to spare, I highly recommend you read both of these:
A Missionary On Trial, by Ariel Levy in The New Yorker.
And Protecting Whiteness At All Costs, an Open Letter to Ariel Levy and The New Yorker by No White Saviors on Medium.
These articles raise issues like the White Savior Complex, humanitarian work in Africa, mental illness, who gets to tell stories, money, journalism, colonial history, public health work, conflict between expatriates living abroad, the role of faith in development work…the topics go on and on.
These are not stories to be read alone. They aren’t stories a person can read and think about and then move on from. They need wrestling, untangling, debate, perspective. They need to be talked about from all the angles.
It isn’t useful or transformative to read these articles, or a book like When Helping Hurts, or even to write a book like mine, Stronger than Death, and just move on.
Rather, what can we learn from these stories about how to love, serve, work, be productive? What are the practical implications that can change the way we live, as we tangle with the messy places in faith and mission, expatriate life, and humanitarian work?
Some people facing doubt, fear, judgment, disillusionment, and disappointment while working cross-culturally or cross-religiously or cross-economically, etc, and decide that the best thing to do it burn is all down. Burn down the aid and development industries, burn down missions, burn down crossing cultures, burn it down, down, down. Or just get out. Leave the mess behind.
How about another way? A transformative, better way? Not stagnating in status quo because this works for those in power and with privilege, and not the way of destructive rage, but a dismantling and then reconstructing way.
Theologian NT Wright said, “What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether. They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.”
To fully engage in this kind of living, we need to transform some broken things from the inside, including our own selves, rather than blowing all of it up.
We need to do good better and together, we can learn how.
This is the first post in what will become an ongoing conversation and iron-on-iron sharpening that will change the way we do faith and mission, cross cultural living, and humanitarian work.
Feel free to share some of your big questions or ideas of topics you’d like to wrangle with in the comments.
Welcome. Onward.