of Faith
Bryant
Myers
Douglas
McConnell
Philip
Ryken
Joe
David
Art
Strickland Planetshakers Firth Gallery
Bryant Myers
Engaging Globalization
The Poor, Christian Mission, and Our
Hyperconnected World
EOF: In the introduction to “Engaging Globalization: The Poor, Christian Mission, and
Our Hyperconnected World”, your book from Baker Press, you started giving a brief
review of how poverty has changed over the globe and all the things that happened
in the past couple of hundred years to get us where we are today. And you also men-
tion that a lot of Christians today, even in your classrooms, aren’t really aware of these
effects or what is even important about those effects. So maybe you could just start with
giving us an introduction to globalization now?
Myers: I begin the book by talking about all of the things that are changing very, very fast. We all know
what they are. The economy in the world has grown significantly in the past twenty years. Our financial
systems are now global. Our capital movements are all global. Our criminal behavior is all global. You
go right down the list. An awful lot of things have been connected up and are influencing each other. It
has at the same time, at least on the material side
of life, made quite a significant reduction in the
material poverty both in terms of reducing the
number of poor, but [also] extending life expec-
tancy, reducing childhood and infant mortality,
and that kind of thing.
But here in the West, we basically experience
it more in terms of the fact that our computer
stops at about eight different countries before it
gets here. We are ordering stuff on Amazon that
comes with a label on it from China. In other
words, we are all much more globally connected
in where we get our stuff, how we think about
our stuff, and that’s really good and it’s one of the
reasons things that we have, have prices that are
fairly stable here; you get high quality goods at
Walmart.
The other side of it, of course, is what it has been
teaching us in the West, that basically our role in
society is to buy things or to experience things. In
other words, there is a sense in which we can just
let this thing roll over the top of us and not pay
any attention to it. I think that is what the church,
by and large, has done. They are busy with their
local congregations. They are busy with their
local outreach. Many of them have global reach
and some of them are using the technological
side of globalization, but that’s pretty much it.
Where the questions that are important, I think,
are what is it doing to us? How is it shaping our
values? What is it communicating to us about just
who human beings are? If we are being reduced in
the West to being shoppers, that’s not a very high
view of human beings and what we are here for.
So this thing is, I think, largely being ignored,
partly because it feels really technical and its
got all these dimensions; it’s very, very compli-
cated. Partly because we really don’t think much
about where our stuff comes from and that kind
of thing. And so I basically end up concluding
that churches kind of have three different views.
One is that they really hate globalization. They
are a more liberal church that is very suspicious
of capitalism and they just think it needs to be
changed or go away. You’ve got churches basically
that are simply not paying any attention to it at
all. They are not teaching about about it. They
are not having sermons or bible studies. They are
not asking the question, does the church have a
missional role in responding to this thing, which
is all around us. And then there are some that
basically want to figure out how can the church
“In Genesis, we are
told some things about
who we are, about who
human beings are, that
begins with being made
in the image of God,
which means we are cre-
ative by definition.”
be a reforming influence. There I think about the
Victorian evangelicals that worked [for] eradica-
tion of the slave trade; worked against some of the
darker sides of the British Empire. In other words,
they were good Christian evangelicals just like
many evangelicals here are, but they took it for
granted that they had a role in the public square.