Why Are the Children of the World Doing So Much Better?

A report came across my desk recently about Save the Children, a humanitarian organization that concentrates its efforts on improving the state of children worldwide. Remarkably, this group documents surprising progress among this demographic: “Some 44 million fewer children are stunted by malnutrition today compared with 2000; 115 million fewer children are out of school today; 94 million fewer children are now forced into work; and there are 11 million fewer child brides today compared with 2000.”

This is a massive reality; good news, certainly, for any of those who love children and for those of us who care about the sorrows of the world, and about the effect of deprivation and poverty and ignorance on mankind.

How, exactly, was this extraordinary improvement stimulated?

The Christian Science Monitor (a must-read in our family due to its moral editorial policy and its emphasis on what is happening to improve the woes of society and the wounds of the world) lists several areas as causative factors. “While economic growth has been important, much of the progress was driven by government policy and a range of investments that raised living standards and safety for children in some of the world’s poorest countries.”

In addition, the worldwide emphasis on empowering women to advance to positions of influence in society by educating girls, for instance, or providing family planning tools and contraceptives for the poorest of the poor has placed many women in roles who then are able to activate advantage for other young girls and young women.

What caught my attention, however, in this report was the fact that one of the biggest contributors to children’s growing well-being was the signing of the global agreement in 2000 called the Millennium Development Goals; these were 8 propositions that brought wealthy and underdeveloped countries together in a pact to effect world improvement.

This is only my eighth Soulish Food this year; my portfolio has been filled with assignments from a faith-based international development organization to write so-called “Articles of Authority” about crisis systems of the world. So I have turned out five highly researched papers with many citations—papers equivalent to the work a grad student might put into a doctoral dissertation. These include topics such as: “When Great People Have Great Flaws” (a look at the dark night of the soul of Mother Teresa of Calcutta), “Clean Water” (an examination of the world water crisis) and “One Hundred Million Missing Women.” All of these were brain-busters, but the learning curve for me was welcome, since I served for 8 years on the Board of Directors of a faith-based world-development organization. The learning I did enriched the life-path I had already been trotting along.

In the research I conducted on malaria, partly related to the Millennium Development Goal #6 of eradicating the disease worldwide—“to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other disease”—I stumbled across a historical and basically buried incident that really answers the question posed by this Soulish Food—“Why are the children of the world doing so much better?”

It appears that in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Christian Medical Commission (CMC), established through the World Council of Churches (WCC), worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) to develop what became a Christ-centered theology of the meaning of health as demonstrated by our Lord when He walked on our Earth, which was also informed by a theology of the Kingdom of God—Christ’s major preaching theme.

Matthew Bersagel Braley recounts that the CMC and WHO worked together out of their headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, seeking to address many of the deficiencies in health treatments that were (and still are) growing due to modern Western medicine’s rapidly increasing dependency upon expensive technologies, both diagnostic and curative, unavailable to huge population groups.

Braley’s abstract examines the interaction of these two organizations working together: “What follows was a theologically informed [emphasis added] shift from hospital-based tertiary care in cities, many in post-colonial settings, to primary care delivery in rural as well as in urban settings.” If you know anything about the dilemma of health systems worldwide, you will understand that this was a revolutionary shift, to say the least.

In two earlier world consultations in Germany, Tübingen I and Tübingen II, a theology of health had been developed that eventually culminated in an understanding that the ministry of Christ demonstrated a “breaking into human life of the powers of the Kingdom of God, and of the dethroning of evil.” The further implication of this to these theologically informed thinkers was that the “priesthood of believers” referred to in Scripture was really a “priesthood of healers.” In effect, that means all who follow Christ should be active in bringing healing to the body, soul and mind, and to the communities in which individual believers live and function.

Health was also defined as the ideal that God desired for the people of the earth, one that will probably not be achieved completely, but will have periodic breakouts in and throughout time. Health was seen not simply as the “absence of disease” as defined traditionally by the medical establishment, but as the presence of ecological health, harmony within the community and at one-ness within the individual and in his/her relationships with others. It was the presence of peace and a lack of warfare; it was an insistence and concern that the neglected, the poor, the oppressed should be given preferential treatment [emphasis added] because of the systemic unfairness and lack of parity and often true evil exercised by the powerful over the powerless.

So pay attention. Pay attention with all your might. This theological premise informed—totally informed—the United Nations’ Eight Millennium Development Goals, which have been credited with improving many of the conditions of the impoverished, destitute and underprivileged of the world. It is the basic driving rationale beneath those concepts.

Those goals are:
1. to eradicate poverty and hunger;
2. to achieve universal primary education;
3. to promote gender equality and empower women;
4. to reduce child mortality;
5. to improve maternal health;
6. to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases;
7. to ensure environmental sustainability; and
8. to develop a global partnership for development.

The WHO declaration accompanying these goals notes, “The MDGs are inter-dependent; all the MDGs influence health and health influences all the MDGs. For example better health enables children to learn and adults to learn. Gender equality is essential to the achievement of better health. Reducing poverty, hunger and environmental degradation positively influences, but also depends on, better health.” The children of the world have evidently benefited and in some places thrived because of this little-known but crucially important fact, that a Christian theology, the very Gospel of Jesus Christ, informed the global partnership that sought to make the world a better place.

Given that many of the MDGs were met, or nearly so, and the fact that the United Nations declared this international effort “the most successful anti-poverty movement in history,” which it is, such as it is, success is still also a much more daunting task than the optimistic planners imagined. Since 2015, the MDGs have morphed into the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals with 17 points and a target accomplishment date of 2030.

And why is that, exactly? Well, it’s just hard to create a peaceable, equitable, egalitarian world-system that dignifies the life of every human on the planet. Huge progress has been made; the fact that we have healthier children worldwide is one evidence of that. Gender disparity goals in education are being reached, new infection levels were halved, and the world did reach the goal on access to safe drinking water. However, unprecedented weather patterns, donor fall-off, rising conflict that caused unanticipated migration patterns, the lack of high-level technology in many places for data gathering—all these and more defeated the overly optimistic intents of the global planners.

We look forward to seeing, those of us who pray and watch over the world with compassion and concern, to what the Sustainable Development Goals achieve.

Yet, in my heart, whenever I wobble as to the impact of Christian faith in this increasingly secularized, increasingly globalized world, I remember Tübingen I and II and the Alma-Ata conference where the MDGs were framed and published. I remember in these time in these places with these particular persons, Christian theology informed the deep passion and good intents of the world’s humanitarians, and I take heart. I take heart and wonder about all the other times, now hidden from history’s memory, when faith has made the world (often the whole world) better—much, much better. I take heart; I take heart.

Why are the world’s children doing much better than in 2000? I have a satisfying, deeply satisfying answer to that question. Do you?

Karen Mains

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Karen Mains

BOOK CORNER

What's So Great About Christianity
by Dinesh D'Souza

Without a doubt, one of the best books I’ve read this year is Dinesh D’Souza’s best-seller What’s So Great About Christianity? I don’t regularly say this, but it is a MUST-READ for every Christian concerned about the secularization of our society. I have made highlights on practically every page of the book.

Let me just quote some back-cover copy, which begins with the questions: “Is Christianity obsolete? Can an intelligent person believe the Bible? Has Christianity been disproved by science?”

The copy then continues: “New York Times best-selling author Dinesh D’Souza objectively examines the arguments and rhetoric in the current atheist-led debate about God and Christianity. Meeting the atheists’ arguments on their own terms, he demonstrates how religious belief can be reconciled with reason and science.”

Actually, the author goes even further than confuting Christianity’s disclaimers—he shows that reason and science owe their very inception to Christianity, which he eloquently argues was the very basis for the Age of Reason and is the bedrock of theology out of which modern science was incepted and grew.

I found the book inspiring, enlightening, and extraordinarily faith-building.