Faith and Displacement with Dr. Christopher Hays
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Welcome to Stories of Impact. I'm your host, Tavia Gilbert, and along with journalist Richard Sergay, every first and third Tuesday of the month, we share conversations about the art and science of human flourishing.

Today we are in conversation with Dr. Christopher Hayes, the President of Scholar Leaders International and Director of the Faith and Displacement Project at the Fundación Universitaria Seminario Biblio de Colombia. And we're going to do something a little different in this episode. We feature the conversation Dr. Hayes had with Richard in its original interview format.

So you'll get to hear Richard in his element, asking insightful questions as Dr. Hayes lays out the history and context of the volatile political situation in Colombia. This background will help you understand how and why the Faith and Displacement Project is working with an established network of churches in Colombia to train people to help their fellow citizens who have been displaced from their homes due to violence.

Richard starts us off. Tell me a little bit about your professional background and how you got involved in displaced persons as an issue. You know, it was one of these things that we really stumbled into by accident. I was a new professor at the Biblical Seminary of Columbia, having just arrived a couple months beforehand after my Oxford postdoc degree.

And I was called into a meeting between FUSB-SE, the seminary in Medellin, and a seminary in California that we were partnering with. And the meeting was to try to identify a joint research project that was of interest to both institutions. And we alighted on the issue of migration, because of course, that's a big issue if you're in Southern California. And some people in the seminary were aware that there was this big issue of internal migration in Colombia over

owing to the violent conflict in the country. None of us at that point had any idea of how big and how complicated the issue was, but certainly I was the most lost because I didn't even know what the word "despacimiento" was in Spanish.

But our original intention was just to do a little short project together between the two institutions, a few months of research, have a little conference, write a little book out of the proceedings, and then be done with it. And it was only over the course of that initial exploration that we began to feel the complexity and the gravity of this crisis and began to have a sense that if we were to study this issue for a year, write a little book, and then put it on the shelves, we would probably be doing something that was morally reproachable.

Before we get to the conflict and the crisis itself, tell me a little bit about your professional background and what got you into this. I began to do theological studies as part of a religious conviction, a sense of being called to be a missionary, which I had as an adolescent.

And over the course of time, I came to have some mentors who helped me to see that one of the most helpful things that a gringo could be doing to support the church, in particular, Latin America, would not be to work as a pastor or evangelist, but to help provide training for people within Latin America who do that work, but in their own cultural context and in their own language.

I'm a New Testament scholar and a theologian, but the graduate work that I did in theology, New Testament studies, and patristics was always with the purpose of ultimately going to work in Latin America and to do theological education there. And what drew you to Latin America in particular as a gringo? As a high school student on a short-term missions trip in Latin America, I felt that this was what I was being invited by God to do with my life.

My academic expertise in biblical studies began to focus around issues of wealth ethics, morality, and money, which, of course, was influenced significantly by an awareness of the importance of liberation theology and integral missiology for Latin America. So there was a growing convergence between my intellectual theological interests and my sense of spiritual calling. I want to get at that word missiology because the title of your project for the Templeton World Charity Foundation is

Integral missiology and the human flourishing of internally displaced persons in Colombia. What does that mean? Missiology is the academic theological field that focuses on the study of the church's mission, what it is that church is called to do in the world. Integral missiology is terminology that came out of Latin American evangelical studies of missiology, specifically recognizing that

In contradistinction to a lot of North Atlantic missiologies that were exclusively spiritualizing, the New Testament and the history of the church has an understanding of the mission of God's people that encompasses our physicality, our materiality, our emotionality, in addition to our souls. So we're talking about holistic missions, and specifically that's applied to the crisis of forced internal displacement in Colombia.

Forced internal displacement just means that you were made a refugee within your own national borders because of violence. And in Colombia in particular, before we get to your project for Templeton, tell me a little bit about the history of displaced people. Yeah, you know, Colombia is at least three generations in an ongoing and rather atrocious civil conflict situation.

One of the key sparking points in the modern version of this conflict happened with the assassination of Jorge Elias Regaitán, who was a populist politician. And that set off a series of just a number of years of internal violent conflict that never really was properly resolved, even when a quick truce was negotiated by the elite ruling parties.

Because those issues were never resolved, the underlying inequities that is between the rich and the poor, between the city and the rural populations, people began to feel that they would have to take matters in their own hands. And out of that emerged the early guerrilla groups. There are guerrilla groups that many people will recognize today, the FARC and the ELN. The ELN is still around today. It's the world's oldest guerrilla group.

There were Marxist guerrilla groups, and for a number of years they battled with the government. In the 80s, there emerged then a response from a number of the aggrieved people in Colombia in the formation of right-wing paramilitary groups.

People, especially affluent large landowners, began to arm locals and to create local militia. And this was a scenario that ultimately created a cure that was worse than the disease, as in the past decades, the paramilitary groups have become the authors of far more atrocities than the guerrillas are, although there's no doubt that the guerrillas have done many insidious things.

These actors, and there are multiple guerrilla groups and multiple paramilitary groups, were given fuel for their fire by drug cartels and mafias who needed muscle on the one hand, and muscle that was provided by paramilitaries and guerrillas, and on the other hand provided a seemingly limitless supply of capital and resources.

then they also began to ally themselves with different mafia and gang groups within cities. And what you really have there is a game of infernal whack-a-mole right now in Colombia, as all these different groups shift and move, change their alliances constantly. And of course, in this process, the government, the Colombian government's hands aren't clean either. And that's the reason that this conflict has lasted so long, is that it's not so simple as one group against the other group. It's always shifting, always moving.

And the collateral damage of this is human. The collateral damage of this is that just since the beginning of the 21st century, more than 8 million Colombians have been driven from their homes by violence. That's more than 15% of the national population. And the consequences of this forced displacement, of being driven violently from their homes,

are multidimensional in ways that we might not initially appreciate. You have the things that you would imagine, for example, extreme poverty. If you're driven from your home in the countryside, in the gumbo to the city, as is the norm, you can expect there to be an 86% extreme poverty rate in your future.

The populations that are coming, of course, are leaving behind over a million homicide victims. And so that means you've got dismembered families and you've got a huge incidence of psychological trauma. More than two thirds of the population that's been displaced has significant psychosocial disorders. And yet only 2% of those people have received any kind of formal care.

This is also a population that on average has about five years of formal education. 16% of Colombian IDP households, internally displaced person households, don't have anybody literate in them. And if you're trying to get your feet under you again in an urban environment where your agricultural skills no longer work and where you're really poorly educated and you can't even read the government documents that you receive, you can bet that you're not going to be able to move forward.

And all this has resulted in what we recognize now to be traps of intergenerational poverty, because this has been happening for generations. And

And it also results in cycles of violence as those who were displaced by one group ally themselves with another group with far too much frequency. And so this whole thing continues to ricochet year over year, decade over decade. Give me that context. How long has this been going on? And you use the figure of 8 million. Is that just since the turn of the century or going back decades? It's just since the turn of the century.

I described the conflict as starting in the middle of the 20th century. You could trace it back earlier to the colonial period in many ways, but the displacement crisis, this movement of tens of thousands of people year over year, really started to grow in the 80s and 90s with the intensification of paramilitary conflict. And where do these displaced people go?

Well, to wherever they weren't is often the answer. The largest population flows go from rural environments to large urban metropolis. And so the largest displaced populations are going to be in Bogota and in Medellin. You will also find them heavily along the Caribbean coast in the north.

that's largely a population that has been driven out of an area called the Montes de Maria, which is a mountainous tropical forest region that has a lot of guerrilla and paramilitary groups in them. You will also have a major phenomenon of repeated displacement as people who are displaced from one place then are, you know, they tend to settle in places that are poor and therefore controlled by violent groups. And

they are often re-displaced again and again and again. One of the people that we work with very closely has been forcibly displaced five times in their life because of the fact that when you arrive in a new place, you tend to arrive in a place of vulnerability. And the implications of this displacement are what for the society?

Well, at a social level, beyond the individual levels that I've already described, you're talking about a massive economic drag, of course. You're talking about a very high rate of continued violent crime and internal conflict and warfare as these populations have been part of what continues to feed the violence. This is not to say that victims of displacement are invariably guerrillas or paramilitaries or anything like that. There's definitely victim shaming that I would eschew.

But these dynamics do also contribute to the larger dynamics of ongoing civil conflict. So there are security issues, there's economic issues. And then think about what any country suffers if a large portion of its population is psychologically traumatized. That's got all sorts of damage and inefficiencies.

When you have large portions of the population that are living in poverty, you're also looking at children who often have their education interrupted because they have to contribute to the family life and to the family's economy. And that, of course, damages their prospects for the future pretty dramatically as well. Before we turn to your project, help me understand this.

the conflict itself. We know there are guerrilla groups. We know there are government forces. What are they fighting over? They're often fighting over land.

And land as a locus of minerals, oil, gold. Land is a place where you can cultivate drugs, coca. That's a big piece. Land is also fought over as a matter of geographic access. So lots of places that are contested territories are not contested because that land itself is contested.

fertile or has mining capacity, it's simply that's an important transport corridor. There's a saying in Colombia that there's more territory than state. The government's reach doesn't go too far beyond major urban centers and municipalities. And so all of that land is contested

Those economic and material motivations and logistical motivations are then intensified by ideological convictions, be they left-wing or right-wing, or simply a memory of grievances done and a desire for vengeance. And they are now being intensified by additional external actors. For example, the Mexican cartels, the Sinaloa cartels are now making their presence felt in Colombia.

And when one guerrilla group is, say, removed, like the FARC was in significant part a few years ago with the 2016 Peace Accords, that creates power vacuums, which then generate new waves of displacement as groups vie for the territory that was previously occupied by the demobilized group. And the government's role in trying to make peace or contain these opposing forces? I mentioned before that the government's hands aren't clean.

At its best, the Colombian government has shown itself capable of negotiating peace. We most recently think of the Havana Peace Accords from 2016 that got Santos, the former president, the Nobel Peace Prize and did succeed in demobilizing the majority of the FARC guerrilla group. But even more significantly, back in the 1990s, there was a mobilization of a couple of guerrilla groups and that happened as a

a consequence of peaceful negotiation, the establishment of a new constitutional Congress, the creation of a new constitution. And those demobilized guerrilla groups then became politically active and they became part of democratic processes that

Star exemplar of this is the current president of Colombia, Pedro, who was himself an M19 guerrilla, was part of the Constitutional Congress, became a democratic actor, he's still left wing, as he was a left wing guerrilla beforehand, and yet has ascended and become the first left wing president in the country's history. So at its best moments, Colombia and Colombia's government can be part of negotiation, demobilization, peace,

and the integration of militant populations in democratic society. That's at its best. At its worst, they can be part of the problem. Historically, because the government has leaned right for a long time, the government has turned a blind eye to violence done by paramilitary groups and indeed even aided and abetted them with national forces.

And the most direct and egregious instances of this are what are known as the false positives. Under a previous president by the name of Uribe, there were orders that went out to soldiers to achieve certain quotas of dead guerrillas. And it came with carrots and sticks, you know, promises of vacations or bonuses, and the stick being that if you don't achieve your quota, then you will be sent relocated to the hotter zones.

And this did cause soldiers to kidnap peasants, dress them as gorillas and murder them. People who had no gorilla association. So they're called false positives because it was a false positive identification of a gorilla. There have been over 6,000 confirmed cases of false positives. And that's,

that of course exacerbates the violence rather than containing it. So the Colombian government has a mottled history, mottled with a two Ts, history of engagement in the violent conflict and the peace process. For tens of thousands of years, humans have expressed spirituality in countless forms,

At their best, the world's religions today communicate a vision of human life as meaningful and purposeful, responding to humans' most intimate concerns and existential questions, and encouraging commitment to pro-social values like compassion, empathy, and cooperation.

Templeton World Charity Foundation's commitment to the science of religious and spiritual exercises will support research and innovations in spiritual exercises that help people to live well. A total of up to $3 million will be awarded for research advancing our knowledge of how religious and spiritual exercises contribute to flourishing related outcomes. The deadline to express interest is July 2, 2023.

Learn more at templetonworldcharity.org forward slash S-O-R-S-E-R-F-P. That's S-O-R-S-E-R-F-P.

So enter your project. Tell me the mission of your project and what stage you're at. The goal of the project as a Templeton research project was first to ask whether a humble approach to integral missions, that means an approach to missiology that would learn with humility from other fields of knowledge,

might be able to mobilize the evangelical, that's the Protestant churches of Colombia, to foster the holistic recuperation of victims of forced displacement. Basically, can theology learn from other disciplines to help churches care for displaced people?

That was an approach that we took because we're a seminary. And so our natural clients group, the group that we have leveraged with our local churches and church leaders, and what we do is education. So with that sense of a purpose of a mission to enrich missiology with the insights from other fields of knowledge in order to mobilize churches to foster the recuperation of the displaced, we

we created a method that we call missional action research.

Missional action research is a combination of integral missiology, this holistic approach to missions that was developed in Latin America, with participatory action research, which is a social scientific research methodology that was birthed in its original form in the United States in the middle of the 20th century, but really reached a crystallization in Latin America, including in Colombia by a chap named Orlando Falsborda.

And participatory action research aims to study concrete social phenomena for the purpose of elaborating an intervention, which it then implements, measures the impact of, and then revises. And we combined that with integral missiology to ask if we could create interventions that focus on local church populations and local displaced populations.

In order to then do our research and the sort of research that would address a multifaceted crisis like the displacement project that has these economic, psychological, social, political entailments, we put together six different interdisciplinary teams.

Those teams were focused on missions, as you might expect, economics, psychology, sociology, pedagogy, and politics. Each of those teams included a combination of theologians and social scientists, as well as academics and professionals.

And finally, alongside this team of scholars and professionals, we arrayed a dozen people who are co-researchers, either victims of displacement themselves or local ministers with extensive and exemplary experience working with the displaced.

We created a battery of research tools, 18 different research protocols for our different teams that we implemented in six different pilot communities around the country. And on the basis of what we learned there, we created an educational intervention that was designed first to mobilize the human capital of local churches.

who would then in turn help displace populations, identify their own capacities and potencies, and then work together with the religious communities to foster their recuperation in the six different areas of the project that had been identified as being of the greatest poignancy.

And when you say educational interventions, what does that mean? Yeah, it happens in three stages, and it's kind of a spreading approach. The first stage is to work with an individual church leadership team, helping them to see that their mission as a church should be about more than just saving souls, quote unquote, that they have responsibilities and a calling and an invitation to work with people holistically, especially in the moments of greatest crisis, especially displaced population.

And we help them to identify that within their congregations, they have the array of human capital necessary to respond to people's emotional, economic, social needs. And that all of that fits within the mission of what they should be doing as a church. That's the first stage, the first audience.

The second stage of this educational intervention is to help the professional people within the churches to see how their professions can be put to good use to help displaced people recover and how that's actually part of what it means for them to be a Christian in their society. And then the third stage is to work with these now educated professionals who have now learned about how their profession connects with the mission of God and mission of the church to come alongside displaced people

and help the displaced people identify their own capacities and abilities. And then they work together to foster their recuperation in the areas that each different professional is capable of contributing to. In terms of the intervention, did you have leadership teams go into each of these churches? How did that practically work? We received two different grants from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. And the first grant was working on a smaller scale with the six pilot communities that I mentioned beforehand.

In those communities, after we had done our research and developed our intervention, we went from community to community to all the six communities, and we did a preliminary training with them so that they would know how to use the different curricula that we created. We created a total of 19 different curricula that churches could stitch together into their own bespoke program. We then set them loose, and then we returned to do an analysis of their efficacy.

That worked when we were in that pilot phase of the project and we were only looking to work with six different communities over the course of three years. What we learned after that were a couple of things. One, we learned that this intervention is effective, that it helps churches to engage holistically in their mission with the most vulnerable people in their society, and it helps IDPs recover. But we also learned, which would have probably been obvious from the outset, that that's not a scalable model.

And so then the question for our second grant, the one that we're just wrapping up now, is how you scale that model up at a larger level.

To do that next move, to scale things up on a larger scale, we decided that we would try to modify a popular modality of continuing education. It's called a diplomado, a diploma course. First of all, instead of this being an individual diplomado, diploma course, we required participants to come as teams of six from local churches, with each person having an ability that corresponds to the different tracks of the project.

So they had to work together. We also stretched out the diploma course over about seven months in order for people to go away and do significant independent work. And third, we made sure that this was not simply an abstract knowledge transfer sort of course, but rather that it was a mechanism of establishing ministry to the displaced and indeed launching those ministries over the course of the several months of the diploma course.

So it unfolded in four intensive weekend modules in which the participants were trained

to go back to their church communities, implement one or a set of the project curricula that had been created in the previous grant. And then having implemented those curricula and taking different steps with the displaced community, they would return for the next module. And in that way, we accompanied them, helped them troubleshoot and help them walk through the different steps of the process so that at the end of the diploma course, they'd actually established

relationships with and ministry with the displaced community. In other words, we really radically altered this modality of continuing education, but it allowed us to then scale about tenfold. What do you think were some of the biggest challenges? Well, the second grant started in 2020.

And so that meant that the pandemic fell and Colombia quarantined much more aggressively than the United States did. Colombia was also hit much harder than the United States was. It got vaccines much later. Colombia also has a much smaller professional class. So the hunger and suffering and poverty were far more extreme here. And all of that meant that this approach, which depended on people getting together and doing things, was severely undercut.

Because we were quarantined and then even when we had some mobility, we had biosecurity protocols that limited how much we get together. We wrestled with the question of whether or not we would do best than to create a virtual modality for the diploma course.

But the big problem was that was that even if we could train the churches virtually, there is no virtual access to the IDP population. You know, in these remote IDP settlements, they don't have Internet access at all. And so we had to find ways to do responsible in-person training in the ongoing context of the pandemic. That was a big challenge.

Then in the late spring, early summer 2021, Colombia entered a period of intense civil unrest beyond the violent conflict that we see between guerrilla and paramilitary groups. In cities across the country, there were violent protests and uprising as we were trying to launch our course in the cities. It made it dangerous for people to move about the city. It made us dangerous for us to get there. This contributed to a desertion rate in our project that was disheartening at times because

And churches during this period of time, insofar as evangelicalism, Protestantism in Colombia is largely a lower middle class phenomenon, they closed left and right. And churches in that state of desperation certainly weren't looking by and large to start new outreach programs to populations that would only be representing a drain on their resources. So those were pretty big obstacles that we encountered. And what was extraordinary was that people still came and they still did it.

And we had hundreds of people that participated in this process. We had dozens of churches that went through the training month over month, that braved the streets during times of conflict, during times of civil unrest, that did run the measured and calculated risks that were entailed by going outside of their house within the legal parameters permitted by the country. And yet one was always aware during that period of time that this is a vulnerable thing.

But those were pretty massive challenges. And the fact that people did actually go through the training, that they did launch Ministries with the Displaced, is testimony to, I think, the efficacy of the learning that went on in the process, that people became convinced that this sort of project is what their churches should be about, and that they did have a sense that this could be done, despite the fact that it was really hard work. How many people actually went through the process?

We had about 60 church teams that started. Then those churches ended up getting a little bit north of 500 people to go through our overarching curriculum on integral missiology, and then about 450, a little bit more than that, to go through the professional training materials within the short

few month period of time that they had to work with IDPs, they reported back to us that they had been working with over 800 IDPs just in that little window. But the ministries that they created are ongoing ministries, and they have a whole range of curricula that they've been trained to use. And the idea is that they drip them out over the course of months as the population's ready, and as the population identifies what's most pertinent to their interests at that point in time.

So can you say that your project touched thousands or tens or eventually tens of thousands? What's your feeling? The projection would be that it would continue and that yeah, it would multiply out into tens of thousands. One of the ways that we are trying to support the ongoing implementation of the process is by having created a virtual version of the diploma course.

For us to make financially sustainable, we need to get together five or six different churches in that one location at the same time to do it. The virtual diploma allows us to be able to train just those two churches remotely, but synchronously and with a personal facilitator, how to do their work, how to grow through this course. But they still do in-person meetings with displaced populations in their own context.

So we're hoping that that new virtual modality as a complement to the in-person modality helps us continue to roll out new churches and mobilize new churches who then create their own self-sustaining ministries that will then have ongoing lives with IDPs. How do you define success for the project?

For the audience of IDPs, success looks like diminution in poverty rates. It looks like progress in their emotional health. It looks like regrowing social tissue. It looks like restoring a sense of political agency. And I am happy to see success in gradual terms. I don't believe in silver bullets.

And I recognize that processes like displacement take decades for people to move through. But I also recognize that if we're not intentional with interventions, they just don't move through them. So that's what success looks like holistic flourishing for displaced people with that population.

With church populations, success looks like a more profound understanding of the holistic nature of the integral nation of the church's mission and a willingness and a sense of agency to mobilize one's own giftings and skills as part of the mission of the church. And it also looks like those people mobilizing their skills in ways that recognize the potency and the dignity and the capacity of the survivor population of the displacement crisis recognizes

rather than seeing them in objectifying ways that ultimately perpetuate their victimization. That's for the ecclesial audiences. And as an academic, what success looks like? Success looks like learning. And we have learned a massive amount about displacement itself,

about the intersections between religion, theology, and the experience of displacement or recovery there from. Sir John had this idea of the possibility of a hundred fold more spiritual information and the learnings that we have generated about theology, the practice of the church, and indeed the scriptures themselves have been radically expanded because of the interdisciplinary work that we've done and because of the empirical work that we've done.

And another component of academic success is the vindication of the efficacy of this missional action research theory. What have you heard from the survivor population about your project?

At this point, the evidence is anecdotal because the remit of our project was primarily to focus on the creation of the intervention and the assessment of the pedagogical efficacy of the intervention in the short term. So to get really good quantitative data from the surviving population about their long-term flourishing, that would take a number of years and another grant. However, the anecdotal data that we've got, the individual testimonial data that we've got

has been really encouraging. To pick a couple of instances, I mentioned earlier a chap that we've worked with closely over the years who has been displaced now five times. We met him after he had been displaced four times. He was living in Córdova and was a displaced person there and also ministering as a pastor with the displaced population in a settlement called La Granja. So he went through the faith and displacement process there with his church.

And then he was displaced again and he came to Medellin and actually began to study at the seminary. And he did so at a time when he had, you know, he has three teenage kids, two of whom were about to start university. And this looks like an insane idea, right? I mean, we're talking about people who are desperately poor and they've just been through this, another traumatizing experience. And they're all starting university. Three of them are trying to start university at the same time. And, um,

They ended up mobilizing a family work team. They did everything from starting a little catering business to doing cleaning and houses on campus to babysitting to doing tech support. But Dehner is very explicit about saying,

Our ability to do this comes out of what we learned in Faith the Displacement, which galvanized for us a sense of our own capacities and potency. And that has driven us and given us hope and energy to be rebuilding this. They're an extraordinary family.

You definitely see evidence of psychological trauma there that they are still processing and working through. And yet three of them right now are finishing up university. One of them is finishing up med school right now. And they are investing in church ministry. They're investing in the seminary community. They keep bringing back supplies to the displaced community that they left behind.

And so that would be a really strong indication of the way a whole family is moving forward in a context of psychological, social, economic recuperation, and ultimately with an educational trajectory that is really promising.

But we also see most of our indications of success come in biddier ways because we don't have the pleasure of spending months or even years with the displaced people in the way that we do with this particular family that came to Medellin. And yet we heard people say that as a result of going through the small business curriculum,

They start rattling off the new businesses that they've created or other members of their community have created their sense of enthusiasm over the possibility of actually being able to start a pig farm or a fish farm or a store. And we also saw people in our focus groups with IDPs

We saw them making connections between one area of the project, one area of their training and another area. Quite unprompted, we would hear people say, because we've been able to address the traumatic experiences that we've had,

through the psychology team's content, we have been then enabled to address our own possibilities for economic recuperation. And then they will frame all of that in terms of their spirituality and their sense that God has been guiding them and accompanying them, and that the community of the church, here's the sociology, is helping bear them forward. And so these are indications that

this multidisciplinary approach is being efficacious in addressing the complexity of people's suffering and then through that integrated approach allowing steps forward that wouldn't really have been possible otherwise. So with that in mind, draw for me the connection to human flourishing, the work that you've been doing on flourishing.

The whole project is focused on fostering holistic human flourishing. And Sir John has this focus around human flourishing that's multi-orb. It certainly has these economic components, but it's also for Sir John had these aspects of individual agency, efficacy in society, and spirituality being a component of holistic, of your flourishing as an individual and as a human in society.

And while Sir John's theology would not have aligned neatly with Latin American integral missiology, there were really significant overlaps with their deeper fundamental commitments. So the identification of the church appropriately trained and operating in cooperation

can then, over time and in the context of extended relationship, foster the holistic version of IDPs. One person helping address their financial situation, one person addressing their psychological woundedness, one person helping to focus on reanimating their sense of political agency. And all of this happening in a context that is encouraged by, sustained by, inspired by, and oriented towards life as part of the people of God.

Is this scalable in other conflict zones beyond Colombia? You never want to just pop an approach down from one context into another. But this missional action approach, yeah, it absolutely works in a variety of contexts because we've seen its two constituent parts, theoretical underpinnings, both participatory action research on the one hand and integral missiology on the other hand, take root in varieties of locations around the world.

And we have been really encouraged, I've been really encouraged by seeing the way that this approach, both at the theoretical level and at the practical level, is working specifically in relation to the current war in Ukraine. I mentioned I work with an organization called Scholar Leaders in addition to working with the Faith and Displacement Project. And I started with Scholar Leaders literally precisely when the war in Ukraine started. And we watched in front of us the events

the unearthing of the biggest displacement crisis that we've seen in decades. As at this point, 8 million Ukrainians have left the country and there are 4 million internally displaced people still in Ukraine.

And at that point, we had this question in our minds of whether an organization like Scholar Leaders, which historically has not been involved in these sorts of conflicts or crises, could do something. Because our remit at Scholar Leaders was really focused on mobilizing and building capacity in theological leaders and seminary leaders and faculty theologians.

But what we knew from the experience in Colombia is that in situations of violent conflict and forced displacement, that some of the most reliable, efficient actors on the ground are going to be local religious communities. And so we took a gamble and we said, we're going to try to resource local seminaries in order for them to then be hubs that would put into practice their integral mission,

And the consequences of that decision have been outrageously effective and inspiring. Tens of thousands of people have been provided housing in the seminary campuses as process of transiting through or out of the country, or in longer term senses, especially when artillery shelling from the Russians has driven people from their homes, or when the destruction of the infrastructure has meant that they don't have warmth.

They have fed over 400,000 people. That's 10% of the displaced population of the nation, which is insane if you think about just the scale of what that means. And we did all this work, feeding 400,000 people, providing transit lodging to over 40,000 people, getting 11,000 people out of war zones. We did all this work with a combined effort between ourselves and United World Mission. We put in about $1.5 million.

That kind of efficiency, $1.5 million directly affecting and benefiting more than 400,000 people, you wouldn't see that in a large NGO. But it's because of the efficiencies and trustworthiness of these local actors. But another cool thing that's come out of this is that these...

theological leaders haven't just become aid workers. They haven't abandoned their calling as people who are there to train spiritual leaders. They have continued to do their theological training, to train new pastors, and indeed they feel even greater urgency about it because there have been more, just to speak of the Baptist seminary, there have been more than 500 Baptists that have either left the country or died in the course of this process. So they have to train huge swaths of new ministers and chaplains in this context.

And so they're doubling down on their work of teaching. But they also say if we're going to teach effectively, we have to answer new theological questions. Because we can't teach pastors to work in this context unless we teach them how to do trauma-informed pastoral care. We have to teach churches how to deal with people who have become amputees due to the war. And we have all these buildings that don't work for people who are disabled. We have to answer questions about the difference between Christian citizenship and

and the Russian nationalism that's driving this invasion. We have to answer questions about peace and reconciliation. These are new theological questions, and we can't just look at the stuff that was written in Western Europe or the United States for our answers. We have to do new interdisciplinary research. And so they've created...

interdisciplinary research teams using components of our method that we developed in Columbia in order to address these major crises. And their research teams are not only creating academic outputs, but they're also creating ecclesial and public outputs in order to make sure that the academic research

has an impact on their society. And it's those lessons coming from participatory action research that are now taking root in the Ukrainian Academy that are so encouraging to us. And it makes me think that, yeah, this is an approach that doesn't just work in Colombia. As you peek into the future over the near term, and if you were to apply for another Templeton grant, what would you like to do? What still needs to be done?

One of the areas that's on my mind and on my heart these months is actually in relation to issues of sexual misconduct. It's become widely recognized in wider society through the Me Too movement, but it's not a new thing for anybody. It's been a public issue in the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, but this is a problem.

In religious communities around the world, it's a problem. In seminaries, it's a problem where there are power dynamics that are unequal, where gender dynamics and patriarchal dynamics isolate power in the hands of people who might also be inclined to be perpetrators. Work needs to be done here, first of all, because religious communities need to be places of healing and safety, not places of evil. And secondly, because religious communities and theological actors should, properly speaking, be

helping make other spheres of the world safer, first in churches and then beyond that. And so I have some curiosities and some thoughts about how we might mobilize some of the lessons in this approach. It's a very different social crisis that nonetheless has multidimensional entailments. Special thanks to Richard Sergei and this week's guest, Dr. Christopher Hayes.

If you appreciate the Stories of Impact podcast, please follow us and rate and review us. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and at storiesofimpact.org. This has been the Stories of Impact podcast with Richard Sergay and Tavia Gilbert. Written and produced by TalkBox Productions and Tavia Gilbert. Senior producer Katie Flood. Music by Alexander Felipiak. Mix and master by Kayla Elrod.

Executive Producer, Michelle Cobb. The Stories of Impact podcast is generously supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation.