Christian base communities and grass-roots development

Abstract

Eradication of poverty is a central goal of economic development. An underlying assumption of most economic development models is that expanded factors of production and incentives are the keys to its eradication. Development theories and policies have focused on an analysis of how to change, transform, and expand productive inputs: land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. In the development decades of the 1950s and 1960s the emphasis was on the expansion of physical capital and maximizing the per capita income growth rate. In the 197Os, with evidence of growing disparities between the rich and the poor (especially in nations that had succeeded in high sustained growth rates, e.g., Brazil and Mexico), new emphases on “growth with equity” strategies and on the development of human capital emerged. Emphasis on improvement in the quality of labor shifted attention to meeting basic human needs such as health, nutrition, and education. An essential input into the development process largely overlooked in the literature is the transformation of the poor’s self-image. This is true even for models of grass-roots, community development that emphasize the need for active participation of the poor. It is our contention that the transformation of self-image of the poor is a necessary condition for economic development that includes the bottom 40% of the population. This article examines the elements of a successful community development model that has as its starting point the transformation of the participant’s image. Specifically, the article examines the role of Christian Base Communities (Communidades ecleriules de ba.se), or CEBs, in Latin America. The CEBs are small religious communities that have applied the message of the scripture to their social environment in a way that leads to social, political, and economic activism.1 The approach taken in this article is to examine case studies of two CEBs in two different countries. Both are in poor neighborhoods: one on the outskirts of Mexico City