Protestant Missionaries and Humanitarianism in the DRC: The Politics of Aid in Cold War Africa

Abstract

Organizations, including missionary NGOs, have both an inside and an outside: external circumstances and pressures to which they react, as well as core values that define them and guide, even impel, their actions. In Protestant Missionaries and Humanitarianism in the DRC, Jeremy Rich provides a longitudinal study of the Congo Protestant Relief Agency, a mission-sponsored humanitarian NGO. He documents both the extraordinary pressures within which the CPRA operated and the revisions the CPRA made, over the course of a half century, to its original focus in order to continue to address critical human needs.