Tim Høiland

writer, development practitioner, fan of monster ballads

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Body parts

March 4th, 2010 · Faith & Spirituality

Like many people these days, I’m a bit of a mutt, spiritually speaking. My parents grew up Lutheran, and I was baptized in a Lutheran church in southern California early on. While living in Guatemala City we attended an interdenominational church with a pastor who was Presbyterian. During brief stints in Los Angeles and Dallas we were part of the Evangelical Covenant Church. As a teenager, after our family moved to a largely Mennonite area, I was confirmed Methodist. In college I joined an independent evangelical megachurch where I was, in a manner of speaking, ana-baptized.

Among my favorite spiritual writers are Presbyterians, Catholics, Quakers, Anglicans, Mennonites, Baptists, evangelicals, and of course, fellow mutts. It’s all very complicated, I know.

Here in San Rafael, like much of rural Latin America, there are basically two categories as far as religion goes: evangelical and Catholic. Not much room for mutts is what I’m saying.

Maybe you’ve found a category that fits you like a glove, or maybe you were born into one and have never had reason to question it. But increasingly, we Christians aren’t sure where we fit. Have you noticed that even churches belonging to specific denominations are leaving those details off their building signs and website banners? We’re not sure which labels to align ourselves with, or even whether labels are good for anything in the first place.

For all these reasons I found Streams of Living Water by Richard Foster to be very encouraging. The book is about what Foster describes as the six traditions, or streams, of Christianity through history:

The Contemplative Tradition (the prayer-filled life)
The Holiness Tradition (the virtuous life)
The Charismatic Tradition (the Spirit-empowered life)
The Social Justice Tradition (the compassionate life)
The Evangelical Tradition (the word-centered life)
The Incarnational Tradition (the sacramental life)

Foster’s burden is to show that these six streams, at their best, strengthen each other. They’re not to be pitted against each other, but instead just emphasize different parts of the Christian life and faith that we should all, in some measure, embrace. But rather than viewing each stream as a valid and interrelated expression, doesn’t it seem that we Christians have all too often huddled around those who see things the way we do, doing whatever necessary to avoid and/or de-legitimize everyone else?

While reading through the New Testament not too long ago, I was struck by just how insistent Paul, Peter, John and others were about the utter importance of unity within the Church. Evangelicals may do a good job of preaching what the Bible teaches, but without social justice Christians in the mix, the teaching runs the risk of remaining abstract. Similarly, social justice Christians are all about taking action, but without contemplatives by their side, they’re probably going to burn out.

In the end, I think the Bible is clear in teaching that God has created us and continues to mold us each differently, and that the reason he does this is because together we are the body of Christ – not a homogeneous bunch of feet or hands or heads or small intestines.

Basically, I guess what I’m saying is this: if I’m a lung and I continue to spend all my time with lungs and together we pick fights with those good-for-nothing hearts and kidneys and spinal cords and tonsils and ligaments and kneecaps, I shouldn’t be surprised if the body is sick. On the other hand, when I’m able to recognize that by their very existence hearts and kidneys and spinal cords and tonsils and ligaments and kneecaps and every other unique and irreplaceable part together enable lungs to do what only lungs can do, we might all be a lot better off. And when the parts of the body are working in harmony, there’s no telling what might happen.

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Building capacity, one dance move at a time

February 25th, 2010 · Costa Rica, Education

It has been an interesting transition. Less than two weeks ago I was an intern with the largest Christian development organization in the history of the universe, out of an office in the capital of the world’s largest superpower. Now I’m working with a small, exciting, chaotic start-up NGO in a town most people have never heard of, out of an office in a basement of a house on the side of a volcano. There are pros and cons with both, of course, but there’s definitely something to be said for the chance to help teach English via Cha Cha Slide (disclaimer: I only dance at weddings and in Latin America).

In the weeks before I arrived, ADE staff completed a census of everyone in San Rafael, gathering key data about all sorts of things. One of the most striking findings was that 98% of the population had only a sixth grade education or less. This in a middle-income country in an increasingly globalized – and educated – world.

This finding confirmed the importance of one of ADE’s main projects: opening a secondary school in which students from the community have the opportunity to receive a world-class education that fits into the broader goal of local capacity building. Take this week as a snapshot of what that might look like.

On Monday ADE students and staff headed over to the local elementary school to weatherize their classrooms. After the earthquake damaged their building and rendered it useless, they moved into temporary wooden structures meant for emergency housing. More than a year later permanent solutions have remained frustratingly elusive, and when it rains, water comes in through the doors and windows.

So, using a donated sheet of clear plastic and pieces of scrap wood from a neighbor, we weatherized the classrooms with these simple ingredients in such a way that when it’s sunny, they can be rolled back to let in fresh air. Today, despite driving diagonal rain, the classrooms stayed dry.

On Tuesday, we set out in our 12-passenger van along the road through the earthquake-affected area, stopping along the way with digital photo and video cameras, which students used to document reconstruction efforts.


This was an opportunity for students to learn more about what is happening in their community and to ask questions they may have never been invited to ask before, such as: Will bags filled with dirt really work to hold a road in place if/when another earthquake comes? Would I want to live in the valley below that sort of structure? Did this construction company ask anyone who lives here before making their decisions?


These are just preliminary questions; the beginning of a new way of thinking in which everyone – even a seventh grader – is a key community stakeholder.

All of this is in keeping with the belief that any sort of healthy and sustainable development (or redevelopment, in this case) must involve local capacity building, and that few endeavors build capacity quite like an innovative and interactive education – whether within or without the classroom, using pens, pencils, books, hammers, nails, cameras, and killer dance moves.

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A different sort of spooky

February 22nd, 2010 · Costa Rica, The Great Outdoors

For the past four months, until last week, I was living in northeast Washington, D.C. in what was admittedly not the safest neighborhood. It’s the sort of neighborhood with a liquor store on every corner and bars on the windows of some homes. I eventually began venturing out at night on foot, but it was always a little spooky. I’d purposely empty my pockets of valuables and make it a point to pay attention to my surroundings. It was a matter of using common sense to mitigate the risks without being paralyzed by fear.

So now I’m here in rural Costa Rica, far from the dangers of the North American ghetto. As I mentioned before, I’m staying at ADE’s education center, a work-in-progress tucked into a valley in a little clearing in the rainforest. It’s really beautiful – in the daytime, at least – but I have to admit that the first couple of times hiking down there at night have been a bit spooky.

I walk with a flashlight which lets me see about two feet in front of me on account of the insanely thick fog, which feels like rain on pause. There’s a German shepherd that barks up a storm but has so far resisted its apparent urge to rip me to shreds. That’s been nice. But rumors of coyotes and vampire bats (seriously!) have warranted my complete vigilance and visions of acting quite unlike Gandhi should I encounter such beasts along the way.

On top of that, there have been a couple of close calls with cows – which, take my word for it, are much scarier under the aforementioned conditions than one might otherwise expect – and their many droppings interspersed along the trail of deep mud make me glad to be wearing crude rubber boots.

So this is life in San Rafael de Vara Blanca. Cows and mud and fog and breathtaking beauty and, perhaps, vampire bats. It’s really something else.

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