Mobilising evangelicals for development advocacy: Politics and theology in the Micah Challenge campaign for the Millennium Development Goals

This chapter looks at the genesis and implementation of the Micah Challenge campaign, the first Evangelical transnational advocacy campaign for justice for the poor. The campaign, which ran from 2004 to 2015, sought to mobilise Evangelicals round the world to advocate to their national governments to do what they could to end global poverty, and in particular to support the Millennium Development Goals. This proved quite a challenge as Evangelicals are known for their focus on an inner-worldly religion and a reticence to engage in political issues. The chapter explores the way in which the campaign sought to overcome this reticence by developing a theology of justice and advocacy which would persuade Evangelicals that political advocacy for the poor could be a type of religious action. It shows how the tension between the personal and the social, the inner-worldly and the outer-worldly, shaped the way that Micah Challenge communicated about development advocacy and ultimately led to a paradox which it could not overcome. To make justice and advocacy palatable to global Evangelicals it had to develop a theology which placed a great emphasis on personal morality and spirituality, and yet in doing so it lost focus on the global political and economic issues that it wished to raise. This chapter focuses on the genesis of Micah Challenge and explores the way in which it sought to develop a theology of justice and advocacy in order to try to mobilise Evangelicals to campaign on behalf of the poor. It examines how the tension between the personal and the social shaped the way that Micah Challenge communicated about development advocacy and ultimately led to a paradox which it could not overcome. The chapter considers the role of faith-based organisations in mobilising the public, or a specific religious constituency, to campaign for development outcomes. It provides overviews the history of Evangelical social action and discusses the new Evangelical theology of development which came to the fore in the latter half of the 20th century and upon which all subsequent developments build. The chapter also explores Evangelical involvement in the Jubilee 2000 anti-debt campaign and examines how this laid the groundwork for the Micah Challenge to emerge a few years later.