"I am writing regarding an incident that involved one of the staff members of the Chaplain’s office, Lisa Ho, and the possible misrepresentation of the purpose of an event that took place on the Ohio Wesleyan campus last week

As you are aware Ohio Wesleyan University hosted soulful rocker Matt Wertz on February 28, 2008. Wertz, a Missouri-born Christian singer and songwriter who now resides in Nashville, Tenn., has been touring nationwide for the past six years. According to Lisa Ho at the Chaplain’s Office Matt Wertz requested that the donations be given to support the Mocha Club.

The original advertisement available at http://www.owu.edu/news/2008/20080211-wertz.html claimed that the event would “support children’s causes—such as HIV/AIDS and orphanages—in 27 African countries”.

While this claim looked attractive to a lot of unsuspecting students, examining it a bit further yielded the surprising finding that the Mocha Club is a pastor training organization. Specifically, the F&Q section of the website mentions that:

“African Leadership is first and foremost a pastor training organization. We are currently discipling nearly 10,000 pastors and church leaders in 27 African nations. Through our mission to meet the physical needs of Africans, our leadership network also offers the life-sustaining hope of Jesus Christ by meeting their spiritual needs.”

Barrett Ward from the African Leadership himself was nice enough to explain by saying:

"African Leadership trains church leaders in what is considered a Bible College equivalent. African Leadership is equipping them to meet the needs of their local community. Mocha Club is a funding arm of AL that funds those projects listed on the MC site. I could certainly go in to this in greater detail over a phone call if you like...why the mention of disciples again? That word to me means mentoring, training, or shepherding. I will do a better job of explaining that in the next round of FAQ revisions. Do you have an aversion to the word discipling? What specifically do you want to know about what we mean by that? "

If the claimed objective of the Chaplain’s Office was to help people in Africa, how would sponsoring training ministers whose objective is to "to develop these disciples who can disciple others" be really making a difference in the HIV epidemic in Africa? I am unaware of a testable theory, community intervention, or evidence-based approach in the international development that has spelled out proselytizing as an effective mantra for people in the HIV epidemic in Africa. No such intervention has ever been shown to work toward this objective of cost-effectively alleviating the HIV burden in the continent.

What are all of these initiatives with evangelical organizations that the Chaplain's office has recently been "selling" under some quasi-humanistic umbrella about if not really about international development? I can point to many NGOs that work in Africa (Care, Oxfam, World Vision, Save the Children, etc, etc) that actually work on absolutely wonderful development projects and their interventions have been shown to work and actually do lift people out of poverty. Is this really about faith or really about helping people in Africa? Even more disturbing was the fact that Lisa Ho effectively did not release the nature of the organization that event was sponsoring until the last few days of the event.

Let me remind you that this event used a massive amount of money from the WSCA! This is effectively students’ tuition money that could have gone to better use.

I am alarmed that a University official, like Lisa Ho, would not be very upfront in communicating to the OWU community of what the real purpose of an event of is, and what it is really intended to achieve. This is about Ohio Wesleyan students’ money (either implicitly collected through ticket sales or explicitly appropriated through the WSCA).

If the Chaplain’s office didn't care about the event sponsoring being a faith-based organization why would the office select it in the first place? Was the Chaplain’s Office hoping that students wouldn't really find out? Is such events really about faith or really about helping people in Africa?

Your thoughts will clarify what the role of WSCA had, is the Mocha Club really an evangelical organization and what exactly is the orphanage work that they do there...someone pointed to the fact that when Mocha Club says 90% of funding goes to "help orphans" it really means placing these orphans into bible study houses."

P.S. Apparently, someone disagreed with this post claiming that it is "misinformed and misrepresentation of the facts. If the blogger would like to contact me personally, I would be more than willing to give him/her the facts regarding this issue."

The purpose of the blog entry is to provide more information for an event that occurred on campus. Its intent is not to be inflammatory and the entire post provides facts and where they come from. Even more importantly, it stirs discussion on a very important question: what role do faith-based organizations play in international development?  Does work of faith-based organizations actually translate into better outcomes? Unfortunately, while there is an answer for the first question (eg about 30% of the health infrastructure in Zambia is owned by faith-based organizations), nobody really has the answer to the second question....does it do more good than damage? Unfortunately, this is not an uncontroversial topic. If anyone disputes any of the facts, we can always revisit the information...this is a very important question and the truth is what matters.