Partnership

Partnerships in a cross-cultural Christian context.
”No church is so poor that it has nothing to share with others. No church is so rich that it has nothing to learn from others.” –After Josiah Kibira, Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania.

Churches and church-based organisations have a long tradition of working together as partners in networks that cross borders of nations and culture. The Northern and Southern partners have accompanied each other in multifaceted missions that most often include:

• preaching the good news and educating Christians of various cultures
• undertaking diaconia and development work in the society broadly, and
• practicing dialogue and exchange with people of other faiths.

Partnerships between Northern and Southern states and NGO’s have during the 1990’s achieved status as a possible way for more equality in development. In a Danish context the Danida strategy of partnership expressed in the document “Partnership 2000” is a notable example.

However, the popularity of the term “Partnership” has made it a kind of buzzword covering so many different kinds of partnerships that the term has been in danger of loosing meaning. Partnership can cover short-term result oriented partnerships as well as partnerships with a longer history and with greater depths to them in terms of common values and shared tasks in the development undertaken.

Therefore, it is important to specify what is meant by “Partnership” when the term is used. This need of clarity has become even more urgent after recent examples of Northern states and NGOs who unilaterally decided that concrete partnerships with Southern partners for various reasons had to be terminated. It can be argued, that the term “partnership” has no meaning if this can happen. The development of partnerships should indeed be an issue where both partners have a real say, let alone dramatic changes as termination, where open and thorough discussions should be mandatory before such a step is taken.

Among churches and church-related organisations, partnerships have a long history. One could see the global history of Christianity unfolding as a series of old churches forming new churches and keeping contact and accompanying each other as partners on the road. This history has, as other global histories, partly been one of cultural clashes and of dominance. However, world Christianity has also proven to be a history of giving the dominated tools to voice their rights, taking South Africa as the perhaps most outstanding recent example.

Partnership Agreement
The idea of working with Partnership Agreements is that the individual member organisation and its partner take time together to reflect on the underlying values and the future perspectives of their particular partnership. The reflection can contain all facets of the holistic mission, including the development agenda and the possibilities that this could be addressed through e.g. the Mini-Programme of DMCDD. The very process itself is important. The Partnership Agreement should be a capacity development process in a dialogue between the partners.

DMCDD believes that many Southern partners have lessons to teach their Northern partners regarding the three facets of the holistic mission, not least the evangelisation and the dialogue facets, whereas the Northern partners have lessons to teach their Southern partners in terms of e.g. larger organised development efforts. For both partners it might be an asset with a certain degree of specialisation and priority setting allowing some particular competences of the partners to be develop in stead of working in too many fields at a time.

Download: Strategy and Guidelines for Partnership Agreements