Areas of Overlap : Ministry and Community Development

There as many areas of overlap between the fields of Community Development and Ministry as there are practitioners in the two fields. This is partly true because there are such large areas of overlap between the two fields. Historically speaking, Community Development arose within the church context to a large extent, then drifted off into being its own specialty as the workload increased. The involvement of the Church in the inner city slums, third world and North American First Nations is also well known.

At present, it is my sense that the overlap of the two fields of activity can be seen most clearly at the strategic level rather than at the "tactical level". This is because once the fields get broken down into operational and tactical formations, their appearance shows a great deal of variation for practical purposes, even though their tasks remain quite similar in some aspects.

The seven areas of overlap I discuss here are the ones which are relevant to myself and are listed in descending order of relevance to myself. Other workers would select other areas of overlap to highlight and certainly list them in a different order of priority, but the purpose here is to be suggestive of the types of cross-fertilization that is possible between these two sets of practitioners in order to stimulate thinking and interaction along this institutional boundary.

My seven areas of overlap are:

• Equipping
• Problem Solving
• Paradigm Pioneering
• Program Development
• Program Evaluation
• Marketing
• Academic Curiosity

•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•  
•