The idea surfaced while we listened to one of our Zambian students preach in chapel: maybe poverty is one strange way in which this part of the world is blessed.

Mercy, when you work in Zambia, 2002, you sometimes wonder if there aren’t better ways to spend your time.

As a missiologist in the European-continental tradition, qualitative research has always come more naturally to me than quantitative. This bias was reinforced through my anthropological studies that emphasized participant observation over statistics.