Worldview indicators

The more reading I do about worldview, the more convinced I am that it is the most important knowledge to guide a Christian program evaluator.

Steve Wilkens and Mark L. Sanford, Hidden Worldviews, IVP Academic, 2009, describe a lived worldview as a group of answers to ultimate questions about reality (p. 209).

  • What is the nature of being? As a human being what is my purpose?
  • What is the nature of knowledge? How do we know anything? What is true knowledge?
  • What values are primary? How do values guide my everyday living? What is good; what is evil?

A Christian worldview is unique in that God desires our salvation, not our intellectual understanding of reality. As finite sinful beings we can never fully understand God’s revelation about reality (p. 207). To clarify worldview, and to see if it is consistent with a Christian worldview, my thinking and reflecting needs to be guided by Scripture, church tradition, reason and experience (some theologians refer to these four and their intertwined interactions as the Wesleyan quadrilateral.)

A Transformative Evaluator needs to examine his or her worldview throughout the process of planning and implementing an evaluation exercise. Otherwise opportunities for making the exercise and evaluation report more transformative may be missed.

As we seek to live out a Christian worldview there are three primary indicators for monitoring our progress (p. 216): humility in the biblical sense, loving God and neighbor in relation to loving ourselves, and gratitude towards God. In future posts let’s explore monitoring systems built around these indicators.

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