I want to share some experiences1 and perspectives that are being debated and framed amongst diverse social, academic, and political sectors in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this way, rooted in our faith and an ecumenical perspective, we can think about creating alternatives to the economic model that has been imposed on our region and at the global level for the past century. From these experiences and debates I will propose some challenges for our churches and the ecumenical movement. In 1990, La Red Nuevo Paradigma (New Network Paradigm) emerged out of a planning, monitoring, and evaluation project formed by the International Service for National Agriculture Research in Ecuador. Originally, this project was to be co-sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture. However, when the authors developed a project that proposed rejecting the traditional implementation parameters, the donors threatened to pull funding unless the project complied with the classical model, where known universal solutions are applied to equally known social problems. This generated an internal debate among the project participants over whether to accept the donor's conditions or to seek other sources of support. The debate revealed the logic used in international technical cooperation for development organizations. In response to the debate, some project members decided to continue to look for support from alternative organizations that would allow for flexibility and creativity of Latin-American talents seeking to experience a “different” perspective of development and innovation in the region.2 The Network's source of emotion, passion, and commitment is the shared dream of building our interpretive frameworks and action theories grounded in our Latin America, created “locally”, with autonomy to manage our problems and influence our future, free from the universality of the “global designs” that erase our history, silence our knowledge, and tame our will to change the “worlds” in which we live and out of which we dream of a different future.3 Since 1492 “development” has been the most attractive and ambiguous idea galvanizing the attention of governments, leaders, and societies independent of race, religion, and ideology. In the past five centuries, its promise of positive, gradual, lineal, and accumulative progress transformed into the source of hope for humanity. Ironically, despite the never completed promises made in its name, the values, concepts, premises, etc., created to sustain it still dominate the social imagination of people groups, the semantic repertoire of experts, and the rhetoric strategies of official and alternative discourses in the North, South, East, and West.4 According to this analysis, the idea of development economics has been present through modernity. We have built our methods of church missions, social interpretation, and community intervention based on this economic model: “Our ways of looking at the world and acting in it having also been created by this idea of development, throughout our existence, through tradition, religion, education, and science.”5 Therefore, in order to carry out mission and social actions, we normally include in some form the need to support economic growth and the development of the individual, family, church, community, and institution in governmental, church, and organizational plans and actions. The current model of development economics is not only going strong, it appears to be getting stronger despite the permanent crisis that increases negative effects on human beings and nature. In light of this reality, while critics show that it failed as an economic effort, development discourse continues to contaminate social reality and remains in the centre of a powerful but fragile semantic constellation.6 Hence, we propose that the alternatives not only make reforms, corrections, or technical adjustments to the development economics model, but also reveal, step away from, and replace the logic upon which it has been built and sustained, which has become part of the normal way of thinking, being, and living, on both the individual and social level, in this modern world. Arturo Escobar analyzes how some social and intellectual movements in Latin America have sensed possible measures to move away from the prevailing model of development economics, which now has the power to impose itself globally through technology and communication.7 In his analysis, he emphasizes the need to recognize the crisis of the Western model that is cited by many sectors as the most significant cause of the current global energy/climate and poverty crisis. Faced with this crisis, the need for a shift toward a new cultural and economic paradigm is urgent and is recognized and under construction in several of Latin America's social and political sectors. This can be glimpsed in debates on the definition of development and the rights of nature in Ecuador and Bolivia, and in a new wave of movements and struggles in these countries and other parts of the continent. These can be interpreted in terms of two interrelated processes: relational ontology and a redefinition of political autonomy.8 One of these debates is centred on the worldview of Buen Vivir introduced in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia. For participants of this debate, Buen Vivir, more than a constitutional declaration, constitutes an opportunity to collectively build a new model of relations among humans and with nature that breaks with the classical model of lineal, ascending, and developmentalist progress that has been imposed through modernity. The ontology and worldviews of indigenous peoples do not imply a lineal notion of development nor a state of sub-development that must be overcome. They are not founded on scarcity or the primacy of goods and materials. Echoing these principals, Buen Vivir aims to introduce a different life philosophy on the vision of society. This makes a development ethic possible that subordinates economic objectives to ecological criteria, human dignity, and social justice.10 Using this perspective, it seeks new relations among societies and with nature that join the economy, environment, society, and culture, introducing ideas of social and intergenerational justice and recognizing cultural and gender differences. One of the guiding principals is multiculturalism, with emphasis new political-economic issues, such as food sovereignty, the protection of nature, and the human right to water. In this view, Buen Vivir is not just a purely indigenous Andean cultural-political project. It is also influenced by current criticism of Western thinking, and its objective is to influence regional and global debates on finding alternatives drawing from other world visions, rationalities, and ways of thinking and living. Accordingly, Buen Vivir seeks to reverse the colonial concepts of power, of knowledge, and of being that have characterized the modern world system that supports the scientific and liberal model of economics’ ideal that a progressive-developing-growing society good for humanity.11 spaces of self-organization, spaces of power, in which a new organization of society is collectively built. The movement's territories, which existed first in rural areas (farmers and indigenous peoples) and for the past few years are also forming in some big cities (Buenos Aires, Caracas, El Alto…), are the spaces in which those who are excluded ensure their daily survival. This means that now the movements are beginning to take the daily lives of their members in their hands. In the urban areas mentioned, an important shift occurs; they no longer just survive off the “remains“ or the “trash” of consumer society but they begin to produce their food and other products that they sell and exchange.13 In this way, we can see how new worldviews and experiences that move away from the classical economic model are being born in our region. Franz Hinkelammert and Henry Mora maintain that “building alternatives regionally and globally involves a radical overhaul of our current categorical frameworks; frameworks that not only predetermine our perception of reality, but also limit the goals of human action that we can conceive of.” From this perspective they propose a horizon for reconstructing economic theory that goes beyond the conception of it as the art of profit and recovers it as the art of production management and distribution of goods necessary to supply for the community and satisfy human needs.14 Thus, they propose an economy of life where the focus is the real life of humans instead of neoclassical and neoliberal economic theories that have sprung forth out of the Western positivist tradition. According to them, an economy of life should have conditions that make this life possible based on the fact that humans are natural, corporal, and needy beings. Consequently, these new world views address, in particular, the production and reproduction of material conditions (biophysical and social-institutional) that make life possible and sustainable by way of satisfying needs and the enjoyment of a full life for everyone.15 This is the role of churches and the ecumenical movement facing this crisis of the dominant development model, in light of these growing alternatives and the reconstruction of economic theory. Boff suggests that we are living in times such as those of Noah, whose call to people to change their lives went unheeded since they were living in accordance with the thinking of their time.16 Therefore, it is urgent that we not only refresh Noah's call to change our lifestyle, but also hear Paul's call in Romans 12 to change our way of thinking in order to change our way of living. In other words, we need to stop thinking that making adjustments or reforms to the economy is going to reduce poverty, violence, and the destruction of nature, since it has been shown both theoretically and empirically that when the economic system “functions better,” inequality is greater. As churches and ecumenical movements, we have the challenge of dialoguing with and accompanying communities that are promoting ways to re-create the economy, taking from our ancestor's worldviews and the thinking of our critical tradition. Based on these experiences and the biblical-theological perspective of an abundant life for humans and the clamor of creation awaiting its redemption, we can contribute to a new way of thinking that allows us to recreate our way of life as humans and with nature. Milton Mejía is a professor of theology at the Reformed University in Colombia and Faith, Economy, Ecology, and Society programme coordinator for CLAI1