Check out this email I received a few days ago from Dustin Holliday, one of the revolutionaries in the current batch of EnterMission Coaching. He is leading the charge in missional expression at Christian Fellowship Church. They are a force to be reckoned with! They’re seeding the ground for a holistic church planting movement in Nicaragua. Enjoy this report from the frontline.
Get this one boys...
So we are down in Nicaragua hosting the Purpose Driven Church with Verbo as from the Bore Well model. I share with Pastor Earl about how Christian Fellowship Church had fund raising to fill a container through Stop Hunger Now with 142,000 meals to send to Haiti. Earl says that since we are in a church to church partnership then Verbo should help with our outreach too. With the 105 core members/leaders that were in the conference he cast the vision that since God had so blessed them with relief after Hurricane Felix in 2007 that they should all ask God what part they will play.
It essentially breaks down to 25cents a meal. That astonished the Nicaraguans.
Long story short, out of the 105 people in attendance they gave enough to purchase just over 1700 meals!!! One guy testified that he used three days worth of his own food money to buy meals for Nicaragua. He said he could be hungry for three days when Haitians were starving!
God is so huge. His church cannot be stopped.
--Dustin
Amazing.
Let this remind us that the poor ARE NOT helpless.
They are more than capable of working to improve their lives and the lives of others. They are powerful. They have gifts and talents and abilities we do not have.
The approach of most western church is to do things to the poor instead of with the poor. (Don’t misunderstand me. There are crisis situations where we must immediately do things to and for the poor. But, this is a very short window.)
In most cases, by taking this approach, we hurt the very people that we are trying to help. This approach creates the feeling of inferiority, paralyzes indigenous leadership, and marginalizes the poor.
This dynamic has been playing out all over the developing world. Which is why William Easterly in his book, White Man’s Burden says,
“The real tragedy isn’t that we aren’t giving more money. The real tragedy is that the West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still has not managed to get 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $4 bed nets to poor families. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $3 to each new mother to prevent five million child deaths."
If we only do things “for” the poor, we are often exacerbating the problem and pouring resources into a bottomless pit.
Interventions that invite the poor into the design and implementation of the intervention can actually END poverty by getting at the root, not just the symptoms.
The government and the church have such a long history of colonialistic and paternal approaches that lead the poor to believe they cannot do anything without the help of money and resources from others.
Not so for Verbo and this new movement in Nicaragua!
Comments