Taking Responsibility

Refection #1 from my West Africa Trip

Sometimes I wonder if one reason for our global economic crisis is so that non-Western, national ministries can be weaned off of financial dependence on places like the United States.

If so, I think I started to see the effect of that very thing during my recent trip to West Africa.

Most of the time when I visit grassroots ministries in developing countries, there is always the discussion about lack of adequate funding for various projects. Usually the discussion ends up with the question of when a greater increase in money from America can be expected so that local ministry can continue.

This time, however, I did not hear that sort of question. Instead, I witnessed testimonies from church planters in northern Ghana praising God for how they were now able to fully support themselves thanks to the two bullocks and plow that had been made available to them three years before.  Land in that part of the country is readily available, but farming the dry, crusty ground is not easy—especially if you have to hoe it all by hand. But, with a bullock-powered plow, a single farmer can cultivate five times the size field for the same effort turning his work into a viable, profit-making enterprise.

 The stories we heard from a dozen or so couples all indicated that as a result of being self-sufficient, they were now able to spend adequate time leading several church-planting cell-groups in surrounding villages. One couple had started work in seven different villages—all places that were predominantly Muslim.

In a similar way, speaking with the leadership of the Evangelical Church of Gambia, I was encouraged to hear one of the key priorities of this national denomination is to help each pastor in the whole country become a successful businessman in order to fully support himself and not be dependent on the local church or foreign handouts for survival. In one case, we met a young man who with the aid of a digital camera, computer and printer, was doing just that with a thriving photo studio business thanks to a micro-enterprise loan received a couple years before.

I don’t think any of this get’s us as Americans off the hook in terms of our responsibility to share our wealth with the rest of God’s people around the world. But, how refreshing it is to hear such stories and to think that maybe there is a new day dawning of national organizations taking on themselves the responsibility for financial sustainability of their own ministries.

Jon