Community Development

The narrow road was curvy, snaking a path through rice fields and clumps of bamboo houses.  Mountains hung on either side of us, covered with coconut trees and cogon grass.  Monsoon rains had softened the underlying dirt, making the certainty of our arrival a bit more suspect.  My passengers were the 3 staff members from our BOOST-agricultural ministry, 3 recent BOOST graduates, and a fellow missionary.

Fortunately God’s angels were able to keep both me and my car from stumbling and we arrived at the one-room village community lodge at 9 a.m.  For 30 minutes we greeted the villagers as they entered.  This was the home of one of our BOOST graduates and he had texted the village leaders to gather the people to hear a presentation about how to improve their community.

For the previous 3 days, my fellow missionary/agriculturalist had trained us on Community Development – a process on how to help community members improve their livelihood while allowing us to cultivate relationships to share the gospel.  We learned that there are two categories of human needs: acute and chronic.  Acute needs arise from disasters (wars, floods, famine, etc.) and require immediate outside resources to relieve hunger and meet other human needs.  Chronic needs develop over longer periods and are the result of deeper problems within the community.  

Interestingly, most benevolent organizations meet chronic needs with outsiders coming into the community to distribute food, provide health care, build roads, improve sanitation, and other give-aways.  Aside from being very expensive, such an approach usually robs the native people of their self-dignity, creates dependency on the outsiders, and hinders the people from developing their own creative solutions.  Haiti, for example, receives more outside humanitarian aid than any other country, yet it remains one of the poorest.

As the villagers seated themselves, we began asking questions about the community.  We explained that we were not there to give away anything, but instead to help them identify their own community problems, prioritize them, and using readily available resources to come up with an action plan to begin solving the problems.  The process would take several weeks and involve several meetings.  But the goal was to strengthen the community by educating them how to creatively meet their own needs: physical, spiritual, psychological, social, and economic.

Interestingly, Jesus and His disciples met human needs while sharing the gospel twice as many times as when they shared the gospel alone.  They healed, fed the hungry, and delivered from evil spirits, while sharing the gospel message.  When we do community development, our goal is to demonstrate God’s love by building capacity and confidence in a community.  As we go through the process, we build relationships.  More times than not, they inquire why we are there to help them.  When we share the gospel, they are far more likely to listen and respond, knowing we are there to help them.