Resurrection Hope: Try, Try, and Try Again

You know, when we think about the church in the world today, and what we’re doing in God’s kingdom both collectively and as individuals, it’s easy to get discouraged. Satan roars around like a lion waiting to devour us, often by using our good intentions and misguided battlefronts “to lead us like lambs to the slaughter.” Living on another continent and listening to the news and noise from back home often makes me grieve rather than rejoice. As an example, seeking to own Christ as the Risen Lord and King who claims our allegiance over all earthly commitments and communities, Rebecca and I have tried to think about politics in ways that are difficult to define and that are nonconformist to either of our two parties (neither of which reflects God’s dream for the world). And so whether in the NY Times, Christian social justice blogs, or in chain mail, we’re constantly discouraged! Whether it’s the Christian activist who writes about Obama’s presidency as if it is the sign and seal of God’s kingdom coming for the poor, or the chain mail that tells us that “Christ died to save your soul, and the American soldier for your freedom,” we feel sometimes that the kingdom might be stumbling.

But the temptation to feel failure is even greater here in our own lives and work! Many of us have grown up with so many commercials that say things like, “For just 7 cents a decade, you can save an entire community from starvation, and build three churches, and convert the entire country,” that we’ve started to believe that God’s kingdom work among the poor is simple or easy, that all it takes is good intentions and cold hard cash. But that certainly doesn’t reflect our experience. Community development work is hard, and there are plenty of setbacks, failures, false starts, and all the rest.

And as opposed to some other areas of missions or development, where the field seems to have reached a fairly defined set of “best practices” or rules for success, in promoting market-based agricultural business, we sometimes find ourselves in what might be called “half-charted territory:” not untried, not without guidelines, but with a whole lot of really smart folks saying, “Now how exactly do we make this work?”

And this is even more discouraging than biased blogs and misguided (or dishonest!) chain mails. Discouraging enough to sometimes make you wonder if it’s worth it.

And then we remember the little parable of the mustard seed. In Matthew, Jesus begins his ministry by declaring the kingdom of heaven, the rule and reign of God that will set all things to right, that will be the jubilee year for the poor, the day of healing for the sick, the blind, and the lame, and a reversal of the fallen world’s order. And how does Jesus say that this great overturning of the world will happen? How will this mighty work for the outcast, the beggar, and the poor break onto the scene, this revolution that unseats the powerful and lifts up the lowly? Like a tiny insignificant seed, that hides in the soil quietly, and then slowly by slowly becomes the enormous tree that attracts all the birds of the air to its branches. In other words: the Risen Lord’s kingdom is coming, and if we want to see it, we’ll look to the small things, the quiet efforts, the little by little steps of His followers seeking His way in the world. In a society where our worth is determined by the bigness of our actions, whether inside the church or outside of it, Christ tells us His kingdom is coming, whether we see it or not, coming in the small things, the hidden things, the stopping, starting, halting efforts of His people to do His work.

What that means is that as community development workers, a good bit of what we’re doing is experimenting, trying this and that, seeing what works, and believing in God’s kingdom coming for the poor at every step despite the inadequacy of our efforts. I know that this isn’t as comfortable as saving a city for 7 cents, either for us or for the folks back home. The kingdom isn’t ever comfortable, but it is beautiful and good, the dream hidden deep in our hearts fulfilled by Christ in His death and resurrection.

So practically what does this mean for us? A whole lot actually. After four months of studying Planting Faith’s groups, learning from our partner organization and our bosses Horace and Ann Tipton, and thinking long and hard through everything we learned back at Covenant, we have proposed to try a new pilot project that would keep the best of what PF has been doing, to learn from our mistakes, and to adopt new techniques that will be more community-based, more empowering, and more sustainable.

So instead of lending to the farmers, we’ll partner with a local microbank that has proven that they are experts at making sustainable loans to farmers groups. Doing this will help us as the church and the “wazungu” to distance ourselves from the financial portion of our program (thus eliminating some of the negative incentives in our current model), and will save us a good deal of headache in terms of staff time and fundraising. Instead of forming a new big group of 50 farmers, we’ll work with a smaller group that has already been functioning for some time before we ever get to them. Instead of researching the markets and crop possibilities ourselves and then presenting them to the farmers, we’ll use a series of participatory activities and trainings to help the farmers analyze the market for various crops, their potential to produce those crops, and to develop a business plan to collectively conduct that plan. This will be more empowering and developmental, putting the future and success of the group totally in the hands of the group themselves, and equipping them to follow this exact same model over and over again without our help in the future.

And we’ll still be doing all of the other Christian business and agricultural training and research, the marketing assistance, and oversight that seem to have been successful in the good work PF has already been attempting.

This all may seem quite technical, but for us, it’s just another way we’re seeing the kingdom of God affect not only the type of work we do, but the way we do it: by starting small, by trying new things and learning from our successes and mistakes, and by building all of our work on the absolutely rock solid foundation of the resurrection, which means that “our work in the Lord will not be in vain.” Hallelujah, that Christ allows us to participate in the work He’s doing, accepting and using our faltering, stumbling efforts to build His kingdom.

Will our project work? We hope so, but we can’t be sure. But we know this: Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ is coming again, and in the meantime, the mustard seed sized work of the kingdom is coming in our world, giving us glimpses and hints of what He will do in full in those last days.

Peace,
Michael Rhodes

P.S.- Sorry for all these digressions! I hope you find them interesting, but regardless, look for a regular, "so what again have ya'll been doing?" post early next week!