Note From The Unite4Africa Board – May 2014 – Jim Weisert

I try to spend time reading and or attending different lectures, conferences and seminars throughout each year that can help me become a better leader. Last week I attended the 2nd annual International Wholestic Missions Conference in Peoria AZ.

The unique thing about this conference is that the organizational host’s (Global CHE Network) approach to global missions is empowering communities to lift themselves up out of poverty who then train other local communities how to do the same. It is an incredibly successful approach to 21st century missions.

If you haven’t read the book “When Helping Hurts” and you’re involved in any kind of international or local serving organization, buy the book today, read it, and then make plans to attend next year’s International Wholestic Missions Conference being held Apr 29th – May 1st 2015. Your organization will become a great benefit to all you serve from the knowledge and applications you will learn.

Let me have the Leadership of CHE tell you about their approach:

 

CHE (Community Health Evangelism) is a movement that has revolutionized the way global missions are being done around the world. We promote Christ-centered development through empowerment strategies that avoid unhealthy dependencies. We facilitate processes that involve the people themselves choosing priorities, identifying assets, and making and implementing plans using locally available resources. Our program is being used by hundreds of Christian churches and organizations across the globe to transform lives, families, and communities from the inside out.

As we move from one community to the next, from nation to nation, Christ is Lord in all and Lord of all. Church planting movements, disease prevention, and poverty alleviation are all intended outcomes of our work of making disciples of all nations. We believe in advancing God’s Kingdom by reflecting the depth and breadth of His Kingdom plan.

CHE is initiated in a community by a two- or three-person CHE training team—dedicated Christians who speak the language of the community and live close enough to visit frequently. CHE trainers are generally supervised by a local organization—whether a church, an association, a denomination, a mission agency, or an NGO.

As they start out in the community, they raise awareness of need and opportunity, and facilitate a process by which the community itself identifies solutions and begins to work together in an organized way. The community gains hope and vision, and a development process is catalyzed.

The trainers assure that community leaders understand CHE as a way they can address their physical, social and spiritual needs themselves, not a program that offers them money. The key to CHE is the community’s willingness to take responsibility for addressing its own problems.

Through a series of open meetings, the community decides whether or not to do CHE as a community. If the training team has done its initial work well, most communities decide to do CHE.

The community then selects people to serve as their local leadership committee. Then the CHE program is officially launched by the community.

The leadership committee selects other community members to be trained as volunteer CHEs (chays)—community health educators/evangelists. The work of these dedicated volunteers is crucial to achieving results. Through frequent trainings, the CHEs are equipped, and they learn how to pass along what they are learning in home visits with other families.

The combined influence of the training team, the leadership committee, and the volunteer CHEs creates a dynamic process of learning and change in the community. Physical and social health improves, projects are accomplished, and spiritual growth occurs as people come to faith in Christ. The community changes from the inside-out.

CHE works because it is the community’s own program, with CHE trainers serving as catalysts for change.

At the conference this year there were 63 different workshops grouped in nine different tracks, see below. Incredible, relevant, and applicable information was available in each track.

• Transforming the Village
• Transforming the City
• Worldview and Christian Community Development
• Mobilizing the Local Church for Wholistic Ministry
• Poverty Alleviation and Economic Development
• Short Term Missions and Global Partnerships
• Planting Wholistic Churches
• International War on Women
• LifeWork: Christian Mission in the Workplace

I want to encourage each of you to spend time increasing your working knowledge of Wholeistic Missions and join Uinte4Africa by attending the 2015 International Wholeistic Missions Conference. You will learn a great deal about how Unite4Africa works in the field. You can check out Global CHE Network here and or the program from the 2014 International Wholeistic Missions Conference here.

Thank you for your continued partnership with Unite4Africa and your faithfulness.

God Bless

Jim