Consulting Cross-culturally

The meeting room felt like an oasis of shade compared to the bright sunlight coming off the hot sand outside the open windows.  While the ceiling fans whirred as fast as they could overhead, a group of thirty church leaders gathered around tables with me, trying to figure out why we had broken up into small groups to play with seeds and pie-charts and talk about the problems of a fictitious village.  Despite the heat and sweat pouring down my back I was bursting with excitement because we were now getting to a key part of our presence for the past year with our church partners.  After months of preparation, the national consultation on theological education had finally come.  Now I had the chance to share with our partners the foundational principles and techniques of the Community Health Evangelism (CHE) strategy and how it has helped our partners in other places.  Once they saw the data we collected from the simple process of their voting with seeds and how we used that to identify other problems and resources we had for solutions in this example village, they were quickly able to see how it could be part of their church’s plan to build up communities with the Good News. 

Sitting in on group work in the evening

The consultation ended on a high note of synthesizing the major gains from the presentations and discussions.  But overall I came away with a handful of encouraging impressions mixed with another handful of discouraging ones.  On the one hand it was discouraging to hear that there are no new Bible school students starting this year, mostly due to under-funding teachers, poor living conditions and disorganization.  I also came to realize that the overall education of even the majority of leaders at the consultation is lower than I expected.  The critical thinking skills that I had taken for granted in some of the group work questions were not evident in short tangential answers that many groups gave.  Depressingly, some over the course of the week expressed the hope that foreign money would fix their problems.  But at the same time there were a lot of hopeful comments as well, like those who encouraged the church to hold a meeting to review the state and vision for theological education every year and to make sure to rally the financial support of their own churches to do it.  The fact that starting a program for theological education in French was lifted up as a high priority also shows that they see the need to aim higher for better training, better theology, and better preparation for the future realities of the country.  I was encouraged that all the comments made by people on the national leadership team showed that we are thinking about the same things and share similar ideas.  The president even ended by echoing a concept we talked about in the CHE training, that the church needs to start with the little things which are in reach and that will help us build up to the bigger things.  I’m thankful in all of it to have taken away a clearer view of the problems the church faces in training pastors and evangelists and the vision they’re forming for negotiating those challenges.

--El Padre