Development Discipleship

The four pastors laughed nervously as we sat in a now dark and peaceful church that had been full, hot, and animated last week during our CHE training. One of the first questions from this small group that had been chosen for mentoring in their CHE work was over the confusion of how to lead "evangelistic" groups that were more than Bible studies. The simple idea of Community Heath Evangelism (CHE) is to help put basic practices in health prevention and community development into the hands of community members. Then these things can build on each other and slowly add up to create better health (physical and spiritual) and economic opportunity for all the people in the community. One of the big pieces that goes into this puzzle is helping increase community ownership and develop leaders. This was a key piece that our first training of CHE evangelists a few weeks ago really hit hard and fleshed out in a way that excited me.

Nobody wants to be the worker in the parable of the talents that hid the talents and doesn’t have anything to show for what we were given. This was a continual refrain during our recent training, that once you are given something (i.e. learning), the faithful response that God wants from us is to practice it and share it. This speaks to one of the biggest pitfalls we see to development in our country, that a one-time training in something great remains just that, a one-time experience. The exciting thing that I hadn’t seen in CHE training before was the emphasis on developing leaders using a discipleship model even for the health and community practices. So then you also have a pattern and natural way of leading people in spiritual development through the same style of discipleship.

Consequently, in all of the CHE teaching and modeling the goal is to form people as disciples: people who obey what they learn (put it into practice) and then share what they’ve learned. A 3/3 method of meeting is recommended as a way to cultivate this. The first 3rd is to discuss what people did or shared the previous week, providing accountability in sharing. The second 3rd is to talk about a new story or lesson and what we learn from it. The last 3rd is to make plans for what we will do in the coming week as a response or result of this learning, and who we will share the story or idea with (anticipating starting next week with a report of how it actually went). This can work well for people exploring the Bible, or people exploring stories that encourage preventative health practices and community development practices. In this way we can start with simple things to see who is doing the discipleship growth of acting and telling. Then the focus of relationship and teaching can be on those who rise as leaders in action and sharing. These are the people that will spread the good practices for physical help in their communities and spiritual growth as well.

-- El Padre