In Brief: Building income generation

The new shops are being rented already. This one
sells used clothes.

We’re excited about our partner church completing the building of a rental house and some rental shops in the past few months.  Our excitement goes back to the abundance of talk about how many vestiges of colonialism are still alive and well these days.  We’ve always been pretty sensitive to this with our church partners and with how we try to work through Community Health Evangelism (CHE) to do community development rather than top-down aid donations.  But we are constantly coming up against the tension between these ways of working. Part of it comes from the noble desire of churches in the US to help our partner church with their efforts, which often comes in the form of supporting education programs or building or agricultural projects.  While it’s not intended to be this way, this often subconsciously paints the Western Christians as the successful heroes of the situation, to be able to make things happen so well with their money.  

The second house being built, next to the first
one and behind the shops.

But there’s also the difficult side for our partners practically when Western churches then become the gate-keepers of what is possible, because the local church has to come asking whenever they have a good and helpful idea that requires a substantial financial investment.  One way that our partners have been working to get over this unhealthy dynamic is to try to start income generating projects that will provide the local church with ongoing income to fund their bigger ministry ideas on their own.  There are several ways of raising a decent amount of income, but most of them are fraught with risk.  For example, buying and selling things depends on a lot of variables, running transportation businesses requires a lot of upkeep on vehicles.  What our church partners have settled on for now is building simple houses and shops on their un-used property.  The idea is that this needs less supervision and upkeep, but should be able to bring in some steady income for many years without much more input.

So it’s exciting to see this idea come into practice as a few shops have been built and one house is ready to rent.  It’s the church’s hope that the profits will initially go to employing more administrative and accounting help in order to be more effective in the projects that they are seeking to carry out. This is a big step when the national church has only had three paid employees and has relied on volunteers to do work and reporting in a patch-work fashion.

-- El Padre