CHE Sustainability

Upon returning and being able to gauge in person how the CHE training program is progressing, it has become more apparent what the next steps need to be for our partner church.  My colleague has made an effort to do a few trainings in my absence and to keep up with me as we translate lessons into the native language.  But since the new year, the training has ground to a halt because now there are too many questions about if there will be enough funding for most things we do.  The agreement with our church in the US was that all the support would come from local sources by this year of the partnership. So we’ve been having some big discussions with the church leaders now that it’s possible to gather more closely.  Clearly it’s time for our partner church to take more ownership for the daily organization and figure out how they can reliably provide more funding, above the 50% of the operating budget that they have been covering.  This will probably involve operating more taxis and putting what taxis they have in the most strategic locations or changing the people who look after them.

A local youth group.

Also, there are big decisions about what direction they want to go with the focus of the CHE training.  We will start by surveying current evangelists and finding who has really found it useful and wants to continue.  Another big necessary step that has been a long time in coming is forming a national committee for CHE.  The church decided the best way to get more people involved and help the benefits of CHE spread around the church is to have the vice-presidents from every organization within the church be on this committee.  Then the women’s and youth’s organization can take more initiative in being involved and even the different regions can show their interest.  This committee will direct the work and provide for how to continue CHE in the future.  Part of that will be accountability and part of it will be taking care of the business ventures that financially support the work.

I’m excited for more of this local ownership.  A lot of our work so far has been to try to find supporters of CHE among the pastors and people who can testify that it is helpful in Niger.  Now this new committee will take a fair amount of training to understand well the way in which CHE seeks to be different from other projects.  But I think it will provide what we’ve been looking for in terms of the chance to branch out into more facets of the church and community.

-- El Padre