CHE Training Notes

Around the circle of our largest CHE training yet.  We met in one of the churches in our city.

Over a week ago now we held our biggest CHE training yet, for 30 pastors and evangelists in our region. After mostly recovering from this huge undertaking, I’ve had a little chance to reflect on how our time together went. During the training, it quickly became apparent that the biggest challenge is to help the village pastors to see their role as larger than just being a spiritual representative of Christianity in their community. But instead to see themselves as possible agents of change for their community’s health problems and overall development. And that this is actually what it means to be a spiritual representative of Jesus Christ. Then the additional benefit is that this is also able to help them do the spiritual side of their job as well. That’s really the ultimate goal for our partnership with the church here, that both our churches can be stretched in what we think of when we think of evangelism. An effort to help us to see the integration of spiritual and physical, to make it more personal and communal.

I think most of the group caught a larger vision after a number of lessons, but the biggest response was from practical lessons. There were many appreciative thank-yous when we demonstrated some new versions of compost, hand-washing stations, and even family planning methods; things that they said they could really use in their lives. And the good news is that I’ve already heard of one pastor who is doing the handwashing station with family, and two who are trying the composting methods on a large scale.

It also made an impression on me how discouraging many of the pastor’s situations are. One of the big hopes of this method is that the pastors/CHE leaders can strike up conversations with people sitting in public groups or in their homes about health or the development of the community. But the pastors here expressed how difficult it is for anyone to be open to talking to them beyond greetings, because there’s the fearful sense that if you listen to them you might become Christian or be labeled Christian.

The final observation I have for now is that I’m more and more convinced that the teaching methods of CHE are just as important for leaders to learn from as the health or development strategies. So, we did a fair amount of lessons on learner-centered teaching, starting from problems, questions, and listening. All of these are very close to the way Jesus models teaching as well. Hopefully this approach can help make progress with people being willing to engage with the pastors in their community building efforts.

-- El Padre