“OUR POOR NEIGHBORS CONSIDERED US POOR!” AN EXAMPLE OF THE IMPACT FROM THE RIGHT KIND OF MESSAGE

This past Saturday I was volunteered (by someone whose name will remain anonymous) for duty at our USCWM/WCUI foodbank. We receive just about to expire and some unsellable food from some local Trader Joes (thanks to TJ) stores and the food is divided into categories and then we each pass through to pick out food we would like to take home. This day I was accompanied by my daughter, Leah, who was to help me see what I needed to do so that I could actually be of some use. Also helping out as a “setup” person (they get to go through the line after the drivers and before all the rest) was Anne who is from Africa. She was there with her 2 lovely daughters and has been involved in this Saturday AM event for some time. I heard her accent and struck up a conversation as we were waiting for the drivers to arrive with the goods.

Enthusiastically she shared her story. Anne had grown up in a central African country and her was family was so poor that their poor neighbors considered her family as poor! But through the messages delivered by her pastor in their home church Anne began to hear God speaking through her pastors teaching and what she heard transformed her mind and her life. My immediate thought when she mentioned the name of her church (the name is too long for me to remember) was that it was probably a “prosperity” gospel church. Oh no Anne replied. What the pastor shared was not the prosperity gospel as most people understand it but a gospel of hope and encouragement that God did not intend that His people sit idly by suffering with poverty and ill health. No, He was a God of true prosperity but prosperity as understood in the concept of shalom. He wants His people to live lives that are full of His peace, the peace that passes all human understanding. This pastor taught that his congregants were responsible for their own well being and that their lives could be made better with their own efforts in tune with the work of the Holy Spirit active and alive in our lives! WOW I wanted to shout thanks be to God that He would allow me to hear such a story. But what has this to do with Zeal and Knowledge?
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Let me take us back to the purpose of this blog. It is primarily intended to assist those with a passion/zeal for doing good to acquire a deepening knowledge base for how to match their zeal with sufficient knowledge so as to maximize our efforts for kingdom transformation. This story gets to the heart of this purpose. This story illustrates that there are indeed some excellent churches globally whose pastors are preaching and teaching sound messages that have enough impact to transform thinking and thus lives. There may be more sound messages such as this being preached globally than in the church in the west. So for those in the western church who are involved in global missions activities remember one of the principles we think is foundational to effective involvement cross-culturally is working through local churches who have leadership that is preaching and teaching the truth about the overwhelming good news that not only did Jesus die for our sins that we might have eternal life but that He also, along with the Father and Holy Spirit, desire to see His people living lives of shalom and not lives of poverty and dis-ease. We must acknowledge that God is working through His Church all over the world and if we involve ourselves and our churches in cross-cultural global ministry without being connected to such churches and leaders as Anne describes then we are not practicing zeal with knowledge and we are probably causing more harm than good.