Transformation and Development on Challenging Times
By Billy Montes
I was blessed to be a part of a recent training-workshop on Church and Community Mobilization held in Cambodia. It was an unforgettable experience and I am grateful to the generous funding support of the Mission Alliance Philippines, Tear Netherlands, church leaders from the Visayas and Metro Manila for making this happen.
The training provided us a thorough understanding of the process involved in transforming communities anchored on biblical principles. It taught us how to empower and encourage people to work together, focus, and identify their needs in order to achieve a better life, especially for the children.
God wanted our lives to revolve around making disciples. He wanted us to lead like Moses in Exodus 3: 7-10, wherein the latter brought thousands of Israelites out of Egypt, setting them free from bondage.
The present situation of rural and urban communities in the Philippines is not very different from that of the biblical Israelites. Both experiences involved crises in the spiritual and physical realms.
This is one of the important topics discussed during the third day of the training—a whole-life discipleship that states: “in real life, there is no separation between the spiritual and secular, both are created by God for His purpose under His Lordship to bring Him glory.”
Discipling and mentoring means following the teaching of Jesus Christ that is not limited to spiritual growth but secular welfare of the people, as well. As the Scripture says in Mark 12: 30-31, “and you shall love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength and the second is this ‘you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself’. There is no other commandment greater than this.”
All of the topics of the training were useful, no doubt, but there’s one that really struck me—discipling. There’s one illustration that impressed me and this was pertaining to environmental sanitation.
It concerned the people in the community who use the river as dumpsite where they dispose their wastes yet they use the same river as their source of drinking water and it is where they wash their clothes.
The challenge is how to persuade them to follow the disciples, change the common practice of the people in the community, and connect it to spiritual values.
There was an activity where the facilitators made the participants taste flour, salt, and then sugar and asked us, the participants, to identify them separately. We did. Then, a bread was passed around for us to eat.
Mr. Herry Herjanto, our facilitator, asked us how it tasted. Then, he popped this question up to us: As community facilitators, are you giving your partner-community the ingredients separately or the whole bread?
Another experience I cherish was when I played a role. My partner was supposed to be the experienced carpenter and he instructed me to fix a chair. However, I cut him short and told him I did not need his instructions since I already knew what to do. So, he left.
When he came back, he found out that I had not accomplished anything. It turned out I knew nothing and that I was at a loss of what to do because I had no knowledge about fixing a chair.
It taught us that we need to be equipped and empowered in order to achieve our goal. We need to listen to an expert or a knowledgeable community leader in order to fix a community problem.
Later, we went swimming in a pool with brother Ry, one of our facilitators. No, it was not rest and recreation time but another lesson was at hand.
It was an exercise to demonstrate priorities on areas of concern using a plastic bottle with holes in different levels. When water was poured in, some participants plugged the holes in order to save the water from leaking. The lesson here was we need to work on problems, either in our lives or in the community, in order to solve them.
On the third day, Ms. Kimleng Mao facilitated a session called “Cultural Onion,” which showed that transformation is a complex process because of the various factors that influence an individual or communities associated to environment and people’s experiences.
Ms. Mao cut a big onion in half and passed the two halves around. We observed that the inside of the onion was exposed showing several layers that surrounded the “core” or the center of the onion.
It illustrated that the core or the “self” is surrounded or influenced by many factors, including authority figures and experiences. It was an important realization that it takes seven years to form the whole self of a person.
Transformation must start from inside out, a process that is crucial to understand since Christ penetrates the core of a person, His light penetrates the heart of a person first before His light radiates from the inside out.
That is why, as future community facilitators and trainers, it is important that we invite the Holy Spirit to work in us.