CHAPTER 91
Sustainable Community Development through the Local Church
Florence Muindi
Florence Muindi is the founder and president of Life in Abundance (LIA) International, whose global mission is to serve the poor and vulnerable in holistic transformational ministry. Florence is a medical doctor, specializing in public health, and has been in cross-cultural missions for 30 years. She serves as the chancellor of Daystar University. She is an author, an ordained minister, a mother, and a grandmother. She lives in Kenya and travels globally for ministry.
During the years I spent in medical school, I came to understand an approach to mission efforts among the poor, which is to bring sustainable change by empowering local churches. I had taken a break from medical school for a few months. I wanted to apply some of the medical knowledge I had acquired to help the poor.
Learning How a Clinic Can Serve—a Busy Failure
I committed to serving in a clinic that was remotely situated in the dry and neglected northern part of Kenya among the Turkana tribe. It was about as rural and poor as it can get. The clinic was run by a skilled nurse from the Netherlands. That clinic served a community of two hundred households throughout a large area, with hardly any infrastructure for transportation or communication.
While I was there, the lead nurse took a leave of absence from the clinic and left me in charge for months. Many of the patients, mostly children, would arrive with common communicable diseases. Most of these diseases could be prevented with good hygiene practices, but if left untreated, they could become fatal. Malaria was common and endemic. Many of the patients would stay in homes near the clinic, come in daily for their medicine until they finished their treatment, and then journey back to their homes. For some, it was a couple of days walk. After several weeks, many of the same patients would return with the same diseases and repeat the treatment cycle.
After those months among the Turkana, I was weary and discouraged. I had worked hard every day, but the people were left with the same problems. They were caught in a cycle of treatment, reinfection, and then more treatment. This cycle can be likened to someone continually drying the floor when their roof leaks but never fixing the roof so that the rain stops pouring in every night.
I promised myself that I would not participate in this kind of wasted effort again. There had to be a better way to care for the poor and vulnerable in a sustained way, and I was determined to find a strategy that would transform entire communities into a new form of life.
Finding a Way to Bring Sustained and Holistic Learning
When I graduated from medical school and could practice clinical medicine, it had already become clear to me that I had to find a way to address the root causes of poor health. I had learned that if I serve in preventive and curative health care but fail to address spiritual needs, I would be doing a disservice to the people I serve by excluding their eternal needs. Spiritual well-being is just as vital as health and development and must be addressed in one unified approach.
After medical school, I got married. My husband and I prepared to serve in a marginalized area in East Africa. We worked with a health and development organization for two years. While in East Africa, I began to design community development strategies, forming a curriculum that could be the tool to address spiritual and physical needs in a sustained way. I learned a great deal from the writings of other leaders. This further enriched the curriculum that I was developing. I decided to test the updated strategy among the Maasai, a rural, underdeveloped, and needy community.
There had to be a better way to care for the poor and vulnerable in a sustained way, and I was determined to find a strategy that would transform entire communities into a new form of life.
What I Saw That Changed My Vision
On Christmas Eve, 1999, something happened that changed my understanding. By that time my husband, our two sons, and I had served for four years—two in Kenya and two in Ethiopia. We had settled into what we understood as our lifelong calling—to serve the poor and vulnerable in Ethiopia.
Activities were taking shape and picking up speed in an integrated medical ministry that served people affected by leprosy in a slum on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. I made every effort to respond to the great needs. I did prayer walks, organized Vacation Bible Schools (VBS), conducted classes to help God-seekers, and encouraged discipleship. I did all of this while pursuing medical work with home visits, medical camps, and health education. I soon became the person everyone was looking for in the community.
On this Christmas Eve, I had gone into downtown Addis Ababa to get bread for that day’s VBS. About four hundred children from our community were registered for the halfday event, and along with helpers from a local partner church, we planned to serve tea and bread to celebrate Christ’s birth.
To make sure I could get enough bread, I needed to be in the city early. It was a cold, misty day with a light drizzle, so visibility was low that morning. As I was on my way back with my car filled with bread, I saw something moving slowly in the middle of the road. Roads were often shared with donkeys, sheep, cows, and people. This time, I realized it was a bundled-up mother with a baby on her back. She was lame and covered with a plastic bag because of the rain. As my car headlights shone on her slowly making her way across the muddy road, I recognized she was one of the homeless people from the community.
I realized she was heading to the community trash pit. Then I saw them. Several children between five and ten years old. They were wet and busily going through the garbage to find something, anything, to eat. I was completely unaware that this was happening at dawn in my adopted community.
These children were about the same age as my two sons, who at that moment were warm and secure, tucked into bed. They were about to wake up to breakfast and caring parents. I remember thinking that even though these street children had almost nothing, God loved them just as much as my children. Then they rushed over to the car to beg. They were desperate. Real children with faces, personalities, and stories.
Of course, I had seen street children before. I grew up in areas of Kenya where poverty is common. So the needs of the poor were familiar to me. But I had learned to dismiss street children as a nuisance, someone else’s responsibility.
This morning, as I waited for the lame mother to cross the road, I looked these children in the eye. I could not unsee what I had seen. I was deeply touched. I was tempted to give them the bread I had just bought. Or to bring them home with me. I drove away overwhelmed with emotion. I began to rationalize. I was already overcommitted. I was preparing to host and feed four hundred children that very day. What more could one person do? Yet I realized that my efforts were not making a lasting impact on the entire community.
The Hope of Christ at Work in His Churches
I was troubled by this and wondered if I was doing anything useful at all. That Christmas season was sad and soulsearching for me. I argued with God in prayer for several days with a deep discontentment. I just had to respond to what I had seen. Then it became clear to me—like darkness giving way to vision and direction during a sunrise. It was not going to be me taking charge to give bread, to organize an orphanage, or to open a clinic or a mission station—playing the hero. Instead, it would be Christ working through His churches.
Christ would give us a way to envision and equip local churches, giving them training and hope to serve their communities. Christ would draw people to Himself, empowering local churches to bring fullness of life.
If we looked to Christ to work through His church, then we would not separate the work of meeting physical needs from meeting spiritual needs. Instead, we would adopt an integrated approach to address important needs by dealing with the root causes. It would also empower vulnerable and hurting people to participate with ownership of their development. It would bring more than relief—feeding for the day but long-term development. Lasting transformation.
God’s Life Flourishing through His Church
Soon after that time, God led us to form an organization that we called Life in Abundance International. We have seen God bring about sustained development—the kind that continues to meet the physical, mental, social, and spiritual needs of a community in several countries. This kind of change requires integrated solutions that address each community’s root problems and unique circumstances. This kind of transformational development is sustainable because it is based in the community with locally owned structures. In all that we do, local churches are central.
- Vision casting hope. We have learned to begin by interacting with community and church leaders and conducting initial vision-casting gatherings. These times are designed to help local leaders learn how they can work together to address the great needs of their community. They are invited to partner together and to participate with God in His greater agenda.
- Understanding the needs to envision the hope. We begin by training a few leaders to conduct a participatory baseline survey of the community. This survey identifies and documents the needs. This helps them project what transformation will look like in the coming years and determine how to monitor and evaluate the journey.
- Mobilizing and organizing the community. Local leaders help people of their community understand and become part of the community development endeavors.
- Interventions to bring lasting change. Various endeavors begin. The medical projects, various education programs, community-based orphan care, leadership training, and microenterprise projects begin. It all flourishes as a fruit of the church. The local churches are the anchor. We keep the church at the center so that it can lift Christ and set the tone for the spiritual aspect of development, for there is no lasting impact without spiritual transformation.
- Phasing out to see complete local ownership. After three years of training leaders, and helping with various programs, we phase ourselves out to allow the people and churches of the community to take complete ownership of their ongoing transformation.
Two Key Strategies
We have seen that God is blessing community development efforts that embrace two key strategies: transformational models and partnerships.
- Transformational models pursue the hope of sustained transformation with holistic approaches to serve spiritual, social, and physical needs. The cardinal features are: training local leaders to continue training others, initiating local church-based partnerships, empowering recipients to participate in their own development, implementing sustainable interventions that address root causes, and planning the phase-out from the beginning so local leadership can be prepared to take over.
- Partnerships are beautiful in the eyes of God. In this fellowship, the Lord commands the blessing of abundant life (Ps 133:3). It is important to partner with other local churches, serving and celebrating as different denominations. We see different leaders and diverse ministries working together with people from the Global North and Global South. If we go alone, we can go fast, but when we go together, we go far and deep.
