The most severe crisis of drought and famine that has been faced by the Horn of Africa for over half a century has now been impacting several nations for over one year. Our involvement with churches in Kenya has enabled a crisis fund, currently standing at £230,000, to be channelled direct to places of the [...]
Both Debt and Homelessness are two major problems in these days of recession and many churches are becoming involved in helping people in their localities. We, in Newfrontiers, are privileged to have two highly experienced long-standing networks which are eager to equip other churches to serve those who are affected by these two social issues.
Debt [...]
Continue reading about Equipping conferences in November - Debt and Homelessness
Help still urgently needed
In the last 9 months Newfrontiers churches have been able to contribute nearly £200,000 to help Edward Buria and his team, who are based in Meru, in their endeavours to provide relief through his churches into the communities in Kenya during this time of severe famine.
I am breaking into my series on [...]
Integral part of the community
The church, by its very nature, is an integral part of the local community. It is made up of people from that community and is well equipped to understand and contribute to the welfare of the community.
In this respect, also, it usually differs from the secular agency, although there are, of [...]
Continue reading about Development from a Christian perspective - Pt 6: Church characteristics pt 2
Having looked at some of the characteristics that relate to the secular agencies we will now look at some of the distinctives of the church in its development work. However, I must stress that this is inevitably a somewhat simplistic overview and there is often significant overlap between the practice of the church and the [...]
Continue reading about Development from a Christian perspective – Pt 5 Church characteristics pt 1
In the last blog I looked at the first three of five characteristics which I consider to be particularly applicable to a secular agency namely:
1. Expertise
2. Resources
3. Size
4. Quick fix
5. Staff mobility
We will now look at the fourth and fifth characteristics.
Quick fix
An aid agency may be particularly good at providing a ‘quick fix’ solution to a problem. However, sustainability and [...]
News
First, the International eNews of Newfrontiers has just been published. Do you receive it? It is a newsletter which ‘visits’ four nations each month to bring updates of what is going on in and through Newfrontiers churches. To view it or receive this regularly click here.
Now, lets return to the series on Christian Development.
Having briefly [...]
Having explored some of the definitions of ‘Development’ and ‘the Poor’ in the last blog we will now look at some of the differences between the world’s and church-based models. First, I would like to look at a variant of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of need.
Maslow’s pyramid of need
Maslow was a psychologist who developed a theory [...]
Last time we looked at the statements that have a spiritual impact. In this final part of the series I list those statements that we would expect to apply to any work of this nature, whether Christian or secular, NGO or Aid Agency. These are coloured green in the PowerPoint presentation.
9. Who?
It is clear who [...]
Continue reading about Ministry Health Check pt 6 - The ‘NGO’ statements
What are the other statements?
Having shared some examples of statements let me now provide the full list in this and the next posting. Written here they seem somewhat overwhelming but please do not be put off!
For clarification on any of these please refer to the series which I posted Sept - Dec 2009 where I [...]
Continue reading about Ministry Health Check pt 5 - The ’spiritual’ statements
