Humility Opens Hearts

Challenging The Norm

By C & R in East Asia

For security reasons names, location details used in this article have been altered.

Mr Henry and his wife owned a restaurant in the southern part of the country. After a major natural disaster in our area in 2008 they felt called to move here to work in the affected areas. After some training he became one of our counselling centre station leaders in an area heavily affected by the disaster. Neither he nor any of his team of workers had done community work before.

As a restaurant boss, Mr Henry was used to telling people what to do and expecting to be obeyed. Initially this led to a lot of conflict with others used to working in a collaborative volunteer environment. As local leaders C and J worked with him Mr Henry showed a very humble spirit and readiness to learn a new christian way of leading people.

Mr Henry learned quickly and changed significantly. He apologized in tears to his fellow workers, which is not a thing that would normally happen here at all because of the big loss of face it would involve. As a result of Mr Henry’s leadership the work at that station has now become very successful. He and his wife live in a crowded apartment that is always full of young people who love them. Many of the local people are seeing their love in action as the team help in schools, run afterschool programmes, care for the elderly and disabled, find those who can be given microloans and help to fund poor students and their families.

We are thrilled to be able to report that as a result of the work of Mr Henry and his team, 21 people were recently baptized! J told us how the pool they were baptized in wasn’t very big. The people included some from town and some from the villages. Villagers often lack the means to maintain high levels of personal cleanliness so by the time they got to the last person the water had become very dirty, causing a great deal of consternation for the last woman, but despite this she still agreed to be baptized!

Around 250 people have become christians in our five station areas since the disaster. This is very exciting as well as challenging for our workers to be able to disciple all these people effectively. It also requires much wisdom as J heard recently that officials are not happy about the growth of Christianity in high profile areas such as the disaster regions. J’s government contact said officials have been instructed to find out where the Christian groups meet, and who is meeting there, both in the heavily affected areas and here in our city. This means we will all have to be extra careful about how, when, where and who to meet and talk with.

The C & R are involved in counselling, development and education in East Asia.

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