Tag: church partners

Ministry Highlight: Togo

We began our ministry in Togo in 2009 with the Child Sponsorship Program. In just under two years we have registered more than 4,300 children and we partner with 20 Implementing Church Partners.

How Can My Church Help Open a Child Development Center?

Churches that wish to open a child development center will go through an application process, and maintain a continued relationship with local Compassion staff who provide training, support and accountability to their child development programs.

Teaching Home Economics With Common Sense

Moms in our Child Survival Program typically lack the opportunity to learn basic home economics skills. Knowledge that we consider common sense is not always common for them.

Why Do Child Development Centers Close?

We partner with more than 5,000 churches worldwide to implement our sponsorship program. And last year, 95 centers closed, about 1.7 percent of the centers open at the time. The number of child development centers that close each year varies. They close for a variety of reasons, and each case is different.

How Does Our Partnership With Local Churches Really Work?

We depend on the church in your sponsored child’s community to carry out our programs. With your help, we provide the church with finances, guidance and accountability in order to make their program a success.

What Is There to Love About the Church?

“The Church is the Bride of Christ through which the world should know the Lord, and to my knowledge God has not planned an alternative.” — Palamanga Ouali, Country Director of Compassion Burkina

Christian Community Outreach in Bolivia

A small shade tree on the street, some borrowed chairs and a lot of enthusiasm from the neighborhood children, is how church La Capilla 20 de Mayo started in 2004.

At that time, Pastor Raul was the youth pastor at a church in the city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. He started to visit the Normandia neighborhood to have some special time with the children, sharing the Gospel with them and providing the families with some clothes, medicine and other items.

Seven Were Chosen to Serve the Needy

Compassion, which reopened its East Indonesia ministry in 2005, has brought new life to the ministry of some churches. Pastor Pangkey is one pastor who has been inspired by Compassion to begin new patterns of ministry.

He had the opportunity to take part in the Global Leadership Summit in 2007 in Jakarta. At the meeting, God asked him to challenge his congregation to open its heart more for the people in the community.

Pastor Pangkey felt that God wanted him to look to the others who haven’t yet been reached by our programs and the church. This is how he began the Stefanus Group.

“God spoke to me through the scripture in Acts 6:1-7, which speaks about the seven chosen men. The Twelve Disciples chose Stephen and six other men to be responsible for what the people needed at that time.

“We know that people who live in poverty are not only people in the past. We still meet a lot of people who live in poverty today. They can’t afford their basic needs like meals because many of them don’t have opportunity to have a job or build their own business. They have to struggle every day to fulfill their basic needs.”

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Opening a Child Development Center

The churches we partner with must meet a few requirements to be considered for a child development center. They must be part of an evangelical denomination, have a children’s ministry, have good church facilities to host children and have personnel to teach and care for the children. If they meet this criteria, then the formal application and review process can proceed.

The Community That Ended Poverty

Just the other day I read something in the Bible that, although I must have read it a hundred times before, never jumped out at me the way it did this time. The words practically threw themselves off the page. I was reading at the end of Acts 4 …

“All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continues to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands and houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.” – Acts 4:32-35 (NIV)

Wait a minute … did I read that right? There were no needy persons among them. How did I miss this before?

Back in July we had a discussion about whether or not we should – or even can – end poverty. It was a good discussion with some very insightful comments.

This verse wasn’t mentioned in that discussion, but as I read the verse I started to ponder something.

If the believers in Acts were able to essentially eradicate poverty among their community, why couldn’t we (the Church) follow their lifestyle and do the same today? What would happen if churches would simply start following the model of the Church in Acts? Could we eliminate poverty?

What do you think? Does this verse change how you think about poverty and the Church’s role in ending it?