Alleviating Poverty through
Biblically Based Business

Equip: Being part of a project to initiate the training

This is probably the most exciting and rewarding role in everything we are talking about here.  To go out and engage personally with those who need help in the Developing World: To see first-hand the situations which your work will help to improve; to build personal and lasting relationships with people who, despite their impoverished situation, have a deep relationship with God; to receive gratitude and appreciation out of all proportion to what you are actually doing; to feel a prominent part of God’s plan for these people – well that is just awesome and unforgettable. 

Whether people are simply part of the team, or whether they are leading the team, this can contain an unbelievable sense of ‘I have come so that they shall have life, and have it to the full’, and the tangible, unchanging reality that this ‘having life to the full’ is not through wealth or possessions, or even location, it is through phenomenally deep and productive relationships, and through a real sense of overcoming adversity and transformation under God.

But the danger is that people feel this role is reserved for those of us with business or training skills.  It is not, in fact little could be further from the truth.  We are not talking about the skills of running a multinational, we are talking about selling pineapples on the roadside; and we are not talking about pontificating as experts, we are talking about helping those with very little education to grasp basic concepts.  Eventually the training will be delivered by people with less grasp of business or training than practically anybody from the western world, and it will be delivered successfully, as it has been in Uganda.  And as with Uganda, if people can understand and apply the training themselves, then they can deliver it to others. 

That is the direct role of the training team, but it has another very important role as well – because this is the role which is most likely to crystallise other roles around it.  Where there is a committed individual or team who is inspired by God’s vision of going to help the poor, other people will naturally be drawn into the other roles to support them.  Once the training team has begun to be identified, the whole thing somehow becomes more real, and the church or community begins to grow in energy around it.  Guidance on this role can be found in Chapters 4 and 5 of Workbook 0

To understand more about Workbook 0, please click the highlighted link above, or to download just the appropriate chapters as a PDF, please click the pictures to the right.

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