Seeing Partnership Being Built in the Body

One of the things I love most about my role at World Relief is getting to work with teams from McLean Bible Church, my home church back in the states. A couple weeks ago I spent two weeks with the latest team to visit Rwanda. The ten men and women from MBC were here to teach workshops to pastors and lay leaders here on biblical principles of ministry. Their workshops were a huge success, and so was the other ministry activities the team took part in. I saw God working in powerful ways through the team – mostly because the team understood something central to the partnership, and that is that we are each different parts of the body, with different functions, but the same body still (1 Corinthians 12).

One of the most touching things that happened during the trip was when my colleague, and friend, and brother in Christ – Emmanuel Kayijuka – was talking to a group made up of the team members, WR staff, and local church members. He grabbed the hands of an elderly woman from the church who leads a volunteer ministry, and the hand of the church’s pastor and the hand of one of the team members, and along with his hand formed the logo of World Relief. He said, “This is World Relief, the local church volunteer, the local pastor, the World Relief staff, and the church in America all coming together to help the poor.” This moment was a real reminder of how the body of Christ can come together and be the hands of Jesus. (see the photo at the top of this post)

It’s great to see MBC stepping up to embrace what it means to be a part of the global body of Christ. Five teams have headed to the AGL already, the church is partnering with the WR Child Survival program in Burundi and the work of Church mobilization in the region. I am serving here for two years and soon will be joined by another long termer for two years and another one for several months this fall. IPJ is raising funds to support the work of WR. Also, exciting is that many in the church leadership are solidly behind the effort. Now I know most of my readers are from MBC/Frontline, so I will close by offering an encouragement to you – to take a step into learning more about what it means to be part of the body of Christ and get involved more with the partnership.