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The Values That Shape Our Work
Using the Community Health Evangelism (CHE) strategy, the following principles shape our work:
- Prayer – Prayer and the blessing of God are necessary for anything of lasting value to happen. True transformation is more the work of the Holy Spirit than any strategy.
- Physical and Spiritual Ministry Need to Be Fully Combined – Jesus modeled reaching out to the needs of whole people, physically and spiritually. When we only speak to spiritual needs, many people will not listen. Community improvement without a change of heart leads to selfishness.
- Community Ownership – The community must see projects as its own. To be “owners,” community representatives must choose both the project and the people who will be trained to do it. Projects owned or controlled by outsiders will stop when the outsiders leave.
- Sustainability – The best projects are those that last. To last, projects must use primarily local resources. This means that projects often need to be kept simple.
- Development Not Relief – Pride and self-confidence are best restored through training people to meet their own needs with their own resources. CHE calls this development. Meeting needs for other people CHE calls relief. CHE focuses on development because change is more sustainable and because it facilitates evangelism and discipleship more effectively.
- Prevention Not Cure – Preventing a disease is better than curing it. Thus, CHE focuses on disease prevention, and seeks to network with others who provide clinical treatments and cures.
- Participatory Training – Adults learn best when they are asked to tell us what they know, and then build on this knowledge to solve real problems they face. We focus on this participatory training rather than funding.
- Multiplication and Movement – Training must emphasize that development, both physical and spiritual, should be shared simply, so that learners can share it repeatedly. The best projects are the ones that are so often copied that they go beyond local transformation to national and global movements.
- Home Visiting – Neighbors who volunteer to be trained as CHEs make the best home visitors. This is an excellent way to do development training, evangelism, follow up, and community mobilization.
- Spiritual Maturity – CHE aims to develop mature Christian leaders who are essential to both church growth and church planting.
- Cultural Sensitivity – CHE programs and administration will be adapted to fit with local cultural norms as much as possible.
- Program Effectiveness – Evaluation is essential to identify problems as they occur and continually improve effectiveness.
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