Empowering the Local Church: A Strategic Way to Build the Kingdom - Part 1

For many years, the West has taken the gospel to the world. This article carries a deep gratitude to the West for serving the Kingdom throughout all these years. It is not intended to discredit the work of missionaries in the past, but at the same time, it seeks to expose some problems regarding how things have been, and still are, done in mission work today. The intentional or unintentional colonization of many organizations in the past is reflected today in many problems. Local leadership was not developed! They were trained in Western culture and in the Western way of doing things. The controlling mindset of the West, created by many organizations, leads to a system of dependency rather than a movement of empowerment.

Unfortunately, many organizations still do the same thing; they go overseas and tell local people what to do and how to do it. We are living in a new season for missions, and organizations need to begin moving forward and equipping local leaders. We still need to go overseas and serve the world, but with a mindset of empowerment, rather than creating systems of dependency or exporting the Western ministry model into organizations overseas.

Empowering local people means we need to stop bringing packaged products or cultural approaches to them and telling them what they need to do from a Western perspective; we need to invest more time in assessment, building relationships, identifying their needs, learning the cultural gaps, and deeply analyzing and internalizing those gaps before designing a project that serves them best, not our organization. We do not want local people to become something they are not; we want them to be and do what God has planned for them. We want God's vision for them to flourish, not our vision, while empowering them to carry it out. Therefore, it is time for Western ministry organizations to begin serving local people, not the vision and mission of their organizations, by identifying the problem, feeling the pain, and offering solutions.