And we've progressed to this, so are we making
progress here?
We will.
I'm not going to use that.
I'm going to use old-fashioned overhead here,
so maybe it'll work.
My name is Jack Walker.
There's not a presenter here.
I guess three could present ourselves, each one
the other, but I don't think that'll work.
I'm a Missions Coordinator here in the
Department of Undergraduate Bible, Ministry of Missions,
and work with the Southern Hills Church of
Christ in town.
Have been with them for 20-something years, and
we'll get in a little bit later to some
of the activities that we're doing on the field.
But after me will speak Dr. Glenn Davis, and
Glenn is in our Department of Agriculture and
Environmental Science, a world trotter for many years.
And this is Monty Lynn out of the Department of
Business, not Department, the College of Business.
I'm sorry.
And Monty is also a globetrotter.
In fact, they did a year sabbatical.
How long has that been now?
Five years.
Five years now already.
My goodness.
Did a year sabbatical in Eastern Europe after
the wall fell and helped talk with him about
market economies and things like that.
The title of the topic today is Ministry
Without Walls in Latin America.
And we chose that topic or that name for what
we want to present for several reasons.
And I'd like to talk a little bit about this
idea of walls and how we're perceiving this.
Walls divide and separate spaces.
When you talk about, as Paul did in Ephesians
2, he talks about the wall of separation being
brought down between the Jews and the Gentiles.
If you think back into the Old Testament, the
walls separated the different courts of
the tabernacle and the temple.
And finally, the holy place and the most holy
place where the priest would only go in once
a year.
And so walls are there to separate.
And in some ways we feel like, or I feel like,
I don't know, I may be getting on a limb here
with my two compilers, but we feel like maybe
in the past we've done some things in mission
work in Latin America.
We've built some walls maybe that should not be there.
And the first one I'd like to say something
about is the whole person.
And that's just as crooked as it can be, isn't it?
That help some?
A little bit.
Traditionally, at least in American religion,
in the last century there was sort of a division
between Protestant and the evangelical churches.
And the evangelical churches were more
conservative maybe, more biblically based.
And they dealt a whole lot with the soul and
with personal salvation.
And some of the other churches dealt a whole
lot with social issues and there's been a
whole lot of tension sometimes between these
two sides of the religious landscape in America.
And at least in my way of thinking, some of
this on both sides has been wrong.
Sort of what we call the social gospel, which
was to take care of the human needs of a person
versus the spiritual.
And over here on the other side, we're only
going to take care of the spiritual needs
and we're not going to deal with physical needs.
And a lot of this comes from good old Calvinism
and what Max Weber says, the Protestant work
ethic and everybody has an opportunity and if
they haven't done well, it's because they
haven't tried hard enough.
A lot of good, a good dose of American
individualism thrown in there that every person
should take
care of their own situation and should not be a
burden on everyone else.
I would like to start with this, with the idea,
the question maybe, and anytime you
want to jump in, just raise your hand and start talking.
My wife doesn't even raise her hand when she
wants to tell me things.
So I would like to challenge this whole idea of
the spiritual versus the physical.
I have a real hard time finding that in
scripture, but we tend to think in those terms.
These are spiritual needs, these are physical needs.
I think scripture is, and because of what
scripture tells us, God views people, we've
chosen to call it holistically.
God views us as a whole person.
That involves obviously our spirituality, our soul.
It obviously involves our emotions, but I think
it also involves our bodies and our
physical lives.
I would like to challenge this idea that
Christianity and spirituality have to do with
the soul
and have nothing or not much to do with
immediate needs of people and their physical necessities.
I would like for us to think a little bit about
some biblical examples.
It's my contention that God promising to
Abraham and then God sending Moses into Egypt and
calling the Israelites out of Egypt, as the
scripture says over and over again, with an
outstretched arm and a mighty hand.
We've got a Hebrew expert right here, he could
give us the correct words to use, brings them
to Sinai and recovenants with them on the
desert, and then gives them the Ten Commandments,
which I choose to call a constitution that's
not a Hebrew way of thinking, that's an American
way of thinking, but he sort of builds this
constitution or this basic document with them
that tells them who they are and who he is and
what he wants their relationship with
him to be and what he wants their relationship
with each other to be.
If you look at the Ten Commandments, four of
those commands have to do with loving the
Lord your God with all your heart and six of
them have to do with loving your neighbors yourself.
Then you have this whole complex of social
legislation that is supposed to control how
these people live with each other once he leads
them into the land and once they begin
to inhabit the land.
I think one of the most famous examples is when
you're in the harvest, leave part of
it on the ground for who?
For the alien, for the poor, for the widow and
the orphan.
If we were looking at that today, that would be
social legislation.
That would be how are you supposed to treat the
disadvantaged among you?
My contention is that what God is doing with
Israel, he is forming a social experiment.
If you look at the prophets, when the prophets
hammer on them, they hammer on them on those
two points, idolatry, in other words, not
loving the Lord your God with all your heart
and your soul, Et cetera, and social injustice,
selling the needy for a pair of sandals, removing
the ancient landmarks, in other words, here's a
poor guy who doesn't have any recourse,
I'll just grab a strip of his land, I'll move
the landmark over, bribing the judges.
All of this sort of thing that you hear in Amos
and Micah and all of these prophets that
deal with how you treat each other.
So I think through scripture, we have success,
we're told.
Houston there is no longer a problem, we're
glad about that.
So Israel did not live up to God's
expectations, but one of the big areas where
she did not
live up to God's expectations, we usually think
about idolatry, which is true.
And I think the two things are connected, by
the way.
I think idolatry and social injustice are very
connected, because I think our view of
God determines how we treat each other.
So if you've created an idol, you've created a
God that pretty well behaves like you do.
We can't create something outside of our imaginations.
So if you look at the gods, and usually very
poor examples of us also, then that does not
lift the standard, that lowers the standard.
So Israel, I think, was this social experiment
where God is trying to create a just society.
And the whole reason for God creating that just
society is so that the nations might
know who I am.
How are the nations going to know who YHWH is?
They're going to know who YHWH is through the
comportment of his people.
So God's intention was for Israel to be a first
step in humanity towards social justice.
Had Israel complied with her covenant and
treated each other like they should have,
the other nations would have followed suit, and
Social justice would have spread through
all of these societies.
Obviously, when you look at the Ministry of
Jesus, before the birth of Jesus, when you
look in Luke at Mary's Magnificat, at her song
of praise to God, after she hears the
announcement from the angel that she is going
to be the one who brings the Messiah into
the world, she quotes many Old Testament
passages that have to do with social justice.
She talked about the rich being brought down
and the poor being lifted up.
When Jesus goes into Capernaum and preaches his
First Sermon, the scripture that he cites
is from Isaiah 40, and it's all about the good
news being preached to the poor.
When you look at Matthew's account in chapter
four, and usually we jump from chapter three
to chapter five, we jump from the baptism and
the temptation of Jesus right into the
Sermon on the Mount, and we miss Matthew's
preparation of our mind for the ministry of Jesus.
Matthew says he went throughout Galilee
preaching the good news of the kingdom and
healing all
those who had a physical problem.
The early church, if you begin in Acts 2 with
people selling their possessions to cover
the needs of their brothers and sisters, I
think one of the most important, most significant
events of the early church as we find it
recorded in Acts and the apostolic letters is
the collection
for the poor in Judea.
That really is much larger than we might think
it is, much more important than we might think
it is.
It is a big deal to the apostle Paul.
He wants, obviously, to unite the Jewish church
with the Gentile church with that collection,
but the collection is a big deal.
It's mentioned in letter after letter.
It finds its place in the book of Acts also,
and so I think the place of the early church
of taking care of needy people, of taking care
of physical needs is sometimes maybe
more important than we thought it has been in
our minds.
You can start with the history of the early
church and go all the way through the history
of the church and talk about the social
involvement of Christians.
The fact that we have a red cross, that it's
not another symbol, it is a red cross, I think
is significant.
The fact that hospitals and schools as
institutions that were invented were invented
within the
confines of churches.
If you look at scripture and if you look at the
history of the church, there is a long
involvement of the church in social issues and
in taking care of needy people without
even mentioning the place of the poor and what
God thinks human beings should do about
poor people.
That is on every page of your Bible, almost.
I don't think that's much of an overstatement.
So I think that addressing the whole person to
begin with, that we need to tear this wall
down that we've built up between the spiritual
and the physical and look at people holistically.
I think another thing that we need to think
about is the whole church.
Let me throw a thing in here.
One of the things that I do is I take people to
Latin America.
In the last five years, we've taken around 500
people on trips.
Last year we took 170 people.
I love to grab folks up off the queue and put
them on a plane, because I know what it's
going to do to them.
I think we sometimes have thought that missions
and what needs to go on in a place like Latin
America is the domain of professionals.
I'm all for professional training.
I've got the assistant of the department right
here, I've got to talk good.
I love this university, I love what we do in here.
I love what our sister universities and other
institutions are doing.
I think folks who are going to do ministry need
to be trained.
And I think that training needs to be as
rigorous as any other profession.
But I get very nervous about professionalism,
which is let's leave the job of the church
to the people who have been trained for it.
And let's be a spectator and let's support it
financially, support them emotionally and
spiritually, Et Cetera, but they do the job.
I look to Ephesians 4 for the model of how the
body ought to operate.
And in that chapter, Paul says that God put
into the church, that this is divine intent,
God put into the church apostles and prophets
and shepherds and evangelists and teachers
to equip the saints for every good work of service.
And so I see our job as ministry people, as
equipping the pew for work of service, including
work of service in other nations.
So I really believe that not only do we need to
address the whole person, we need to address
the whole church.
We do need long-term career missionaries that
are trained, that are what I call primary
missionaries, church planners.
We need those folks.
But there are several places in the world where
those churches have already been planted.
I don't think that our ministry stops there.
I think there are things that we can do.
I think that we have a wealth of people sitting
on our pews in every church who can do tremendous
things for God around the world.
They need to be inspired and they need to be
equipped and they need to be led.
Some of the ways that we're doing it here with
what Glenn and Monty and I and other
folks, and this is not just an Abilene thing,
we've taken people from 12 other universities
and from many congregations across the U.S.
What we're trying to do is to get the message
across to the student on campus and to the
person sitting on the pew that we do not care
what your major is or if you're older what
your career is.
God can use that talent that he has given you.
The whole church needs to be involved in
service around the world.
We have folks in business.
We have folks in medicine.
We have folks in education.
We have guys in banking.
We have a lot of people who have a lot of
talent which can be employed on the mission field.
What we need to do is to create vehicles for
them to get to their place of service.
That's what we're hoping to do.
So we think that the saints need to be active
all over the world.
And I think this example of, I just love to
take people, I just like to do it.
And I love to get people off the plane who
speak about three words of Spanish with a
good old Texas accent.
And I love because they're very nervous and
what can I do and am I going to get in a situation
that I can't operate in and what's going to
happen to me.
And I tell them, well, we did lose those 10 or
12 that they executed on that one trip.
And I have these mamas that call me up, you're
taking my baby overseas?
And I said, yeah.
And they say, well, is this safe?
And I said, where are you calling me from, Ma'am?
And I said, your child will be safer with me
overseas than he or she would be on the
streets of Houston.
We've never lost a campaigner.
There are some that we tried to lose while we
were overseas, but we were not successful.
And so we brought every one of them back.
But I love to watch these folks walk into a
situation and work with fellow Christians
who speak a different language, whose
backgrounds are absolutely completely different.
More than likely, their economic status is
radically different and see them work shoulder
to shoulder because it is a testimony to the
universality of the gospel and the universal
kingdom of God.
I think it is an important testimony to our
local church.
I think the average person sitting on the pew
in our local church needs to understand
that their congregation has a worldwide
ministry in which they can take part.
I can guarantee you, we've got two, three, now
four, he's brand new, we haven't initiated
him really, five, six folks from Southern Hills
here in town.
And here's some folks off of our mission committee.
Charlie, Charlie's older than the woodwork,
he's older than dirt around here.
They've been on the mission committee.
Talk to them after this is over about what
taking our members at Southern Hills has done
for our local work, for our local congregation.
It's incredible.
Somewhere along the way on the return trip,
usually when I'm trying to snooze in the seat
on the plane, someone comes up and shakes me,
oh, this is great, and I want to go, and
don't get me wrong, and I know what's coming
after that.
They apologize for it.
This is wonderful, but why aren't we doing this
in Abilene?
And that's when I know the lights come on,
because it's not the where.
We do want to keep on doing this, but that's
not important.
We need to be doing this here, and so we bring
back with us the effects of taking our members overseas.
Those effects are felt in the local church when
we come back.
Let me hurry, right?
Because these guys really do have something to say.
Let me tell you about my personal evolution, okay?
I know it looks like I ate, but I'm not talking
about that.
I'm talking about how I've changed in the last
six to eight years since I've returned.
I was in Latin America for 20 years, and I did
campaign work all over Latin America,
but I lived in a nation whose literacy rate is
higher than the U.S. and Canada, okay?
Whose protein intake surpasses what the United
Nations wants you to eat in a day.
We have more college graduates, more high
school graduates per capita than the U.S.
We export people.
We have more Uruguayans that live outside of
Uruguay than live in Uruguay because they
can get a good job elsewhere.
This guy lives in Venezuela.
We exported a bunch after Venezuela when you
had oil money.
When your oil money turned off, then we quit going.
I lived in a country which has never seen, and
probably won't see in the near future,
the poverty that I have witnessed in other nations.
I approached what we were doing, even in
short-term work, in a completely different way.
When I returned to the U.S., and we started
working here, and we started gearing up with
Southern Hills about what we're going to do,
and we began to go to Mexico, and we began
to go to Honduras, then after the first trip, I
said, we can't keep doing this the way
that we're doing it.
This is not the way to approach this culture,
and it's what we call admissions contextualization,
that you take the gospel message, and you take
the living out of the gospel message,
and you have to adapt that to where you are.
We began to say, we've got to address some
needs here, but in the beginning, when we
moved from what we traditionally called
evangelism, to what I called evangelism with
social action
packed on, okay, here's what we'll do.
We'll take some doctors, dentists, and nurses
with them.
We'll have a clinic during the day, and we'll
have a preaching service at night, just like
we've always done.
That was our next step.
After a while, I began to question that, and I
began to move what I would like to call,
I can hardly say it now that I've written it,
characteristic holistic ministry.
We began to say, we need to address the needs
of these people, and our addressing of those
needs needs to be central to our ministry, not
peripheral, central.
It needs to be a deep down part of what we
feel, and what we say, and what we do when
we go to do ministry in a third world country.
There was a shift, and then we began to look
and say, okay, we don't just need to address
the effects, we need to address the causes.
We don't just need to have a clinic, we need to
teach them about pure water, and we need
to teach them about inoculations, and we need
to teach them about food preparation, and
we need to teach them about vitamins, Et cetera.
We began to move into preventative things,
which is great, but I still, there was deep
down this itch, and I said, this is not yet
where we need to be.
We began to think about what I'm calling
proactive Holistic ministry.
We began to say, how can we actually be
proactive in changing how they live, and so we began
to do things like building houses, and we
established a clinic.
Last year we built a food kitchen, and all
these things are great, and I think we need
to be doing those things.
But in my own evolution of thought, I have
moved beyond that.
I have not abandoned that, but I have moved
beyond that, and I've come to the point where
I believe that God calls the church to be a
proactive agent in the community, to literally
change the situation of people who live around
her, and I do not believe that's peripheral,
I believe that's central, and I do not believe
that's only in Honduras and Mexico and other
places where I've worked, I believe that's true
in Abilene.
I have come to the point where my own thinking
about what my local church needs to be doing
has radically changed.
I believe God has led me through my experiences
to come to that point, and here's a whole
line of things here, but I believe we need,
number one, a long-range commitment.
I don't believe, a lot of what I do, people
would call short-term missions.
That's true, but I want to do that within the
context of a long-range commitment to
a place, to a site, where I want to work in my
ministry, and so it's proactive because
it's not just dealing with the effects, it's
not even dealing with the causes, it's saying
we can step behind that to literally be agents
in God's hands in the community to change
people, and it is communal, it's not individualistic.
The church is a community in the greater community.
God calls us, I know we respond individually, I
know we have to respond to the gospel individually,
but we are baptized into one body, and the
church is that one body in their local world,
and so I feel like God is calling the church to
be an agent in the community, that the
church does not need to be enclosed within four
walls merely taking care of her own activities,
she needs to be out into the world, that's what
God has called us to, and the whole church
needs to be out into the world, not just a
select few, and so this communal ministry
that I think is so important, we're using our
work in Honduras kind of as a case study.
It is incredible what God has done in the last
five years in this extremely poor neighborhood,
peripheral neighborhood in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
When we first started going it had about 75,000
people, a conservative estimate would now
be 120,000 people, so there is an Abilene
sitting on the edge of this huge metropolitan
area of way over a million people.
These are the folks who move into town and
Squat because they have no resources, are
they the people sliding down who have had to
leave a previous situation because of some
economic reversal, and so these are people
literally living on the, it is nothing for
a baby or two to die every week in that
neighborhood, it's nothing at all, it's an
everyday occurrence.
People living in cardboard sacks if they're
lucky with some plastic or some pen on the top.
Poverty like I have never seen, and I have not
been all the way around the world, but
I've been in several places, I've never seen
anything worse than this.
But what God has done in this short five years
in the life of this church, this little church
had 15 people when we went, within three years
it was over 100, it's at about 120, 130 now,
about to elect its own deacons, now these are
people who have never had a leadership
role in their lives, but they're developing it.
Not just the male leadership, because the
male's not worth much, but the female leadership
in that church is out of this world.
They are truly the backbone, and they know, as
we say in Spanish, B de obra, they know
everything that's going on in that neighborhood
with every family right around them.
That's active membership in the community.
God has blessed us way beyond anything we ever
imagined, and we never thought we'd have
a permanent clinic, we never thought we'd have
a food kitchen, we never thought we'd
have a daycare center that we're hoping God
will call us to build this year.
We have decided, we're going to keep on doing
things like clinic and daycare centers, but
we have decided to invest more in long-range ministry.
We have decided to invest more in education of
children, daycare center, we have partnered
with a little public school down the road to
help build it, help equip it.
We're going to partner in a literacy campaign,
and Lord willing, this year, this man's going
to lead the establishment of a bank or a
microbusiness training program or a bank and microbusiness
training program.
We're not sure yet exactly how that's going to...
We have decided that we think God is
calling us to equip and empower people.
While we're doing this, we're involved in
leadership training, and we're hoping that
this congregation will also be a mother church,
and we're already sucking places where we
want to plant new churches, with a mobile
clinic and a big old circus tent that Abilene
Tentenonin gave us, where we're going to have
day camps for kids during the day, and we're
going to have evangelistic services at night,
and we're going to get involved in leadership
training as this goes on.
So I'm going to hush.
These guys have got a whole lot more to say.
Mr. Glenn is up next.
We've got until six or seven, I think it is.
I was in one of those meetings last night.
They're calling them a great city.
I wondered why they had two meets in the entree.
Protein deficiency.
There was a pillow under the table, too.
All right, okay.
We didn't do that.
We were in reasonably.
Did you cut that pocket open?
No, no.
Did you put it up here?
I clipped that over there.
Is that good enough?
That's good enough.
I was born with a microphone.
It's not just a microphone, though, is it?
It's one of those bugger things that you send off.
So I'll have to mark out my first two lines here.
First, I was going to hit money up for a loan.
I've never sat next to a banker before, but I'm
glad to know that I did, and it went quite well.
I appreciate Jack so much and his great spirit
that includes all of us on campus who want
to be involved in somewhere or other, reaching
out to those who have less than we or for
those who have not had opportunity to hear the
good news of Jesus, as we have had opportunities
to hear over and over.
My background is one of agriculture, as you can
see from the note material, but I do have
a great appreciation for Church Panthers one
time at the National Soybean Research Center
of Brazil.
We were fortunate to have a great number of
professional type people in town and a lot
of agricultural wealth in that part of the world.
But we simply could not handle all sides of
this thing, and by the time we got to town
we knew for some weeks we were going to that
particular location, while we were requesting
Church Panthers to come there, and fortunately
they did, and we have the blessing of looking
back now and seeing three good congregations in
the Londrina, Brazil area.
Yesterday we had a great time, and one of them
was just, have you been in here all the time?
I thought he had, because everybody I was going
to say something about, I thought I'd
already cleaned it up.
But yesterday we had a wonderful time, about
the third or fourth year, where we've given
a teach that's amazing what people will come to
eat, you know, if you're telling me you
have something to eat, and Sid Allen and David
Goosby and others and the families were there,
and of course these are the door-opener people
that I've known through the years and come
to appreciate them.
So, thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
I had students making comments yesterday
afternoon that would not have made those
comments had
they not heard the comments and then the
prayers of Keith Justice and had not known a little
bit about the Cowards for Korea project, and
that these men and perhaps women are with
them and getting off the plane this year, and
Sid, you'll have to tell it, saw the sign
that says, Welcome to the Milkoop, and that was
some twenty years after the shipping of
the Holstein Heifers, about twenty-five years,
and here the welcoming sign getting off at
the airport is from this co-op, perhaps doing a
multi-million dollar type of business now.
When our students heard more of that, they
began to say last night or the day after noon,
don't eat lunch in the afternoon or dinner in
the afternoon, but we did yesterday with
the Brazilian group, but I left an email for
you today, by the way, you didn't comment
on it, I noticed.
I was hoping that someday he would have the
privilege of learning to speak the real Latin
America language, but he keeps buttering around
in the Spanish stuff, but sitting at the table
and this couple from Lovok was saying to
President Money and his wife, we're
neighborhood people
and the kids grew up together, and they said,
you know, our granddaughter is down here in
school, and we're so glad that she was here,
and do you know what she majored in?
Of course, they didn't know me from whomever,
and said, agriculture.
Of course, the President and his wife came real
straight about then, and they talked
a little bit, and I'd had their granddaughter
in the 2:00 class, and that was 4.30
whatever time we got over there.
She was also present yesterday in the group
where Dr. Allen and David and others and Jack
were present.
So I appreciate the great benefits and the
symbiotic qualities that we have as we associate
together in these efforts.
My interest is in that, of course, of helping
students to get out there and see how they
can become useful.
Do I have a right click?
Just go on there.
So we will move.
Uh-oh, I didn't mean to do that, but I did, so
I hit the...
The issues in urban agriculture, I'm going to
go directly to this because we're incorporating
a unit and a course this time.
If you look down toward the Albany Highway, you
see that we've become the location of
Abilene to bring your brush and anything that
you want recycled.
So having that and having the capabilities
while we're putting into these courses.
Well, who's involved in urban agriculture?
Well, our young friend here on the right, of
course, getting into that bowl of rice
brings great joy to many of our hearts.
There is an expression up there, this
para-urban, you learn something, I guess, every
day that
refers to those farms that have actually pulled
in close to town and are able to market their
fresh products there.
So I left it in because it was a new expression
for me.
Is urban agriculture a common practice?
Well, it turns out that it's tremendously a
common practice, some of the material from
FAO and USAID and so on, saying to us here that
the population of the world is going
to be urban.
Only within 25 years has the population of
Latin America become urban by 2020, that Asia
and Africa will have as many urban residents as
they have rural.
So things have changed so very much.
So 800 million people there that are involved
in some kind of production.
Well, where does the production go?
Much of the food produced is for our own
consumption, and that's what we're looking at initially
in the Honduras program.
Of course, if there is a surplus, it goes to a
local market.
This one was too precious, I thought, to pass up.
And yes, you do have things like this going
through your garden.
Are fruits a viable option?
This comes out from the agricultural viewpoint,
spins out of the work of the Israelis in the
drip irrigation.
For some reason, these people don't give a
whole lot of credit to them, but that's where
it is.
When you read the limits and the perimeters of
the land of Israel from Dandez to Beersheba
or Beersheba, well, Beersheba is where the
experiment station is, where Drip irrigation
got its start in the world, and I've had the
opportunity to at least be there a couple
of times.
Who gardens where?
Well, the location and the ownership of the
garden land gets to be kind of complicated.
Sometimes that land on which people are
gardening doesn't belong to them.
Sometimes the city grants it to them, as we see
some in Kosovo, and as we see in Nigeria,
we have a land use grant with its head to the
household, and they're allowed to use
this land for a very small fee.
So it's a rather mixed situation, and this is a
study that was done just a couple of
years ago in Nairobi, so you see that this land
comes from all sorts of places, includes
16% just along the riverbank.
Well, unique features of the urban gardening is
that it's very adaptable.
You had rural, well, and rural gardening and
tillage and production kind of stayed rural,
but now in urban it can go to just outside the
city if you live close to it, it can go
to a raised bed in your backyard or in your
neighbor's backyard.
We have that seven barbed wire fence around the
garden right in front of where we worked
last summer there in Lomas, and so it is adaptable.
It can go from there to a window box, and that
tent that we're talking about there,
we can get a plastic top in that, we can use
that in the daytime for a greenhouse while
we're at it.
Raised bed, that's the kick of the word, and
this isn't a real good raised bed garden.
Some of our friends at the Diccasals at Texas
Tech would say, let's do that a little better
than that, and that is that you get some more
troughs in here, because what happens when
you irrigate, if you're not careful, you salt
out the land, and Iraq has a million acres
of that type of land in what is one time known
as the Fertile Crescent.
But beds are very useful.
You get them up a bit in the air, you can get
the compost into them, you can get the
drainage to them, and these are just things
that you get, and just better drainage.
Higher yield, but we don't want to forget why
we're into higher yield.
I cheated on this one.
These are actually mosquitoes there, and they
have an artifact there that looks like something
they might have picked up at Copan or
somewhere, but in this picture it is a pot to
put beans in.
But that's what it's about, is to get the yield
of food for these guys and girls.
No space is wasted when you're in raised gardens.
If you know Chinese people, if you have a
garden close to Chinese people, and Korean
people, this raised garden is what they like as
they work in the United States.
Expanded to growing season.
If you have a wet season, you put it up in a
bed, you gain a couple of weeks.
Your soil dries out, that's why you bed cotton
in Lubbock, Texas.
You get 2 degrees higher temperature in that,
and you gain 10 days of growth.
Less maintenance.
The plants are growing above the level of where
people are walking, and so you have
less stooping, you have fewer kids and fewer
animals cutting across your track.
And this is one, if you look at those slopes
that we traveled up last year, those 15-18%
slopes that you're walking up and you're trying
to turn those into a garden, I think in Korea
they learned maybe to pull kudzu off of those
and put it into insolage and so on.
But you can.
Some of the best and longest productive land in
the world is land that has a native slope
of somewhere around 15%.
It's been farmed 3,000 years in a row with
terraces, and the people in Ethiopia are saying,
man, will we ever get these terraces put in out here?
But it can be done, and it can retain its
productivity through many, many years.
The terraced raised beds can turn these rough
hillsides into productive growing areas where
you don't lose the soil, you're actually
building soil in those cases.
Well, the temporary and the permanent,
constructing the bed, it's not all that complicated.
You see, they dig it up, fluff it up a little
bit, roll it toward the center, put a trench
so the irrigation water will run to it and take
the salts off with them.
The temporary beds are less intensive to make,
but you do have a problem here if you're on
too much slope, you can't use them, so anyway,
this is just the nuts and bolts of trying
to get into this.
The drip irrigation is where the real crux of
the matter comes here, that you use 30
to 50% less water after you get it to the field.
Most irrigation water is lost before it ever
gets to the field.
We used 10-800 gallons a minute in at Lovok,
and we'd run it a quarter mile and take out 400.
We lost 50% before it ever got to a cotton
stalk, and that's the common problem of irrigation
In a situation like this, of course, you have
the infamous T-bar up here with not a hose
coming down to it, but a 5-gallon bucket fitted
with a little fitting, and thus you have the
Hose strip here that will reach for it.
We had one of them in the lab yard, I tried to
steal it to Goof, but he took it back,
so he had to take it to Amarillo.
I didn't know they were in that bad of shape in
Amarillo, but he took it.
But you get this drip, you don't wet anything
except what is needed, and then you don't
over-wet it.
I've seen in the Sinai 200 acres of olives
irrigated in this self-same way.
With this 5-gallon bucket and using the
Hargashimer system, you can water 200 feet by filling
that 5-gallon bucket twice in a day, and that's
200 and a square foot of tomatoes and most
anywhere in the Sinai, Beersheba will run a
pound per square foot, California, £2
per square foot.
So we should be able to get £200 of tomato off
a 200-foot strip, a foot wide,
with two 5-gallon buckets of water per day, and
that's about as efficient as you can get
in irrigation.
This is the last I put up just to show my
students that I do still read.
Dr. Daniel Hillel is one of the renowned soil
physicists of the world.
He ranks about third following Dr. Joe Ritchie,
who is an old roommate and a graduate of Abilene
Christian University, but he is one of those
who have joined the Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations as a senior scientist
after having retired after a beautiful career
at Rutgers University.
He has gone to one of the most difficult parts
of the world, of course, the Sahel, the Saharan
area, and has written a beautiful plan for them.
So if you'd like to read, here's a person to read.
I'm a mesquite next to a couple of sequoias here.
These guys have years of experience, and
Glenn's had his hands in the soil of the earth all
over the world.
My introduction to this has been fairly
theoretic so far, and I'm hoping this summer
that we
can do some things practically in Honduras that
haven't been done before in this part
of the world for churches of Christ.
Maybe you've gotten a sense already from the
irrigation information that Glenn gave is that
what we're interested in are simple but
long-term fixes for primary problems in the
daily living
of people that we're working with.
The idea is to not bring in huge development
projects or build huge buildings, but with
simple ideas a lot of change can be made.
My interests deal with economics and banking,
and let me just ask you where you think churches
of Christ are right now in terms of economic development.
Let me go back here a second.
Are we at the buggy stage or the rocket stage
or the car stage?
Well, there's a caution when passing, right?
We're going to lose this slide in just a minute.
I think pretty clearly we're over here.
I don't know where you'd put government
organizations and their experience and
knowledge about economic
development, but I wouldn't put them here.
I'd put them in the middle because government
organizations have made a lot of mistakes
and we've built huge hospitals that are empty
today and have hospitals and hotels and businesses
around the world which haven't functioned very well.
The people who are in that first slot with the
rockets I think are denominations that
have experience in economic development.
One good thing about this even being at the
buggy stage is we don't have to make a lot
of mistakes that people have made over the years.
We already know how to do things.
We already know how to create jobs.
We already know how to help families have a
little extra income so the children can
have enough to eat.
We know how to do that and it's not that
complicated, but we simply haven't had much
experience in churches of Christ.
Part of that I think is because of theological reasons.
There are other reasons as well, but Jack
mentioned the social gospel and our concerns
about evangelism taking a back seat perhaps to,
I'm going to do it this old way, to interests
in social welfare.
I want to turn to that and pass out a few scriptures.
As a teacher in business, I've had to spend
some time thinking about what scripture says
to labor and justice and jobs and wages.
I've been surprised how many hundreds of
passages literally there are in both testaments about
the way in which we treat people.
This is just a sampling of some that have
pretty strong things to say, both in the Old
Testament and the New.
To go back to Jack's points at the beginning, I
think we've got to start with a clear theology
of why economic development plays any role in missions.
We won't have time to unpack that very much today.
Jack's already addressed those issues.
I would guess many people have questions about
this venture, like you're going to mix money
with missions.
We're giving money to people in developing
countries and you don't think that will bleed
over into evangelism and influence people for
the wrong reasons.
That's what people did with Jesus' following.
They were interested in food.
How can this work?
There are a lot of questions, but I think some
of those questions are dealt with in
terms of our theology about the needs of people.
I would simply encourage you to go back, as I
continue to go back and learn things as
scripture says.
One other point in between these two, and then
we'll hurry along, is we have an incredible
number of resources these days in terms of the
knowledge that people have in churches
and in terms of physical resources.
I think about my son.
If I were to give my son or my daughter a
wrench set for Christmas and a big toolbox
they get for their next birthday, I give them a
supply of spark plugs and auto parts for
the next three years over their birthdays and
on trips when I come home.
My son or my daughter has all these parts
around them that they've been given.
It would be silly not to wonder, Dad, do you
want me to do something here with this?
Why do I have all these things?
This is a wonderful time when Americans have a
lot of resources and God gives resources
to people not to squander on themselves, but to share.
It comes back to our theology.
This is an amazing time of empowerment in terms
of resources to fulfill the call of
Christ for what the body of Christ is about.
The last point there on that slide was that
especially in developing nations, if there's
not some economic engine to support new
churches that are planted, then there will continue
to need to be external funds brought in.
Those churches that are started in Honduras
need enough jobs, enough income to continue
the ministry on their own and to not be
dependent upon Americans or others.
There are a lot of approaches to economic
development on a very small scale.
These are only three.
The last one I'll tell you a little bit more about.
It's become quite popular, but let me mention
the first two as well.
10,000 Villages is a Mennonite organization
that imports handicrafts that people have
made all over the world and then they sell
those handicrafts and they return a portion
of the profits that are made to those artisans
in other countries.
They have a webpage and thousands of products
that you can order or you can go into their stores.
There are only one or two in Texas, but there
are several across the states and they're
based in Pennsylvania.
One idea people have had, especially in
traveling, is, boy, look at the artistry in
this place.
Maybe we could import those and sell them in
the states and get a better price and return
the money to the people.
It's actually pretty complicated to do that,
but that is one approach.
There are literally tens of thousands of
savings organizations.
This is informal finance that exists especially
in Africa.
They've existed for over 500 years and they
work something like this.
15 people will get together and each day
contribute a small amount of money to a pool
and each
week one of those 15 people get the whole pot
for that week.
The next week one of the others gets it and so
after 15 weeks everybody's gotten a large
lump sum.
It's not gambling really, it's just
contributing and then you wait your turn and
sometime in
the 15 week period it will come to you.
So there are very simple savings kind of
approaches where when it's hard to amass a lump
of money
to do something with and help get beyond the
poverty that one is in, there are simple ways
of dealing with that.
One of the challenges here is, is that money
spent in a way that will help you move beyond poverty?
But there are many, many experiences and we
know a great deal about that kind of savings organization.
The last one is micro enterprise development.
These are small firms that are started to
generally create jobs and a little bit of
supplemental income.
Depends upon the particular application, which
one of those is more important.
About 90% or maybe higher than that of the
people who start small businesses like this
are women, married women, who stay at home to
take care of their children but don't have
enough income from their husband's job to
provide food for the kids at home.
Hillary Clinton actually attended this micro
economic summit and there was a goal that
within 10 years micro enterprises would spread
across the entire globe.
You can see the idea, it's loans between $5 and
as high as $500, mostly they're smaller
than $100.
Depends upon the country and the standard of
living and that's coupled with a couple
of other things that I'll show you as I wind
down here in just a minute.
One of the myths we have in western nations
about poverty are that there are people who
can help themselves and they simply haven't.
If they pull themselves together like Americans
have and other westerners, they would be able
to rise out of their poverty and they would be
like us.
There are a lot of fallacies in that that are
easy to identify when you go to these
countries or do just a little reading on the
internet or anywhere else.
A lot of these families in Honduras have two to
three children.
These people never will get a paycheck for the
most part and you imagine never getting
a paycheck in your life.
You get wages at the end of the day typically
or at the end of a week.
There aren't jobs to be had.
There are manufacturing facilities that hire
mostly young girls who sew our clothing and
it's shipped to the United States under the
label of The Gap and JCPenney and others.
Those are mostly young girls, some women, but
the mothers are at home with their children
trying to care for the children.
Unemployment in parts of Latin America,
especially in the lesser developed parts, can
be as high
as 40 percent.
The husband's income supports four or five people.
In Honduras, the latest information I could get
is the average weekly wage is $21.84
and weekly food for four costs $19.60.
Now of course that doesn't include medicine or
medical care or school supplies or clothing.
It's a very different picture again than just
saying they should do better and they can
do better and they're not and let's stay out of it.
To start a business, if you were to say why
don't they just start businesses, well they
have no collateral in the neighborhoods where
we're working, they have no credit history,
they have no training or experience in
business, they don't know how to start a
business or
run a business.
There is money available, there are loan sharks
who typically charge about 300% interest,
they give you the money in the morning, they
want you to pay it back that afternoon.
It's very hard to get any money to start a
business outside of those savings programs
that I mentioned and many places there isn't
capital available elsewhere.
As we kind of wind down, micro enterprise
development typically does, there are lots
of models, but typically does these three things.
It puts together these small loans that again
could be as small as $5 but maybe as high
as $100 or higher and it couples that with
business training.
So typically there will be some training, it
might last a week, it's typically mandatory,
some training in accounting, just a little bit
of bookkeeping, how do you keep record
of the money that comes in and goes out so you
can know how much you're making off different
products if you're selling something.
There will be a little bit of training on
marketing, who are you selling to, are there
enough people in your neighborhood to sell that
product or deliver that service.
There may be some training on savings and how
important it is to put back into the business
and to accumulate some funds.
There's some training on stewardship and what
it means to take care of the resources that
you have.
There may be other training on where that money
may be spent for a family.
There also is in many of these programs
accountability built in and the way this is
done in a lot
of programs is you make loans to a group of people.
So for instance we might have five women who
want to start a small business, five different
small businesses, we put them together in a
group and they make a pact that if one of
them defaults on the loan the other four will
make up for it.
So together through mutual accountability they
work together to make sure those loans
are repaid.
The repayment rate, you want to guess what it
is, on average repayment rate of loans
for micro-enterprises and developing countries,
97%, 98%, 95%, it's better than what you find
in the U.S. for big loans for people with nice
houses and part of it is because of that accountability
that's built in.
So again we're not talking about dependence,
we're not talking about crossing the line
and the church is now doling out money, we're
not talking about bringing in western ideas
and big projects to remake your society.
We're talking about small technology that can
make a real difference and get people
out of those situations they're in.
There actually has been a lot of thinking about
what makes for Christian economic development
and these are some of those ideas, there's a
book that was just published about Christian
micro-enterprise development, this material is
not from that, there are a lot of Christians
with experience and in Churches of Christ we
can learn a great deal from what they have
to say.
Is our session up at 4:30 or 4:45, see if we
have some time for questions and we'll
leave you with some images of the people of
Honduras in the Lomas neighborhood where we've been.
Is 4:30 the time?
Okay, Jack do you want to finish up anything else?
We can field a question or two could we?
Feel free to break out if you need to run but
if we can answer questions.
These are images in Honduras.
I know in the U.S. the Drip irrigation system
is going from drip to actually jet into the
vineyard, I know that's grapevine, but what,
you didn't comment on that or did you kind
of include that into the drip irrigation
program or is that something other than grape?
You mean actually putting it in the ground, yeah.
Why not put it into the vine?
Oh into the vine itself, yeah, I don't think
you'd be able to do it on other than a woody plant.
That would be the only one that I would know of
that you could that I don't claim any expertise
in that area.
I've never seen it in the Israeli system
studying with those who, San Diego State University
professors who teach in the Sinai or the head
of the Sinai and in California and I've never
seen it in their experimental work in the head
of the Sinai.
I've never seen such beautiful flowers and they
have these little tiny hoses and they
just run all around those little flower beds.
But you're talking about actually injecting it
into the stem of the plant.
Yes, this is the emitter system that was
essentially an Israeli-Chinese emitter system
has been
a tremendous success.
I would like to commend you guys for the
projects that you have for the Maduro people.
I'm from Maduro and I feel very honored that
you're doing this.
We work at the, well I'm the administrator at
the JMA clinic which is part of the emitter population.
In fact, we have an official program which we
see the Shari children and mothers that
we haven't been official for.
Some of them don't know how to read and write.
Some of them pretend I'm making tortilla.