Mutoigo’s comment concluded a week of regional meetings in Siem Reap, Cambodia, where 70 attendees from international and local agencies as well as 30 college students from North America gathered to explore and share their experiences in transformational development in the multi-religious context of Asia.

Siem Reap, whose population is 95-percent Buddhist, is part of the religious tapestry of Asia that includes Hindus, Muslims, Animists, Confucians, ancestor worshippers, and Christians.

After 30 years of communist rule from the 1970s to the 1990s, and the ruthless dictatorship of Pol Pot who destroyed the country’s social structure and murdered a quarter of the population, Cambodians in particular are seeking restoration, healing, and faith. As a result, opportunities to offer prayers to Buddha and other gods can be found on street corners, in businesses, and throughout the structures of daily life.

The presence of leaders and young adults from twelve countries, whose ages spanned five decades, brought the fellowship and encouragement of the broader Christian community to the event’s attendees. The participants explored a dual focus on the biblical basis and applications of transformational community development in minority-Christian contexts.

The 3-day conference in January was the first in the region in a decade and organized jointly by the Asia ministry teams of World Renew and Christian Reformed World Missions (CRWM), who have had a presence in Asia for 50 and 100 years respectively. World Renew and CRWM work closely together in those countries in Asia where both have a presence. Both agencies share a vision of empowering local churches and Christian agencies to transform both individual lives and entire communities.

Dreaming the Impossible

The featured conference speakers were Dr. Diane Obenchain, professor of religious studies at Calvin College and adjunct professor at Calvin Seminary, and Rev. Dino Touthang, a past director of the Evangelical Fellowship of India Commission on Relief (EFICOR, a World Renew partner) and former chair of the executive board of Micah Network.

Obenchain’s daily plenary presentations provided the theological perspective by which participants examined the principles, worldviews, attitudes, and dimensions of working as Christian minorities among people of other religious ways of living. “We focus on Jesus as we come alongside people of other faiths who live in communities of poverty,” Obenchain said. “Finding shared values and characteristics, we rely on Him for transformation.”

Dino Touthang’s daily plenaries provided context and application for the concepts. “Christian thoughts and values need to run like a thread through the whole process of development work,” he said. “Transformational community development is not only meeting physical needs but also creating the relational space and equity that makes spiritual restoration possible.”

“We know that development is transformative when the parents of the poorest families in a community say, ‘Our children can dream.’”

Integrating our spiritual and physical witness is based on “doing, saying, and being” a Christ follower in our relationships. In this way, the presence and example of the life of Jesus on whom we depend is introduced. Touthang resided for five years in a remote mountain community in India where he lived out the values he presented. Those formative experiences, he said, developed his faith and confidence in the power of God to work through community development to radically transform people and unjust social relationships.

“One of the goals of good community development,” Touthang said, “is whether children who live in poverty have the hope of a better future. We know that development is transformative when the parents of the poorest families in a community say, ‘Our children can dream.’”

Transformation: the possibility of the impossible

World Renew has worked in India since 1965 and began a drought and famine response with the Evangelical Fellowship of India in Bihar State in 1967. A water project began in the early 1970s, and as more development training programs were added, EFICOR grew into a registered non-profit organization in India in 1980.

Since then, EFICOR has played an increasingly vital role in building the capacity of Indian churches to address social and economic issues in communities of poverty. These include health, agriculture, literacy, income earning, community-based savings and loan programs, and disaster response and preparation.

Today, World Renew continues to network with EFICOR as one of its international development partners, awarding the organization a $6,000 grant in 2013 to train church and community members to address human trafficking. In thirty of the poor, rural communities where EFICOR is currently working with one tribal people group, 25 women and children are “missing.” This people group is an oppressed and ostracized tribe that lives in the mountain regions of India and was considered “untouchable” in India’s caste system.

“Transformation is the possibility of the impossible.”

When EFICOR began working in Jharkhand (formerly southern Bihar), 95 percent of the tribal people there did not have health services available within 8 km of their village, the average per capita income was US$145 per year, 85 percent of adults had received no formal education, 100 percent had experienced two or more bouts of malaria, and adults could expect to live just 42 years. “There were 129,000 tribal people living in Jharkhand in 1971,” Touthang said, “but they had no health services so malaria, tuberculosis, and cholera were rampant. By 1994 there were just 74,000 members of this people group still living—nearly half died of preventable diseases.”

That year EFICOR set up a health clinic near a village where traditional animal and human sacrifices were being practiced and a cholera epidemic was decimating the people. Their need was great for hope that they didn’t have to earn by suffering or appeasing traditional gods. The continuation of the tribe as a people group seemed impossible. But gradually, the villagers began to visit the clinic for health services: volunteer health workers were trained, a 20-bed hospital was built, and the infant mortality rate dropped from 3.6 to 1.3 in 10.

“In the time that EFICOR has worked in Jhkarhand, the literacy rate has risen from 4 percent to 29 percent,” said Kennedy Dhanabalan, EFICOR’s current executive director. “Ninety-eight savings groups have formed in 80 villages and farmers are practicing conservation agriculture on 8,000 hectares (20,000 acres) of land. Ten thousand children are attending school, and the tribal group has graduated the first tribal lawyer in their history.”

Since 2007, the project has expanded exponentially through several multi-million dollar health grants from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that EFICOR attracted through World Renew and the Indian government’s health service. The program now reaches more than one million people across the state of Jhkarhand.

“We started by teaching women who were unfamiliar with marking time using a clock, to boil water for 10 minutes. They sang a lullaby three times through until the water was safe for drinking,” Kennedy said. “Now there are more than 1,000 volunteers collaborating with district and state government officers to improve family health.”

Through the grants, trained community health workers (CHWs) located in local villages in Jharkhand, were supported by a village health committee (VHC). The CHWs and the network of VHCs helped to enhance the existing structure of government health services in their districts. The work of this public-private partnership was to develop and integrate the most needed health interventions at the community level, and then expand them to the district and state levels.

As a result, the CHWs are supported by VHCs that mobilize community members to improve their health, encourage behavior change, and press for more available and better quality care for pregnant women who are referred to local health facilities for delivery. The VHCs organize and are responsible for coordinating the work of the CHWs in their community. VHCs also work with other village committees that EFICOR has implemented, such as farmer’s unions, self-help groups, and traditional birth attendants.

During the grant period, the lives of an estimated 3,249 children were saved through EFICOR’s partnership with the Indian government. In fact, the program is a model that is now being replicated in other locations in India by state health ministers. The seemingly impossible dream that began a half-century earlier in a dying tribal community is now improving the lives of millions.

“Transformation,” quoted CRWM Bangladesh missionary Jeffrey Bos at the January conference, “is the possibility of the impossible.”

All Things are Possible

Finding common values and characteristics in multi-religious contexts like Asia is the beginning of wholistic transformation. It requires creating relational space and equity through which Christian values and thought run like a thread in the development process; it also means that building relationships is one of its most vital components.

In the lives of people in poverty, creating relational space and equity results in healthy communities where people can be transformed. 

“Our calling is, by reliance the Holy Spirit, to share Christ-like love with others,” Obenchain said. “Christ followers do good deeds out of gratitude, not to earn good things by obedience. Therefore, we live in joyful hope of what is to come and not from a perspective of futility and suffering. We are free from obligatory sacrifices to try to control God because Christ has pleased God for us: we are ‘living sacrifices’ called to Christ-like living.”

At January’s regional assembly in Cambodia, the participants became more aware of the many faiths that exist in the contexts they serve—but it is grace that makes faith in Jesus Christ unique among world religions, Obenchain said. We receive spiritual restoration as a gift to spend on others.

In the lives of people in poverty, creating relational space and equity results in healthy communities where people can be transformed. They are positive about the future—their children can dream, they experience respect and fair treatment, and they can be who they are.

“All worship is being corrected and reformed in Jesus,” Obenchain said. “We remove what is not God to make space for who God is through Jesus alone. We also need Christians of other cultures because Christianity is about correcting each other’s worldviews and ways of living into clearer expressions of true worship. As He indwells us, we become the vehicles of God’s love for others.”