What does it take for someone, or someplace to be transformed?  Try a big city, God’s word, a desire to help, and a handful of people – living the word and proclaiming the word.  Kananga, a large city in the middle of Congo, is in a vast savannah, hardly accessible by road.  A once sleepy capital of the west Kasai province, it bristles with life, people squeezing out an existence in small commercial endeavors.  Dr. Jerry, Dr. Jean Fidele and I visited Kananga for a week in April 2008, training thirty individuals from different neighborhoods around the city who had a desire to help their communities.  We discussed principals of health, sustainable development and God’s Word, which is full of good news.  Since 2008, we have visited our Kananga colleagues once a year, and are blessed monthly by email “reports” of their faithfulness.  More than 20 of these individuals are still actively mobilizing the communities where they live.

In Kananga’s Lukonga neighborhood, concerned about malnutrition, the volunteers there use new knowledge to visit homes and measure young children’s arm circumferences.  A short measuring tape is a low cost, community friendly tool, useful for evaluating the nutritional status of children and prompting community action against malnutrition.  Yet, by doing home visits, these volunteers discovered a number of the mothers with a keen regret that the literacy program they once attended had withered months ago when it’s funding dried up.  These women wanted to learn to read, and to do simple math so they could better provide for their families.  The group organized.  The church building became a venue for classes.  Teacher parishioners volunteered to teach the classes.  With a small contribution paid by the women, they purchased a handful of reading workbooks to share, and literacy classes began in Tshiluba and French, enthusiastically attended by many women in the neighborhood. 

In another neighborhood, that team meets weekly under a mango tree.  Folks passing by are welcome to pull up a chair, observe, and even participate in the discussions.  Among the neighborhood problems, the population has outgrown the elementary school.  In discussing options, they discovered that a catholic priest near by had building materials for an addition to the neighborhood school, but he did not have funds to pay for labor, sand, or water.  The group rallied, and organized community work days to haul water and sand, and with the expertise of a mason in the community, assisted in erecting the school building.  They also introduced us to two “Branhamist” neighbors who now follow Jesus because of the Word they heard at group meetings, the love they felt, and the actions they saw taken in their community. 

Another group works with an agricultural community on the edge of Kananga.  This community discovered a new ability to cooperate after re-discovering some principals of health and development from God’s word that trainers shared with them from the training they'd received from us.  The problem of clean drinking water stymied that community.  They had a water source, but humans and animals used it for all their needs, and they had "no money" to purchase materials to protect it.  But with a new desire to please God and obey his word, as a gardening community, they determined to dedicate one field for the benefit of community projects.  They worked together on that field through the growing season.  Then, with proceeds from the sale of the crops that year, they purchased pipe and cement to protect their source and keep it clean and safe for drinking. 

Through our visits, and the reports which come, we get echoes of other initiatives, some more successful than others.  One group held a clean up day for a drainage canal in their sloping neighborhood so run-off rain water is channeled and won’t cause further erosion to wash out people’s houses.  Members of the agricultural community organized a “7 week” training with friends in a neighboring community so those folks might also believe God's word, and work together to find solutions to their problem.  In down town Kananga, another group participates in meetings of an aggressive, but influential youth club, in that urban neighborhood to proclaim the Word, and challenge these young people to live by it.  In all the groups, the volunteers bear each other’s burdens through prayer and share with the sick/suffering among them.

There are corners of Kananga being transformed because a handful of people are living and proclaiming that the Kingdom of heaven is near.  Through the World Mission offering, all over the world, International Ministries missionaries like us, and our partners, are also living the word, and proclaiming that the Kingdom is near.  By giving to the World Mission offering, you are part of the team, even in hard to reach places like Kananga, and lives are being transformed as people come to follow Jesus, learn to read, have clean drinking water, and work better together so the Kingdom may come on earth, as it is in heaven.  Give generously to the World Mission offering, and pray fervently, for the Kingdom of heaven is near and many have not yet been transformed.