Extending the reach of God

posted by Ed Noyes

What an audacious thing to say!  How could anyone extend the reach of God?  Of course the answer is, “We can’t.”  No matter what new territory we explore, what new peoples we “discover”, we always find God there ahead of us.  Still the phrase evokes the image of an important truth: as God’s people, humbly seeking to serve him, we carry God’s presence with us into places where rebellion persists. 

This is an image that continues to inspire me.  To be certain, we are the flawed, scarred, often inadequate body of Christ.  But God chooses to use us to turn darkness into light in the world.

For 25 years, I have helped Congolese Christians to eliminate hunger in the villages of central Bandundu Province.  We have shared the productive crop varieties that God created.  We have shared principles of how God created plants and their environment so that people can work with God to satisfy food needs.  The extension agents of the Baptist Agricultural Center have shared their insights and experience with their neighbors and have pushed chronic hunger to the very margins of Bandundu life.

The IMA World Health project covers 56 health zones in 5 provinces.  Ed and Miriam will be based in Kinshasa.

Now I have a chance to take the fight into parts of 5 provinces where malnutrition and poverty rates are among the worst in Congo: Western Kasai, Maniema, South Kivu, Eastern Province and Equator.  Long-time International Ministries partner IMA World Health has invited me to serve 60% of my time as the principal agricultural extension advisor for a large project rehabilitating rural primary health care systems (rural health centers and hospitals.)  The project encourages villages to create common production fields to help support health centers.  These fields provide excellent opportunities for village groups to experiment with the best available crop varieties and best agricultural practices – simple innovations that can often double agricultural production.

Over the next five years, I will be leading a program that trains village extension workers, distributes high quality seed and seed cuttings over wide swathes of Congolese territory, and helps village groups turn agricultural produce into cash contributions to their local health care system.  In the course of these activities we hope that farm households will adopt innovations that boost their basic agricultural production by 50-100% and ensure that people have enough to eat.  The project hopes to work closely with over 7,000 village groups representing over 4.9 million people.

I will continue to work with Timothée Kabila and ACDI Lusekele, perfecting extension materials, training staff and troubleshooting as needed.  

There is one interesting new development there: Timothée has asked the new governor of Bandundu to include support for ACDI Lusekele’s extension program in the provincial budget.  The governor’s staff has been very encouraging.  We continue to pray that they finally realize that ACDI Lusekele is one of the few serious agricultural extension programs in the entire province and a solid investment in regional economic development.

Paul encourages the Ephesian Christians in this way:  “You yourselves used to be in the darkness, but since you have become the Lord’s people, you are in the light.  So you must live like people who belong in the light, for it is the light that brings a rich harvest of every kind of goodness, righteousness and truth.”  A world without hunger and world where farm families live productive lives while building the capacity of the land to produce sustainable yields – for me that is part of the rich harvest, a sign that God is finally being honored and obeyed.

Please pray for this new venture and the changes it entails.  In the coming months we can share with each other what God is doing.