These past few days, our prayer journey team has been praying and volunteering for residents of Ishinomaki, a city in the NE region highly impacted by the tsunami on March 11, 2011. Several issues have occurred to me as we’ve been at work here:
*** Disaster team advance preparation would be so cool, if we could just do it. In this region, one group had become gurus in disaster readiness. When the tsunami happened, everyone looked to them. I wish all our churches and agencies would invest more time, resources, and personnel in getting ready for “the big one” — or lots of little ones.
*** Once a disaster occurs, it really helps to have an entrepreneur that can envision, dream, and persuade others to come on board. But it also seems absolutely essential to have a natural administrative-type on the team too. The typical entrepreneur will be great at BELIEVING in the future, but not so great at covering all the details. Teaming them up together will create some great synergy for the future.
*** If you provide the infrastructure for volunteers to come help in a disaster, they will. Here we are, 15 months later, and dozens of short-termers are still coming here to serve local people in Ishinomaki. They’re still shoveling out drains, tearing out moldy walls, removing stained flooring, and more. And the impact they’re making here is unquestionable.
*** Connecting the dots between disaster relief and church-planting will always require lots of intentionality and long-term purposefulness. The immediacy of relief will want always to trump the long-term questions of how to birth a church from the relief work.
Have you managed to pull it off? (couple disaster relief with effective church-planting) If so, have you written anything about your experiences? If so, we’d love to read it. Please use the comment box below to tell us about what you’ve discovered so far in your ministry. And thanks in advance for helping!
Have no ‘success stories’ to share as too early on but I moved to Iwate in hopes of sensitively but intentionally bridging relief work and church planting in unchurched areas within the disaster impacted zone. God has led me to focus specificaly on the area of Iwaizumi, Tanohata, Fudai and Noda in Iwate Japan. The grand opening of the church plant in this area (with no church within an hour in any direction) is scheduled for this Sunday June 24th so prayer would be appreciated. Yamamoto in Miyagi Japan is another place where anther group is attempting to bridge relief work and church planting in a previously unchurched area.