South Asia holds a very special place in the Baptist Mission Australia faith story.
Through our team members, partners and most importantly local believers, we have seen God’s Spirit move in amazing ways as together we have humbly, yet boldly, shared the transforming love, hope and justice of Jesus by word and deed.
This has also been a place where our organisation’s commitment to contextualisation, innovative missional approaches and partnership have been forged in practice and where we have learnt many lessons – through successes and failures.
This week I am in South Asia celebrating the 30th anniversary of serving alongside our local ministry partner. It has been wonderful to share with our partner’s national staff and families and our Baptist Mission Australia team members an inspiring conference. We have celebrated our rich partnership and focused on how together we support transformational empowerment in one of the poorest countries in the world.
With the financial and prayerful support of Australian Baptists we have joined with God and seen thousands of lives and hundreds of communities positively impacted through tailored, integral mission initiatives.
The vision here is to empower people living with significant poverty through education and training. Our team members walk alongside the dedicated and passionate local staff team through projects aimed at capacity building and poverty alleviation. From enabling women to run their own savings and loans groups, to helping farmers with agricultural training, to running a local beauty salon, to operating eye clinics, local people are being provided opportunities to enhance their wellbeing, dignity and independence.
Our partnership support also funds the exciting ‘Sharing the Good News in New Ways’ project. This initiative will place the newest, appropriate version of the Bible in the hands of people across the country through a website and app. The project will also support the establishment of a studio, from which discipleship materials can be produced and distributed.
What is happening in South Asia today brings to life some of the key priorities of our Future Directions Paper.
The ministry is locally led. It’s focused on incarnational presence in local communities. It’s centred on local community transformation. Passionate missional leaders are being developed and innovative global south facing partnerships are being strengthened.
And people – from South Asia’s majority religion – are continuing to discover the hope and love of Jesus that makes sense to them in their language, culture and context!
It has been a joy for me to see first-hand this week a glimpse of what God’s Spirit is doing through our mission partnership in this place of desperate need. A highlight was to visit a women’s self-help group in an impoverished local rural community. This group represents a core activity of our ministry in South Asia.
I met and heard from some courageous, resilient women who spoke passionately about the positive change the self-help group had brought to their lives, family and community
Through our local partnership, more than 800 of these self-help groups are operating across the country. The groups begin by addressing literacy and other functional educational and health issues and then enable the female participants to establish their own savings and loans funds. Through these self-governed accounts participants can make loans to establish small businesses or enterprises. With new income to support their family, group members experience the empowerment of bringing money home, learn to gradually pay back their money before continuing to grow their savings and contribute more to the group.
The self-help groups then come together and form local community-based organisations, which oversee a range of local projects and advocate with government departments for improved services in their local area.
This model works! It is changing lives and communities across the country.
This week has reminded me again of our privilege to partner with other followers of Jesus across the globe as together we join in God’s restorative vision for the world.
Our role in South Asia today is different to what it was 20 years ago, 50 years ago, a century ago! Today we stand alongside local believers as alongsiders, seeking to encourage, resource and support them in all they are doing in the name of Jesus across South Asia.
The local family of one of the founders of our South Asia partner organisation, wrote in a message to the anniversary conference: “What began as a vision to uplift and empower the marginalised has now flourished into a transformative force, touching and changing countless lives across South Asia, as a mustard seed now turned into a large tree, providing God’s hope and belief …. may this legacy continue to grow bringing hope, dignity and opportunity to those who need it most.”
Please join me in praying for our continuing partnership in South Asia.
