Church Planting and Development

People sometimes get confused about how/why a minister of the gospel is involved in Christian community development. The title of our blog should go some ways towards answering this question but I recently came across a quote I wrote down a long time ago that says it better:

"Sustainable Christian development requires sustainable Christian communities. In other words, while it is possible to have sustainable development without local churches, you cannot have sustainable Christian development - development that is distinctly Christian - without sustainable Christian communities. This means that Christian development must be accompanied by church planting where no churches exist." Tim Chester in Good News to the Poor: Sharing the gospel through social involvement. p 131-132

I hope in the next week or so to describe what we'll be doing now that we're back in South Africa. It fits very well with the above paragraph.

Bert