The Need for Self-Supporting National Work

"The first thing I remember about encountering self-reliance thinking happened nearly fifty L years ago when I was a college student. I read a story about missionary work in Vietnam following the Indo-China war. It was about the return of missionaries to Vietnam following the devastation caused by the war. When they saw the ruined pastors’ houses, the missionaries felt compassion and wanted to help rebuild. The local people, however, had other ideas. They asked the missionaries not to help, saying that it was their privilege to rebuild their own pastors’ houses. That was a very small seed sown in my thinking a long time ago.

The second experience that brought this issue to my attention happened when I served as a missionary in Zambia in the 1960s. Several Zambian believers and I were sitting under a grass shelter discussing their desire to start a church in the village. They wanted to know if there would be outside funding available to provide a building. I noticed that they constructed the shelter in which we were sitting using only local material. I also noticed that next to us there was a grocery store made with burnt brick and a metal roof. I asked if the missionaries built the grocery store for them. They were happy to say, “Of course not, we did it ourselves.” A few more seeds were sown in my thinking. That was in 1967—about twenty years before I began to deal in-depth with self-reliance issues..............

............................The fifth thing that influenced my thinking on issues of indigeneity and self-support came from listening to and interacting with hundreds of church leaders and missionaries while traveling in Africa from 1984 to the present. Many times, church leaders or missionaries would say, “Let me tell you my story.” Recently I was in Canada speaking on self-reliance issues. One man in the audience spoke up saying that he had been a missionary in Botswana for twelve years. As he was preparing for his return to Canada, the local churches in Botswana took a collection equal to US$1000 to help him and his family relocate back home. He made a point of saying that some of the churches doing the giving were poor churches. Like others, this missionary learned how humbling it can be to receive from those who give out of their relative poverty."

(My Encounter With Self-Reliance. Glenn Schwartz. Mission Frontiers, May-June 2008, pp 27)