We're kicking off our #GreatGain giving campaign this Giving Tuesday with three essential causes: Biblical Education in the Developing World, Global K-12 Education, and Sustainable Christ-Centered Community Building.
We'll hope you'll take a moment to listen to (or read) GOD Int'l founder Gregg Garner as he talks about the heart behind our Sustainable Christ-Centered Community Building Initiatives.
The following is a transcript version of the video linked above.
In all of our [GOD Int'l] regions, we have a campus. And similar to our campus in Nashville, we have a sufficient amount of space to be able to have schools and a church and even a demonstration farm, among other aspects that you would see here in Nashville. You would find there.
However, a big difference is that in our society here, for us to build those kinds of things, we can leverage the various institutions that exist. For example, being able to get a loan so that we pay a certain amount of cents on a dollar to get back even more, and then over time develop equity in that physical asset so that it helps us end up paying for it and it makes sense for us. But most of these countries are cash based communities, meaning there's no such loaning system while they exist for certain people, the interest rates to be able to do that kind of stuff is sometimes in the 30, 40 percentile for them to be able to do something like really build up their campus.
So over the years, we've had to move at what feels like a snail's pace in developing our campuses. However, in the last few years, God has blessed us, even through y'alls generosity, to be able to really expand our campuses.
Why is it important for us to expand our campuses? Well, our campuses in many ways are the demonstration location for the different things we're trying to encourage other communities to do. For example, every one of our campuses has a demonstration farm. And on that farm, we are introducing to the locals what it is that they could do on their own piece of land if they just implemented the type of techniques that we are promoting at our demonstration farm. It's the same thing with our animal husbandry. And the demonstration that we're doing there, whether it's with pigs or chickens, we're trying to help the community understand that. To say, "Listen, we're not just talking about an idea. Come on, look at it, check it out."
On top of that, our campuses allow us to host for large conferences. We have done agricultural conferences, we've done conferences on water and sanitation, healthcare, bible conferences, youth conferences. And in order to be able to host all of those people -- for example, this summer in one of our countries, on one of our campuses, we hosted 180 people. Just getting mattresses and making sure there was room and water and bathroom facility and shower facility to accommodate all those people was somewhat of a challenge. But this is why we need your help.
Because what we are seeing is that when we bring people to our various campuses and when we do workshops and seminars, and when they get to stay with us a few days and we get to ask Questions, there's so much growth and health that takes place. We are even developing commercial type kitchens on the property so that we're able to effectively host - a lot of this stuff is either happening or is in process to happening. But for it to come to total fruition, we need your help.
It is incredibly great gain to see communities thriving. To know that there is a safe space, to know that people can find the people of God and go to where it is that they are living and where it is that they are worshiping together and find refuge for themselves and find something to learn, something to bring home to their own communities. It's a powerful thing. But we need your help to be able to develop our campuses so that we can show others what it is that's possible in their own communities. And there's so many different little projects, whether it's these little types of hand washing, sanitation stations, water filtration units, solar power units that are able to get people off the grid or where there is no grid so that they can have the necessary power to do the kind of work that they need to do.
There is so much that we do on our campus, but we need your help to develop the infrastructure so that we can effectively host the various people that come to us. And these people that come to us, they're not even necessarily part of our organization or part of our church ministry at large. They're often just people who have needed and have an interest and they want to learn. And Jesus taught us that when it came to his gospel and the things that he's given us. Freely you've been given, freely you should give. And we do our best to make sure that the stewardship of these experiences is not something that is putting us in debt, but it's something that is allowing us actually to invest into the communities. So we do that by receiving the generosity and help that comes from you guys, in that you're now able to help us subsidize some of these costs of the improvement of our campuses so that we can be the hospitable host that God would want us to be.
It's so important that on our various campuses we're taking stock of what's going on in the world around us. And if you're going to have a campus or a venue for people to come and learn, you have to create the effective spaces for them to be able to learn what it is that you're trying to teach them. For example, if I wanted to teach a community woodworking, yet I didn't have a wood shop, it would be very challenging to say the least, I'm gonna have to speak about concepts, but nobody would actually get any hands on experience making that happen.
That being the case, as we move through life with these various communities and learn the needs in their areas, new opportunities arise that require us to be able to train to help people meet the opportunity through capacity. Let me give you a practical example. For so many years in various countries. Let's take El Salvador, for example. If they wanted to cut down the grass, which is helpful on so many levels, not least keeping mosquitoes away, they would just take a machete and you'd see guys out there slashing, just slashing all the time. Well, about 10 years ago, we were able to connect with a company that allowed us to get old school sites where, like, you're looking like Amish people out there just making it happen and cutting down the grass. Well, we're at a place now where in most of these developing world countries, they have what we would call like weed whackers and edgers and lawnmowers, and they have access to these things. And with large masses of land, you have people now who would greatly benefit from what has now become cost efficient to do if they had people with the skills to do it.
Now, what this does is if you can train people to now run a lawn care business in some of these communities and you invest in them, you have to have a venue to train them in that. You have to have the equipment. And now you could test them and make sure that they're able to do it. And now you're creating a job for somebody so that it fits with that philosophy that says if you catch a fish for a person, they're going to eat for that day. But if you teach them how to fish, they're going to be able to feed their whole family. And that's a big part of what we're doing on our campuses. So that's an example of the kind of renovations and updating that we need to do on our campus. That not only makes our campus a place that people can demonstrably see new technologies and new ways of doing things, but also becomes a venue for job creation and job training, which is such an important aspect of what it is that we do as a ministry.
If you didn't know this, the Church Community for GOD (C4GOD), which was started hand in hand with Global Outreach Developments International, has been around now for almost 30 years. But we also have church communities all over the world in each of our different regions. And these church communities, they need some help.
The help that they need is to do the things that they can't do for themselves. If you do things for people that they can do for themselves, we call that paternalism. And that's not something we want to be a part of. But., we want to help people do those things that they can't do for themselves. And in order for them to have appropriate church campuses, because we have our organizational campuses in these various regions, but we also have churches in different areas.
In some of these churches, [for example] there's a pastor and brother that I know in Africa and his church community, there's about 50 of them, they meet under a tree still. And while meeting under a tree is humble and there's some beauty to it, it is not a sustainable way of doing church, considering the fluctuations in weather. And even he gets rained out often. But it's a rural community and he's doing the best he can and people are coming together. What we would do then, with your help, is find the right people, put them in the right order through an appropriate vetting process that allows us now to say, okay, we're going to invest into the development of a structure here for your church. We're going to invest into an appropriate sound system for your church over here. We're going to invest into the cleaning up of the grounds area. We're going to take this church and put it off grid and give it solar. This church over here, they're having to haul water from five miles away. We're going to put in a well. There are certain things we need to do for our different churches that we need your help with.
So this holiday season we're asking you to give because there's great gain in creating healthy communities. Students Living a Mission (SLAM) is the youth program of our ministry that has been operating now for about 25 years. And this program has had a bunch of variations to it, but consistently has been giving young people the opportunity to worship together, study the Bible together and serve their communities together. And this is something that we're doing all over the world.
Now, SLAM is a very relevant program because there's a bunch of young people who need help and guidance. And we have the staffed infrastructure in terms of personnel to be able to provide them the kind of mentors and leadership that they need. But we need your help to resource the efforts.
So how does SLAM work in these various communities? First of all, in these various communities there is a weekly SLAM meeting and they come together and they go through the year's theme in terms of a curriculum. So this year's theme is "NuNation", and it comes from the book of 2nd Peter. They spend the whole year diving into that, and it culminates in the summer in a SLAM service camp.
A SLAM service camp, if you've ever been to them or seen them or heard about them here in Nashville, that's where young people come from all over the nation. And they get together in Nashville. The morning kicks off, they eat together, they pray together, and then they worship together. And then they go out into the larger, the greater Nashville area and they serve in, whether it's at apartment complexes, doing a summer day camp, or it's going to an elderly care facility, or it's going to help pack medical supplies to send around the world. These guys are serving all day long, they come back together in the evenings, they worship together again, Bible study some more, and then have a time of fun.
This exact same thing is done abroad in that culminating experience of a SLAM service camp. This last year, we did a SLAM service camp for a community that was actually experiencing a lot of hostility. The community itself was at enmity with the church in the area. We brought the SLAM service camp to that church, and in turn, we went out into the community and hundreds of young people served widows and orphans and kids in school. And at the end of our time together, the leadership of the community had to say thank you because they could now see that God was alive and moving, and they felt so blessed by the SLAM students and what they were to offer.
The third component of SLAM is leadership development. There are some kids in these SLAM devotional groups who will go to the SLAM service camp that we see and they are going to become leaders in their communities. And we want to invest into them. We want to teach them about the stewardship of leadership and how it is they can become responsible for that - so we do seminars.
So one more time: SLAM operates on three levels. 1) You've got your weekly discipleship meetings, 2) you've got the slam service camp where they go to various communities and they implement that program I mentioned earlier. And then finally, 3) SLAM leadership development.
Now, what does this have to do with the creation of a healthy community? One of the blessings that you'll hear in testimony from these kids, especially in the developing world after a SLAM experience, is they'll say, 'I used to think that the only way I could help my community was if I got money. But I never thought I could get money because I didn't know how to make that happen.' But then they end up saying, 'but this week I learned that God gave me enough in my person that with my own two hands, if I learn skills, I can do something to bring about health and change in my community.' And I'm telling you the truth. These are REAL testimonies that we hear with frequency as a result of young people getting to participate in SLAM.
What this also does is it helps us to get a pulse on the communities because the young people are connected and as they age out of the program and we train them to be leaders, these now become these points of contact in the local villages or rural communities that we work with to help us now meet the other types of needs that exist in the community. Their project might be that together, for their SLAM service project, they're going to put in a well, because everybody's having to go so many miles away. Or they're going to clear a borehole that has been clogged, or maybe they're going to put a roof on the local public school. There are various things that these guys start getting the eyes to see and the hearts to implement and it blesses everybody all around them.
This is stuff that we want to do, but we really need your help to make it happen. And I'm so thankful that over the years so many people have been so generous to give and we have used those resources to do these very things. And you're going to. You can even see these other videos that we're going to be putting up where testimonies of how it is that God has used you and others like you who have given and who will continue to give to bring about transformation to communities. This is great gain indeed.
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