Outreach to Zimbabwe

We are hitting the road to Zimbabwe this saturday! This is a blog post to give you a little info on what we will be up to there. 

Church Planting Experience (CPx) is the name of the the training that we have been in for the last 3 months. The first 3 months has been the teaching phase and the second half (3 months) is the “Outreach Phase” and “De-briefing Phase”. Earlier in the training our team was given multiple options for where we would go for the outreach phase. We chose Zimbabwe. The specific destination is near Victoria Falls in a community called Chinotimba. It is a strategic place for us because there are 3 major tribes in Zimbabwe and all three can be found in this area.         
 

Bad Situation, Good Soil

Zimbabwe has been in major hardship for the last several years due to political corruption. Prior to the hardship Zimbabwe was very prosperous and considered the “Bread Basket of Africa”. If you watch the news you have probably heard quite a bit. If you would like some info you could read this article to get an overview of the crisis. The bottom line is the these people are without hope, and true hope can only come from the Gospel, so that is what we will bring. 

The Vision, Mission and Values

Our major objective while in Chinotimba will be to find and train leaders that will start gospel-centered communities focused on making disciples, planting Jesus, and starting a reproducing movement of churches in Zimbabwe. There are three core values that we will be functioning from; Love God, love each-other and love those who don’t know Christ. Our hope is to see many Zimbabweans meet Jesus, worship God and multiply.

Social Action Objective

One of my personal objectives is to discover ways that we can assist native Zimbabweans in restoring their nation, so during this trip I will be assessing needs and looking for opportunity. We have some vision for inspiring citizen journalism to combat further political corruption and also finding opportunities to bring EDGE Outreach in for water purification training. I will unpack those in some later blog posts, they are big topics.

Our Thoughts on Zimbabweans

We love Zimbabweans. We have had the opportunity to meet many and we have been thoroughly touched. Specific reasons aside, we both feel that God will enable us to serve the Zim people. There are budding visions about helping the refugee Zimbabweans to make there way back to Zim to reconstruct their country with the Gospel at the foundation. This outreach will serve as an excellent opportunity for us to practice serving them and see if God would have us work long term with them.

Please keep us in your prayers! We will be in Zimbabwe until July 10th (over 2 months). We do no know if we will have consistent internet connection but we will try very hard to keep you all updated.

Tagged as: Aaron, Missions, Outreach, Zimbabwe