November 2000

Dear Friends,

Last week I was in India and attended a workshop on getting congregations involved in community health. It is already happening to some extent in the United States with parish nurses and the Stephen Ministry. In fact, 10 years ago, when I was an intern at the Carter Center, I helped gather a database on how churches were involved in health. At the workshop in India we were concentrating on the church in developing countries, and we had representatives from six continents, including people doing community health work at the congregational level and those supporting them at the national and international levels. It was an amazing meeting. There were many contrasts: language—for some, English was their third or fourth language; nationality—we learned songs in a Cameroon dialect and another in Urdu; professions—from theologians to community health nurse.

Our goal at the workshop was to pool our experience and knowledge to come up with the framework for a resource guide for congregations to use to implement a community health program. We felt overwhelmed at first by the task, but much aided by prayer and the Holy Spirit, and hard work. After five days we had the workings of five chapters for the resource guide. The stories told by people: in Malawi, where 70 percent of children have malaria during malaria season, of women’s fellowships that help the poor get mosquito nets; in the Philippines, where members of congregations become the depot in their community for people with tuberculosis to come to receive their daily dose of medicines; in Zambia, where congregations are the mainstay for home-based care for families with HIV/AIDS; in Nepal, where women who can read are teaching those who can’t. Quite exciting.

Today I was back in my own church, Patan Church. I am attending the recently started English service. It was started in response to a request by the young Nepali students who wanted to practice English. I go to this church because I want to meet young Nepali students to encourage them to go into health professions. Each week we recite the Apostle’s Creed —it is not easy, with its long and unfamiliar words. Today the pastor explained that it is part of this service because the Nepali church is relatively isolated from the fellowship of Christians worldwide. (Unlike in other countries, the Nepali church has developed almost independently of foreign missionaries because of strict government policies.) So, he explained, we recite the Apostle’s Creed to remind us of the greater fellowship and our basic beliefs. And then he said that he would count "one, two, three" and we would start to recite the creed—it is still difficult for the congregation to recite in unison, but we keep on.

After the service I spoke with a young man whose father and grandfather were Buddhist priests and who was turned out of his family when he became a Christian. The experiences this morning make me think that perhaps we Americans who have grown up in church-going households have a more difficult time because we can artfully slip through life never really challenged in our faith. In countries like Nepal, where being a Christian goes against the grain of the greater society, and even perhaps against the grain of one’s family, those who choose it have weighed it greatly, have suffered and are stronger for it. I admire them greatly.

Beverley Booth

The 2000 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.149