Church Leaders Participation

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Church leaders' Participation

In this programme we try to encourage church leaders to be actively involved socially within their communities. In Zimbabwe the tendency among Christians, particularly in the rural areas is to treat social responsibility as something ungodly. Our work, all our work in the community is done through the churches found in that community. When we get into the community for the first time, we encourage the churches found in that community to work together. We found that next to political parties, the churches are the most divided; they despise each other and wrangle over non-important issues like, the Sabbath, which baptism is correct, etc. Our approach is to help the churches unite around Peacebuilding issues in their communities.

After this we then empower them with Peacebuilding skills, all of them have chosen to have an inter-church committee responsible for the combined churches' social concerns. In one community they chose to pool their merger resources together and help the less fortunate, churches members contributed a plate of mealie-meal each, others clothes and these were given to the elderly and child headed households as well as orphans. An interesting incident was when the church leaders in one part of Tsholotsho confronted the then senator of the area, who had taken the villagers' money ostensibly to pay for someone to fix a broken borehole. After our training we encouraged them to do something about this issue, this came out during one of the workshops. A team of church leaders visited the senator at her offices at Tsholotsho centre, they were able to come back with the money and villagers got their refunds.

Another step we have taken of late is help the church leaders bridge the gap between them and traditional leaders. In one community in Lupane there is a beautiful working relationship between the traditional leadership structure and the church structure. The request of leaders from other areas who have heard of this initiative, we plan to include traditional leaders as a permanent feature of this aspect of the programme. Every activity we do is done from a Peacebuilding point of view.

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