Building Living Stones: julho 2013

domingo, 7 de julho de 2013

Child Sponsorship: Foundation Builders

If you are looking for statistics to prove child sponsorship, like Living Stones Foundation Builders works (www.wribrazil.com/foundationbuilder),

then look here: (http://www.aholyexperience.com/2013/06/the-research-that-proves-you-can-change-the-world/)

“Overall, sponsorship makes children 27 to 40 percent more likely to complete secondary school, and 50 to 80 percent more likely to complete a university education. When the child grows up, he is 14–18 percent more likely to obtain a salaried job, and 35 percent more likely to obtain a white-collar job.”

“Poverty causes children to have very low self-esteem, low aspirations. The big difference that sponsorship makes is that it expands children’s views about their own possibilities. We help them realize that they are each given special gifts from God to benefit their communities, and we try to help them develop aspirations for their future.” ~Wess Stafford, Compassion Int.

“Patient nurturing of self-worth, self-expectations, dreams, and aspirations may be a critical part of helping children escape poverty. It is a holistic approach that secular antipoverty initiatives have largely downplayed, but an approach that Christian development groups have championed for decades.

The traditional approach to development work has been to provide things for people. If people lack education, we build them schools. If they are unhealthy, we build them hospitals and provide doctors, or we drill a freshwater well. If their small businesses are stagnant, we provide microcredit so they can borrow.

While each of these interventions can be helpful in the right context, mere provision fails to address the root of poverty: the behaviors, social systems, and mindset that are created by poverty. The key to ending poverty resides in the capacity of human beings—and their view of their own capacity—to facilitate positive change. While some interventions are necessary, especially in the area of health, they come at a cost of reinforcing an inferiority complex among the poor. Good development organizations understand this.

Along with providing some basic resources that allow children to progress farther in school, the child-development approach advocated by Compassion appears to get under the hood of human beings to instill aspirations, character formation, and spiritual direction. In short, it trains people to be givers instead of receivers.”

Living Stones is not Compassion International, and we do not have the data to be able to do a similar study, but we have the same principles, and an even stronger focus on working through local churches. Please pray about being a part of our sponsorship program called Foundation Builders: www.wribrazil.com/foundationbuilder

sábado, 6 de julho de 2013

Women's Tea blesses Living Stone's Mothers

This June we have been blessed with two short term mission trip groups. The first one provided Vacation Bible School for Living Stones, and the second group had women's teas for the mothers. It was a wonderful time, and over 130 women were blessed from Carpina, Tracunaem, Acacias/Friends church, Lagoa De Itaenga, Mussurepe, Guadalajara, Paudalho, and Cajueiro Claro.