The espistle of St Barnabas to Ronald on the matter of money and movements

Let's drop in on an email exchange between "St Barney" (recently cannonized) and one of his CPM workers in the field.

It's on the topic of centralized funding and location for training church planters. Your situation may differ, but the principles here don't.

Hi Ronald

Thanks for explaining the situation. It sounds like it would be challenging to run training in these remote areas with limited facilities.

But if you move the training outside of the area, how will you avoid the trap of local people thinking that in order to train they need to bring them to a central location that has better facilities requires outside funding?

The reason I ask this is that in the early days that's what we did. We brought people to a location that had better accommodation and training facilities. Initially this proved to work well but what we discovered was that it began costing us more and more money, and we didn't always get the best people coming as sometimes those who should have been there had to stay in the villages for farming or other reasons.

Unknowingly I was communicating to our local guys (my equivalent of Raj and Amir) that it wasn't really possible for them to run and host trainings in their home areas because they needed outside finance in order to run these trainings.

In the end I had to say no more!

As it turned out when i stopped funding the training events the local folks became very resourceful and found the resources and other ways to train people. i discovered that as long as i was paying they saw no reason to come up with another way.

I encourage you to move the training to their own location, and have them come up with a way to fund, and host the training times.

Praying the lord gives you the wisdom needed

blessings

"Barney"