1.6 billion people worldwide live in multidimensional material poverty. They live on less than $1.90 daily and experience inadequate access to basic health care, nutrition, education, clean water, sanitation, and housing. The grinding deprivation these men, women, and children experience daily is at a level most of us have never endured.
People everywhere also experience relational and spiritual poverty. Wholistic solutions to poverty do not merely provide what is missing materially. True transformation requires uprooting the lies that keep people in bondage, healing broken relationships, exposing injustice, and working across disciplines (health, development, education, psychology, agriculture, etc.) to address the whole needs of communities and individuals.
The Global CHE Network provides a wholistic approach for seeking solutions to every aspect of human need: social, spiritual, mental, and physical. The network teaches the integration of community development, disease prevention, discipleship in Christ, and church planting in the hope that communities will lift themselves out of poverty in all its forms, including material, relational, and spiritual poverty.
When communities create real solutions using local resources and change their lives' trajectories, they can spread their success to others and impact the communities around them. Transformational movements multiply change from village to village, improving an entire region's quality and trajectory of life.
Although Global CHE Network (GCN) is a new member of GACX, it is not new to collaboration. The network represents more than 430 organizations working together to catalyze transformational movements in a million villages. Network partners have shared in developing Global CHE Network's 8,000+ lesson plan library with translations in 54 languages.
The network's vision is to engage 1 million villages worldwide. Global CHE Network currently engages 7,200 villages, 65,000 workers, and over 430 organizations.
By 2033, Global CHE Network is working to cultivate 10,000 model villages that will adopt 100,000 more villages. Ideally, in these model villages:
There is a church planted with disciples multiplying disciples.
There is reduced morbidity and improved community health because of clean water, sanitation, hygiene, and nutrition.
There is food security as a result of diversified agriculture.
There is trade from small businesses that have started.
All of the children are in school.
Terry Dalrymple, founder of Global CHE Network, was in a Central Asian country recently and took 52 church leaders to see a CHE village where almost everyone had come to faith in Christ. The village had clean water and good sanitation, food security, improved housing, and every child was in school. The visible changes in that community were a witness to villages around, and new work had already opened in three nearby villages.
Upon returning from the visit, the 52 church leaders gathered around maps and adopted 240 villages for the CHE ministry. The chatter around the room was, "We need a village like this within sight of every unbeliever in this country."
Dalrymple reflects, "There's been a dualism in evangelical circles prioritizing church planting over social action. We are seeing that evangelism and compassion belong together. We must stop prioritizing [certain] commands of Christ and find a way to be obedient to everything Jesus commanded."
Global CHE Network is currently working with the Joshua Project, another new GACX member. Joshua Project is helping Global CHE Network create a map that overlays the multidimensional poverty index on the unreached people's map. This strategy brings evangelism and compassion together among the multidimensionally poor.
If you want to collaborate with Global CHE Network, please visit https://chenetwork.org/.