Luciana - Update 6: Empowerment

Journal prompt: Is empowerment easy? Why or why not?

I believe empowering people is very hard. Considering that the easy and common way of ministry is to just give money and resources to people. It’s a whole other thing to do ministry and empower people. When you’re doing human empowerment your focus is on the development of the people rather than the resources that they need. Now I am not trying to communicate that all aspects of ministry should be spiritual that isn’t what I’m trying to say, but instead empowering others would be to teach them how to steward their resources they have. Empowering a person to be able to live and be sustained on their own without the need of being consistently supported is hard. Empowering, that is biblical empowerment, takes someone who can teach and model God’s Word. To be someone who knows how to empower also takes hard work. A lot of time studying the Bible, and studying what Jesus did to empower people. Something that we have been implementing this summer is model, mentor, monitor, and move on. This had been the process of empowering our East African SLAM leaders. The first week of being in Uganda us interns had to facilitate and teach the leadership how to run a SLAM week. This was our time of modeling and mentoring. The week after it was time for us to step back and let them facilitate the SLAM time, our form of monitoring. Through this time and our steps of the four m’s, we empowered these leaders to be able to do a SLAM week on their own.