Friday, September 2, 2011

Working together as Christians

   Hello again from the farm.  After my last post I received some questions from Nick.  Nick is a  reader from San Francisco and sometimes the questions of an outsider makes our mission clear to ourselves as well. 
   First question; How important is it for organizations, aiming to combat food insecurity, to strengthen their community ties in order to end world hunger?
   Some growing projects are a single person donating production to support FRB.  Our growing project has worked on growing the ties between several farmers in the region as well as their churches and other churches from larger cities.  This effort in "Working together as Christians" has enabled us to reach higher goals than any individual would be able to achieve.  By working as a larger community composed of farmers, planners, churches, and FRB each ones strengths lends to a successful project.
  Second question; Sharing agricultural knowledge to developing countries is a very noble task, how do you plan to reach this large population of farmers in need?
  That is where the FRB organization helps me.  As a farmer in the U.S. I cannot know where the resources are needed.  FRB staff works with all Christian organizations and their missions overseas locating farmers and villages in need of help to sustain themselves, assess the problems, and work with them finding solutions.  Both FRB and the church denomination involved are our hands overseas doing Christ's work.  By working together as Christians across all christian faiths we are able to reach many more in need than acting alone.
  Third question; In this economic climate, it must be difficult to convince new farmers to participate with your mission.  How do you assure them they're contribution is more valuable than they can predict?
  We need to continue to reach out and expand our base, but farmers by nature want to feed the world and know that we are more fortunate than many.  The Assurance comes when we gather together and witness what this means to us and get reports back from overseas projects and their successes.  Each year we celebrate together as farm partners, urban partners, and churches in a Harvest Celebration last year there were about 500 people attending.
  Thank You Nick for your interest and I hope the message of many different people working together each adding their own strengths is what makes a great project successful can also help others.

                                                       Serving together Dean Lundeen   

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