It started back in 2002. There was a famine, a ‘hunger crisis’ as Cuthbert calls it, and poor communities throughout Malawi were struggling. Cuthbert – a member of the Living Waters Church - had just finished Bible college and his thoughts were tuned to how he could help alleviate some of the suffering and the hunger. He was just 22, but doing nothing was not an option.
“Tearfund was running training in Blantyre [a large town in southern Malawi]. I had never done relief or disaster mitigation and I learned a lot from that week.”
So Cuthbert and a few others started doing what they could. Which, it transpired, wasn’t that much:
“We were just a few people; no paid staff, no car. Everything had a hindrance: we couldn’t distribute food because we had no money. So we operated on a principle of using what we had. We thought – what is our strength as living waters church? We discovered our strength was that the Living Waters Church is found in every district.
“We thought if we could bring all the pastors together and train them to have compassion for the poor and those without food – and to go back home and teach people about food management – that we would see some success, although resources were short.”
What came next is a blend of compassion, tenacity and everyday miracles. Working through his church’s development project – Eagles – Cuthbert trained yet more pastors, worked closely with local communities and pursued his own vision to live his faith out among the poorest people of his country.
Basing his work on the principle of building relationships that last, Cuthbert visited churches, encouraging them to care for the poor:
“To convince people that this is really the church’s mandate you have to have facts and points that will move people’s hearts to go the extra mile. I really didn’t know how to do that. But through books and Bible studies from Tearfund I came up with my own materials which I used to convince pastors.
“Most of the time the pastors look after the spiritual man and that is what they are concerned about. But now many churches have realised it’s their responsibility – the church as the agent of God’s kingdom here on the earth? And many pastors have started helping the poor.”
Cuthbert’s decision to encourage groups of Christians to accept that tackling poverty is part of their essential mandate has produced some remarkable results. Of the many hundreds he has impacted, we here at Tearfund are just another bunch, left wondering how we too can live out our faith in such a dynamic, important way. This is our vision: to see 100,000 churches uniting so that 50 million people are released from spiritual and material poverty within the next decade.
And it all starts with prayer.