Jim Flood (third from right) and Mark Tabb (far right) pray with church leaders in Guinea. Brandywine Community Church partners with church leaders in Guinea to respond to pressing problems. There are 68 countries in the world that have PEACE coaches; 48 of those countries are in Africa.
When a team from Greenfield left Guinea that March, they planned to return in a few months. Then they’d present the next installment of leadership training to enhance congregations’ ministry in this nation in west Africa.
But it was early March 2020. As the team from Brandywine Community church returned to Indiana, airports closed behind them, and travel went on COVID-induced pause. Also, a coup in September 2020 ushered in a new government for Guinea.
None of them would return to Guinea until 2023. But those who went back recently discovered the plan had progressed beyond what they might have expected — and unfolded in the ways they had hoped.
FACING THE GIANTS
About 18 years ago, Saddleback Church in California formed a partnership with key leaders in Rwanda, more than 10 years after that African nation was gripped by genocide. In 1994, hundreds of thousands of people were killed among ethnic tensions in a period of about 100 days. Saddleback, founded by “The Purpose-Driven Life” author Rick Warren, began to encourage Rwanda’s home-grown leaders.
They came together around what’s known as the PEACE Plan. They talked about five “giants” considered most pressing: spiritual emptiness, lack of servant leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, and illiteracy and lack of education.
PEACE is an acronym listing antidotes for those five giants: Planting churches, Equipping servant leaders, Assisting the poor and helping them be self-sustaining, Caring for the sick, and Educating the next generation.
After positive changes in Rwanda, other countries in Africa showed interest in PEACE. Saddleback leaders reached out to other churches, asking Brandywine to partner with Guinea.
A November 2019 visit was fruitful. Brandywine’s senior pastor, Mark Wright, was invited to speak to a gathering of thousands of church leaders that just happened to be convened during the group’s visit. The opportunity to address the gathering was received by the team as providential timing. People’s positive response to Wright’s urging for the country’s churches to work together was seen as an encouraging sign of things to come. Yet after a training visit in early March 2020, it would be a long time before the next visit.
ESTABLISHING CONNECTION
As COVID-19 spread across the globe and prompted quarantines and travel restrictions, team members kept in touch with the cohort in Guinea. They set times for Zoom meetings and sent flash drives with materials covering the next topics in the training.
But some leaders, busy overseeing scores of churches, struggled to fit in monthly virtual meetings instead of the quarterly in-person meetings originally planned. Also, there were glitches in sharing material digitally. French subtitles on a training video passed too quickly for viewers to read and digest, for example.
There were also external factors. Flooding delayed one training module by about six weeks. The meetings became more erratic.
‘COVID ALLOWED US TO SHIFT’
While repackaging the training in a virtual format was cumbersome to groups begun in person, working through those issues — such as dubbing languages over a video instead of using subtitles — is bringing added benefit, team members say. It opens up training to countries where it would be more risky to send a team.
Brandywine began training church leaders in the Democratic Republic of Congo. With that training virtual from the start, those who joined were already comfortable with the format.
“We were more successful with DRC via Zoom,” said Mark Tabb, Brandywine’s Global PEACE pastor. “That’s how everyone went into it.”
“It’s an amazing thing how COVID allowed us to shift,” said Jim Flood, PEACE Plan pastor at the church. “They really have to rely on each other.”
Meanwhile, as COVID restrictions faded, Brandywine team members planned to return to Guinea. Plans included a three-day conference to revive the training and rebuilding the leadership team, populating it with people who would commit to monthly Zoom meetings to cover future modules.
‘WE COULD SEE A DIFFERENCE’
Upon arriving in Guinea, Flood and Tabb saw just how much had happened since 2020.
“We didn’t really know what had become of the training we had done…” Tabb said. “When we got there we saw the church leaders we had worked with had taken this training and run with it.”
Churches had started medical clinics and schools. They were training people in how to start businesses.
“Not only were there PEACE works happening, but the vision of PEACE — that has gripped the churches there …,” Tabb said. “We could see a difference in Guinea … (even in) just the trash in the city; there was a lot less of it.”
They met with government officials the first day. On the second, they met with the leadership team put into place after the original trip. They were excited to learn all this team had carried out.
A leadership conference Jan. 16-18 drew 125-150 people, including some pastors who made the 18-hour journey from the country’s second-largest city, some 600 miles away. Tabb and Flood went through stages of the PEACE plan, and Guinean church leaders shared stories of what they’d implemented so far, offering a valuable point of reference to their fellow churches.
“I think it was very helpful,” Tabb said, “to hear how it works right there, in their culture, in their country.”
‘DOING WHAT JESUS DID’
These days, Flood has been meeting virtually with pastors in Mali, as well as a pastor in Illinois anticipating a relaunch of his church. Brandywine’s members are also encouraged to consider what PEACE-aligned works they might also do locally, where assisting the poor might look like providing childcare for a single mother going back to school.
A phrase from the PEACE training about “ordinary people, empowered by God, making a difference together, wherever they are,” stood out to Flood, he said, and shaped his efforts after 2020 to retool the training abroad and Brandywine’s own discipleship classes.
“We’re training church leaders to equip, empower and unleash their membership,” Tabb said. “It’s the power of individual Christ followers doing what Jesus did. That’s all it is.
“Add that up, and it’s incredible the power that is there.”
