Hope Project 4 Kids with Jeremy Walker and Gilbert Mulubwa

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For the

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Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snyder, and we have a special podcast for you. We are doing a video conference with men on two different continents.

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We have Jeremy Walker, who is in England, and Gilbert Moulibois, who is in Zambia.

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So because of the nature of the video, the audio and the video will be a little different than normal, but be patient with us.

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Good to have you with us, gentlemen. Thank you. Gilbert, can you tell us a little about Hope Project and also of your connection with this work?

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Hi, Pastor Jon. Thank you very much for this opportunity that you've given us to just talk about the

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Hope Project. And so the Hope Project is a gospel initiative. It's a ministry of multiple

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Reformed Baptist churches within and outside Zambia. So this ministry has been established with the vision to love, care for, and reach vulnerable children in our communities.

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And so we do this by providing these vulnerable children with four pillars of care, which are intellectual, physical, emotional, and more importantly, the spiritual care, so that these children can have some sort of the potential for them to live out their

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God -given lives. And so the four pillars of care that we provide, we have the intellectual development.

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The intellectual development is pretty much providing free education, quality

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Christian free education to these children. And so these children come to the schools, they learn for free, and this is something that we hope will be helpful to their lives.

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The second one is the emotional care. The emotional care is where we have biblical counselors who are trained, who reach out to the emotional needs of these children.

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And the third one is the physical care. Like I said, most of the children that we have are coming from poor, vulnerable backgrounds.

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Some of them are actually orphaned. And so we provide a meal every single day that these children come to our schools.

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But we also provide health care for these children so that we can just take care of them, take care of them properly.

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Let me just say that again. So the physical care pretty much is us reaching out to the physical needs of the children and realizing that these are children that are coming from vulnerable backgrounds.

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They are coming from communities that are generally poor. And so we just want to take care of these children.

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And therefore, we have the physical care where we provide a meal every school day, but also provide health services to the children.

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The other one is the most important one, which is the spiritual pillar.

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And so the spiritual pillar is where we have well -structured discipleship and evangelism.

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So it's pretty much reaching out to these children with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

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Jeremy, it's good to have you back again. And it was on a previous episode that we did that you mentioned this ministry and your connection with it.

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So tell us a little bit about the ministry and how you became connected with it. Well, it's been my privilege to visit

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Zambia on a number of occasions now. I've preached in different parts of the country. And just last year,

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I had the opportunity to go and preach at a Reformed Baptist family conference in the capital, in Lusaka.

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And I've been involved in various efforts and investments in the country, in addition to the preaching of the word of God, some teaching, some training, some more charitable endeavors.

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And so Gilbert came up to me between some of the sessions at this conference and said,

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I'd like to ask you some straightforward questions and I'd appreciate some straightforward answers.

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And he presented to me the Hope Project, which I think was largely his brainchild.

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As he's mentioned, there are a number of congregations both in Zambia and then one or two outside who are laboring together because of some of the needs of the children, particularly in some of the compounds and on the streets in Zambia.

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Now, Gilbert's mentioned those four key pillars. Primarily, it's the spiritual concern that we have.

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This is always a gospel endeavor. But alongside of that, you've got the intellectual development of the children, their education, training in sometimes simple but hopefully increasing capacity.

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You've got their physical needs, growth, provision of food, clothing, medicines, those kinds of things.

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And then you've got their emotional care, given some of the circumstances in which they live. And having had some opportunities to see some of those things close up and personal,

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I gave Gilbert what counsel I could. I'm not renowned for my subtlety, so I pointed out what

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I thought were the strengths and some of the weaknesses in the plan, especially in terms of engaging an audience, if you like, outside of Zambia.

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And on the back of that, and in cooperation with some of the other

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American or North American continent, European sponsors, especially

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Gavin Peacock, Gilbert asked me if I would remain as an advisor to the

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HOPE project so that they wouldn't be doing these things in isolation. So, Gilbert, if you could, could you describe the situation there in Zambia that you're facing and the seriousness of the needs in these four areas that were mentioned?

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And how is it that HOPE project, in different ways, is meeting those needs?

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So when you talk of the need for the project, I think it's important to know that Zambia is a very poor country.

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It's actually one of the poorest countries in the world. And so we have a lot of children, especially in the compounds, that are coming from impoverished homes.

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They are coming from homes where they are unable to provide for them the basic needs.

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And so it's things like clothing, it's things like an education, access to health, access to clean water, and just all these things that a child needs.

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And so as a project, we are burdened, really, really burdened to just want to love these children, to want to care for these children, to just show these children the love of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. And so we, as a ministry, who

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I must say are being inspired by the work of the Lord Jesus Christ while he was here on earth.

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If you read the Gospels, the Gospels in the

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New Testament, I think you can't miss just how much the Lord Jesus Christ cared and loved the vulnerable, loved the poor.

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So many times the Gospels record the Lord Jesus Christ attending to the needs of the sick.

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We see the Lord Jesus Christ feeding the hungry. We see the Lord Jesus Christ welcoming children, even when there was resistance, even from the disciples.

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And so it's important to just note that this burden that we have to want to love and care for the children, it's something that is being inspired by the

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Lord Jesus Christ. Actually, we see the Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew 25, I think it's verse 14,

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Matthew 25, talking about the list of these.

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And again, it starts to show the importance of the ministry of the

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Lord Jesus Christ to the vulnerable, to the poor. And so as a project, we hope that we can also meet the needs of these vulnerable children.

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And so we hope to do this by actually attending to their physical needs, meeting their physical needs.

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And like I earlier said, it's providing basic things like clothing, providing basic things like biblical counseling, and things like this that we hope will be able to give, to make these children feel loved.

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But more importantly, we are hoping to reach out to these children with a gospel.

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And that is why one of the reasons we, when we were deciding what sort of education to provide, we decided to provide a

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Christian education. As we are interacting with the children, our hope is that we'll be able to provide a

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Christian education, quality Christian education, one that just won't be educating the kids, but one that will actually be drawing these children towards God, one that will actually be spiritually grounding them.

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One that we, to a certain point, prepare them for life from a biblical point of view.

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One that we equip them to respond to cultural things that are happening in our societies, the cultural behavior, cultural way of thinking, that these students that we'll be producing will be able to respond to these things in a biblical way.

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And so that's one of the things that we hope to do. But there's another side when you're talking about the need, and that is the prosperity gospel movement in Zambia.

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The prosperity gospel movement has been growing, taking root in these compounds where we hope to reach.

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Gospel prosperity churches are actively targeting these people.

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And because of the fact that these are people that are coming from vulnerable communities, it's easy for them to be deceived by the promise of magic money, by the promise of miracles, by the promise of this

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God who is going to end your poverty. And not only are there churches that are targeting the vulnerable people, there's also

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Christian organizations that I must add are also taking root in these compounds, in these communities, and most of them are actually preaching false teachings.

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But also, there's a lot of prosperity gospel -like tendencies that these organizations come with.

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As an example, you hear so many stories on the ground of how these

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Christian organizations have about 20 ,000 children. And so in practice, these are 20 ,000 children that are being exposed to these kind of teachings every single day.

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And so as the Care for Kids Hope Project, our prayer and our hope is that we can be the sort and light in these communities that will be able to partner with the churches so that we can enhance the work of missions in these communities.

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As an example, the children that we are reaching out to, we are reaching out to their parents as well, reaching out to the community and connecting these children to the churches.

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And so we hope that we'll be able to meet to a certain point this need. And our prayer is that God will be able to grant fruits.

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So Jeremy, can you tell us a little about the child sponsorship program that has been started with Project Hope?

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Yes. So this Hope Project, when it began, we were thinking, first of all, we need some support for the general administration of the whole scheme.

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But then also, we wanted to give people an opportunity individually to sponsor children.

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Now, all of this can be done. You can reach out to Gilbert at the website. Now, it's a little bit more specific than it was before.

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And that's at the advice of the Zambian authorities who said, make sure that this doesn't just get lost in a sea of other like -named projects.

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So it's now Care for Kids Hope Project. And the four is the number four, not a written four.

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So it's careforkidshopeproject .com. And there are no dots, dashes, hyphens, slashes, anything else.

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careforkidshopeproject .com. And using that, churches and individuals could do a couple of different things.

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First of all, there's the general investment. Gifts are always helpful in terms of providing for the staff, the general setup of the whole organization.

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That's always valuable. And that's perhaps something that either individuals or churches could say, yes, that's something we would like to do.

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And then there's something that's much more personal, and that's the child sponsorship.

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And that's really probably more aimed at individuals. The idea there is that working with, liaising with the

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Hope Project administrators and workers, that individuals or families or maybe a couple of friends together, maybe even the kind of thing that maybe a

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Sunday school class could do together, they can sponsor an individual child.

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Now, Gilbert's set out some of those needs. Again, I think you'll know,

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John, from some of your experience, certainly I've appreciated this, to go into environments so different from ours on every level, really resets our whole sense of privilege.

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And as Gilbert's communicated, the levels of poverty that some of these children are living in, relationally, emotionally, intellectually and academically, financially, as well as spiritually, this is holistic ministry, that they need almost everything that we take for granted.

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Now, what an individual sponsor can do, using the wisdom of the men and women who are on the ground there, is sponsor an individual child so that some of those most basic needs can be met.

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And we're talking things like school uniforms. In Zambia, most of those schools, the kids are going to go in a school uniform and they look super tidy, but it's very different from the stuff that they're going to wear when they're not in school uniform.

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Simple things like shoes, the food that they need to provide the energy even to study, let alone to do anything else.

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School books, basic medical supplies, basic hygiene, toothbrushes, toothpaste, the educational curriculum.

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The HOPE Project is going to be working particularly with the Christian schools, often associated with churches, to make sure that the education is not just academically rigorous, but genuinely

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Christian and spiritually lively as well. It will help bring down that ratio of teachers to students from sort of one teacher to maybe 60, 70 students, hopefully towards a sort of a 1 to 30 ratio, which is much more manageable.

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It will equip the HOPE Project staff to do individual mentoring.

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Really what you're doing is you're providing, not just throwing money at a problem, because that's typically not a great idea.

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And this is one of the advantages of working with friends like the HOPE Project. But you are providing financially for people who know what the situation is and what is really required, to make provision for an individual child across these four particular pillars especially, so that that child is supplied with what is needful in a wise way in order, under God, to equip them to know the

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Lord and to serve the Lord well provided for in the basics of life.

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Yeah, I think that what you just mentioned, Jeremy, it really is something that we, especially as pastors in the

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West, we understand sometimes from bitter experience that Western Christians just sending money to ministries that are concerned about things that Christians ought to be concerned about, that oftentimes enduring good is not accomplished.

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Sometimes even there's damage done. So it is very encouraging to find a ministry that has a theological basis that's biblical, and that's the beginning point.

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And it has then the practical benefit of men within that culture guiding that ministry in a way that the

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Western pastor could never do. Right. So we're grateful. I feel that many churches are grateful to find legitimate ministries that can be trusted theologically and practically to wisely use resources for the enduring good, for the spread of the kingdom and real acts of mercy to the individuals.

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What do you see as some of the advantages of working with this type of relationship?

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I think there are a number of particular advantages, and those are on two levels.

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If someone were to visit a country like Zambia, and I know that the folks at Hope Project would be happy for a sponsor of a child to go and visit, for example, but that the challenge will often be that you'll end up with people who simply hold out their hands and you just become a source of money.

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You're a Western European, you're an American, maybe an Australian, but you're automatically wealthy and the begging bowl goes out.

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And it's very difficult, especially in the light of that different sense of what is wealth and what is poverty.

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Your heart is breaking and if you had a million pounds you'd be giving out a hundred here and a hundred there, but it wouldn't necessarily be going to a good place.

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Now in some senses that's just as difficult if you're in Western Europe or America or Canada or Australia or wherever else it may be, a relatively wealthier part of the world, that you might get a letter,

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I think most churches get correspondence. It drops into the box saying we've got these needs, we're caring for these orphans, we're looking after widows, we need more

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Bibles. And how do I have any idea about the credibility of this? So one of the first discussions that I had with Gilbert was which churches are on board with this?

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And Gilbert said, well I'm a member of this congregation and these are the churches that are overseeing these matters.

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Okay, I know these men, I know these congregations, I know their theological convictions, there's some stability here, there's some credibility here.

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We've made it our practice whenever we can as a congregation, we tend not to just parachute money or other resources into a situation.

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When you've got a trusted church with trusted men and women who've got their feet on the ground, who understand the situation, who know the difference between what is an appropriate gift that will be wisely used and an extravagant bounty that will just be wasted or indulged, what you've got is you can ask people, you can trust people, you can put those resources in the hands of people who know how to use them well for the glory of God in that environment.

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And especially when you're talking about these relative degrees of wealth and poverty, a little from us in the hands of someone like Gilbert and his co -laborers goes a very long way in an environment like a

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Zambian compound or one of the other street children and their needs.

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So this gives you a measure of confidence, it provides credibility, you know that under normal circumstances this isn't going to be wasted investment, that our brothers and sisters there, like us in our own environments, they might make mistakes, but they're working from the right foundation and you can trust them to sort these things out.

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And so it's sometimes called the white saviour complex isn't it? You know it just takes out that whole issue of guilt, it takes out the question of abuse.

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If you've got trusted people in country, especially if there's a relationship between churches and the people in those churches, then a lot of the risk and a lot of the danger is taken out of that environment and you're able to say right, we've put wisely proportioned resources in the hands of people that we have every confidence are going to use this righteously and wisely.

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And that just helps you to know that the kingdom investments that you're making with a view to the blessing of souls as well as bodies are being properly employed.

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And this is a stewardship, this is not my money, this is God's money.

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Gilbert and his co -workers, they want to see God being glorified in the lives of these children as a whole and this kind of relationship and this kind of credibility

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I think just takes out a whole area of risk that is a wise way for churches and Christians to proceed.

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Yes Pastor, just adding on to what Pastor Jeremy Walker was talking about, he was talking about how you can give to the project, he spoke about the child sponsorship program that we have.

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There's another way that individuals and churches can be involved with the whole project and so I just want to highlight maybe two or three ways that you can be involved.

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The first one is as an individual or a church, you can actually be a prayer partner of the project.

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You can be praying for us, we value prayer very much. This is a gospel initiative as it's been mentioned so many times and so it's important that the right fuel is actually there and so please be praying for us and as you do so, we want to know that you're actually praying for us.

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And so on the website, on the Get Involved page, there's a section where you'll find a form that you can fill in where you just communicate with us that you're actually praying for us and on that same section, you can even put in some of the prayer requests that you have.

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So as individuals, as churches, that's something that you can do and we greatly appreciate the fact that there's someone out there, there's a church out there that is actually praying for us.

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Yeah, the second one is that as a church or as an individual, you can also be involved with the work by actually coming here, here in Zambia and work alongside us.

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You can do this in form of a missions trip, you can do this even as an individual, it can be a family vacation.

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You can come through and just let us know, we'll be glad but also very willing to help you just to organize logistics and so please just reach out and indicate if that's something that you'd want to do.

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Thirdly, you can be involved with a project by actually talking to other individuals about it.

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Right now, we are looking for individuals as well as churches to sponsor the children and so one of the things that you can do is to just talk to your family members about it, even just a sponsor or five that you can manage to talk to as in talk to individuals and they come on board and take up a child to sponsor or any form of donation, that's actually something that would be very much appreciated.

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And the last one is that you can actually make a donation of small things.

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So let me actually just give a very practical example. Most of the children that we have in our care are children, like I said, who are coming from vulnerable homes, vulnerable communities and so things like socks, textbooks, exercise books, bibles, pens, whatever it is, just a small, small little things.

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These are things that they are in need of and so an example as a church, you can actually encourage the children or the young people in your church or the ministry to actually make a donation in form of socks or maybe a ball or board games and that's actually something that will go a long way, even as we bless the children that are in our care.

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So please, it may not be in a financial sense, but there are so many ways that you can actually be helpful to us.

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So many ways that you can actually be involved with the work. Thank you. Well, thank you, guys.

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If our listeners would like to learn more, you can go again to careforkidshopeproject .com

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and it's the number four, not the word for careforkidshopeproject .com.

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We'll have that in our show notes and also there is a video that the ministry has put together and you can find a link to that in our notes.

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Guys, good to see you again, Jeremy, and good to talk with you again, Gilbert.

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We hope that the Lord will continue to use the work there with the children.