Our vision
The future we are working towards, and expect not to finish
A vision worth having should be bigger than any organisation's capacity to deliver it.
Communities where no one is left destitute, where relationships broken by poverty, conflict and injustice are being repaired, and where local churches are a visible source of hope to their own neighbours.
What it looks like
Four marks of a community we would call transformed
Nobody is left destitute
Households have enough margin to absorb a bad season without selling the assets they need to recover. When someone does fall into crisis, their neighbours notice and respond before an outside organisation does.
Relationships are being repaired
Disputes over land, water and inheritance are settled without violence. Groups that were set against one another share a market. Families that had stopped speaking are speaking.
The local church is visibly useful
Neighbours — including those of other faiths — identify the church as a place where practical help and honest dealing can be found. Its usefulness is not conditional on membership.
Decisions are made locally
Committees function, records are kept, budgets are managed, and the community negotiates with government and other agencies from a position of confidence rather than supplication.
A vision that is not about us
Read our vision statement again and notice who is missing from it. There is no clause about Ministry of Reconciliation’s size, reach, income or reputation.
That is deliberate, and it has a practical edge. If the vision were about our growth, then a community becoming self-sufficient would represent a loss. Because it is about communities, a community no longer needing us is the point.
Reconciliation is the distinguishing clause
A great many humanitarian organisations could sign up to the first part of our vision. Fewer would include the second, and it is the one we consider most important.
We keep encountering communities where the binding constraint is relational rather than material. Two families who will not share a borehole. An ethnic division that makes a shared market impossible. A household where violence has made planning for anything pointless.
You can spend a great deal of money in those places without changing them. Reconciliation work is slow, unphotographable and hard to fund — and in our experience it is where the most durable change happens.
Hope without passivity
As Christians we believe God is making all things new, and that the final repair of the world is not something we accomplish. That belief could easily become an excuse for doing very little, and in some hands it has been.
We read it the other way. If restoration is genuinely where things are heading, then work in that direction is not futile, and there is no reason for despair when progress is slow. We can afford to measure in decades, keep working after setbacks, and tell the truth about what has not improved.
What we expect to get wrong
Given how large this vision is, we will hold it imperfectly. We will over-claim in some places and under-deliver in others, and there will be communities where we simply are not the right organisation.
The safeguard is not better intentions. It is accountability to the people we serve, a board willing to say no, and public reporting that includes failure.
“They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendour. They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated.”
Be part of it
Give, pray or partner with us — and we will report honestly on what your support achieved.