Obed* serves with Every Man a Warrior , a ministry of Trans World Radio. 

“They say that they will take this city, and then they do that. The [authorities] are not able to stop that,” he says. 

Last Saturday, a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince called Solino fell under the control of a gang coalition called Viv Ansamn. Obed listed Arcahaie, L’Estère and Leogane as other communities gangs have attacked this month or declared they will soon capture.

Many leaders with Every Man a Warrior live in Arcahaie, which was attacked earlier this month. When a coalition of two gangs (“5 Second” from Martissant, and “Jeff” from Canaan) attacked yet again, they fled to the mountainside to save their lives. Also earlier this month, one pastor connected with Every Man a Warrior was kidnapped. Obed said this week that, praise God, the pastor was released.

What can be done? In an international attempt to regain Haiti’s national security, 600 more troops from Kenya will soon join the nearly 400 that have been stationed in the country since May. But Obed says these forces have been even less effective than the police in curbing gang violence.

(Photo courtesy of Every Man a Warrior, Trans World Radio)

There’s another grim layer to the crisis. According to UNICEF, an estimated 30 to 50% of Haiti’s kids are involved with gangs. 

“They give them food, and they engage them, because most of them [have] no parent, [a] parent that died, that [was] shot due the gang violence,” says Obed. 

Children recruited by gangs are often molested, abused, trained to use guns, and forced into domestic service.  

“I believe that when [gangs] want to attack a city, they send those children. They send them without gun[s] to take control and to give information.”

Obed’s mission is to rebuild Haiti; this is where he knows God has called him to serve. He has a background in child protection and is caring for children in northern Haiti as the hands and feet of Christ.

“We have moved some of the families to the borders (of the Dominican Republic). Last week we have rent[ed] home[s] for some of them. That’s what we can do for now — we move some of them to [a] safe house, to [a] safe environment,” he says.

Children from Canaan, Port-au-Prince in the educational assistance program. (Photo courtesy of Every Man a Warrior, Trans World Radio)

Pray for Haiti’s kids, and join Obed in asking God to use these tragedies to strengthen the Haitian Church’s faith and glorify His name. 

“May God use this situation to show His power,” Obed says. “Frankly, we don’t see how we can get out of this. But if God do[es] that (saves Haiti), we believe that the glory of [God] will be known, will cover all the earth.”

Click to learn more about Every Man a Warrior. 

*Name withheld for security reasons

Header photo of children from Canaan, Port-au-Prince in the educational assistance program courtesy of Every Man a Warrior, Trans World Radio.

(Photo credit EFCA)

North America (EFCA/MNN) — [EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re sharing the following report from EFCA’s in-house blog as it relates to important trends in world missions.]

There is a quiet but very important debate taking place regarding the place of western missionaries in today’s expensive world. There are some who argue that the day of long-term missionaries from the West is over and that we should simply support indigenous missionaries across the globe at a much lesser cost. The implications of how we answer that question are significant.

Let me say up front that I lead ReachGlobal, an international missions organization of the EFCA. Let me also say that I believe that the vision for reaching the world does not lie with organizations but with the local church. The best missions organizations, in my view, are those who exist to serve the missions vision of the local church and provide structure, long-term strategic help and best practices.

Price tag perspective

It costs around $100,000 per mission family to be on the field in our and similar organizations. That sounds like a lot, but it is not that much different than the cost of pastoral staff for a local church, if you add in the hidden costs above salary such as health insurance, retirement, staff administrative help, and perhaps the most expensive cost of all: the expensive church facilities that staff work in. The difference between missionaries and local church staff is very small when you consider the hidden costs that churches must cover in order to staff their ministry.

Do your job

It is true that missionaries who are not productive do not belong on the field. It is equally true that this applies to church staff in the United States as well. The fact that some ministries don’t deal with unproductive staff in both arenas does not negate the need for staff. It makes the case for the right staff who are engaged in the right work.

Get clarity on roles

The question of value for that money is an important one. If missionaries are simply doing what local believers could do, one may have an argument for funding locals rather than Western missionaries. However, that misses a massive shift that is taking place within the missions world today where missionaries are increasingly not the hands-on doers but the mentors, equippers, and releasers of local, indigenous workers. In fact, in ReachGlobal, the central job of our staff is to develop, empower, and release. This is something that local believers are not as capable of doing: they need and ask for help in raising up equipped workers for the harvest and increasingly that is the role of personnel from the West.

Money can damage ministries

In addition, simply sending money rather than personnel raises another very important question: dependencies on Western money that fosters dependence rather than independence and control (through our dollars) rather than the development of equal ministry partners.

A book every church in the West should read is, When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor…and Yourself. Indiscriminate financial help is often a terrible gift with unintended consequences that the West does not understand. One of my colleagues at the Lausanne Conference in South Africa is a leader from Liberia. His observation is that money has done more to ruin ministry in countries like his than almost anything else.

Two errors of the same coin

In years past, the west often had a paternalistic attitude toward missions. We had the money, we had the education, and we were the experts. Too often we carried that attitude with us rather than developing, empowering, and releasing indigenous personnel. Now, some would compound that error with an equal error. Western missionaries are not needed, so we will just fund local ministries globally. Neither of these answers is biblical, and it is not an either/or dichotomy but a both/and. The missions mandate Christ left the church will only be met when all believers, those from the majority world and those from the minority world join hands to share the gospel with over five billion people who don’t know Christ.

The Church is a sending church

From the inception of the church, it has been a mission sending church. Paul and Barnabas were simply the first in the hundreds of thousands of missionaries who have gone from one culture to another with the good news of Jesus. My parental family was in that line of faithful missionaries. The day we stop sending people and simply send our dollars is the day that we have abandoned the call of the church to “go and make disciples of all nations;” and the inevitable result will be a quick decline even in giving for missions. What we tell our partners internationally applies to us: No church group is mature until they are intentionally reaching across ethnic, economic, political and culture lines to share the gospel.

The question of whether Western missionaries are needed is really the wrong question because the New Testament does not give us the option of sending missionaries. The real question is: what should long-term missionaries in today’s world be doing?

One thing we know they should be doing is raising up workers for the harvest in all parts of the world, doing formal and informal theological training, training church planters and pastors, and doing everything we can to see multiplication take place where the gospel is not well known. In many places, this means the hard work of evangelism and the making of disciples because there are none present. There are still vast tracts of our globe where the church is small, struggling or non-existent.

The mission will be accomplished

Ironically, just as some in the west believe that long-term workers are no longer needed, believers in other parts of the world are increasingly sending their own missionaries. Missions has become all people reaching all people, and many of our own teams are made up of personnel from different parts of the world. The question will be whether the Western church loses out on the blessing of being a player in the world wide missions efforts in the years to come.

Missions does not win when missionaries do not partner with indigenous believers. Missions does not win when western missionaries are left on the sidelines. Missions wins when there is a synergistic relationship between missionaries from wherever they come and local believers wherever they are.