It’s that time of the year when we come up with New Years resolutions and plans. I love the patch of time between Christmas and New Year—reflecting on the previous year and dreaming about the new one. I personally started 2013 with a three month sabbatical in New Zealand. Fantastic. The next months were spent at a somewhat frantic pace trying to get everything set up for our launch on October 1. This year I’m hoping to achieve a more measured pace throughout the year (Those that know me are laughing).

Reconciled World is the great, grand age of three months old. As we were birthed out of Food for the Hungry our programs have plenty of history and, for the most part, are running smoothly. However, as we move into 2014, we are still focusing on putting together our basic systems and tweaking them until they are running smoothly.

Beyond that we do have one new venture planned for 2014. As an organisation we are all about seeing the church reaching out into the community and beyond. One of our programs, Truth-Centered Transformation, concentrates on that. It’s been successful beyond our dreams at helping poor, rural churches love their neighbours and move out of poverty. The program even has its own website that shares what we have learned and the materials that we use. However, we are often asked, “Where’s the USA/ NZ/ UK… version? Why aren’t we (the church in the West) doing this? What materials do you have for us?” Our Director of Mission Initiatives, John, has been exploring this on the Local Initiatives blog. He has been blogging about those already impacting their communities, sharing about his own experiences and looking at how some of the lessons we learnt through the TCT program could be applied.

This year, we are hoping to take it to the next level. We want to create a space that really explores what it means for churches to reach out and love the poor both in their own community and beyond… even internationally. We want to explore basic questions like:

  • Who should we help and why?

  • What type of help can we offer?

  • When are we helping and when are we hurting?

  • What is the role of missions?

  • What are ways that we can have an impact in our own community?

  • How do we create healthy international partnerships?

  • How can we get more people interested in serving?

As we start working on the project, putting together ideas of what to include on the website and in future blog posts, we would love to hear from you. What would you want to learn about local and international missions? What questions do you have that you would like to see answered? Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below or email me at AnnaH@reconciledworld.org. Any help you can give us in making this project relevant to you would be greatly appreciated!