Taking the first steps

THE Infanta experience has taught Ernesto Mondoñedo an important lesson in community development.

The first step he took there was to empower the people in the community and to develop real leadership. From there the development should catch on in neighboring towns and communities towards a development on national and even global level. That is the Christian vision. As Christians, we must give witness to the Good News and become ourselves the Good News.

“The journey of one mile begins with the first step. This is so if the goal and the direction to reach the goal is set and acceptable to all.

This is not the case with the task on hand. Many steps have already been taken but the global situation has not come any closer to becoming equitably just and peaceful. Meanwhile time is fast running out of the human race.

All people in their level and sector of family, neighborhood, association, town, nation and family of nations have to put their acts together or there is no way out of the maelstrom of global self-annihilation.

The immediate task is to produce and project a composite picture, a vision of a total program calculated to interest and commit all people in the shortest possible time to the realization of global peace and plenty.

Enough details are available to take the first tentative steps toward national and international recovery.

The Infanta project, for example, has identified a whole town as the possible entry-point for national recovery through a Christian system of communication. It inspired the development of a system of dissemination so that God’s vision for humanity may reach and commit a whole nation and beyond in a reasonably short time.

Elsewhere, Christianity is awakening to its pearl of great price, the Good News, with full power to commit at least a third of the world’s population to a divine movement stirring within humanity. Let us now picture our first steps toward world empowerment by the Good News.

Outside of God the most important participant to commit right from the start are national Christian communities that predominate in the nation.

They have to appreciate and accept the vision as realizable and worth losing their individual and corporate life for.

These articles might hopefully do the job of getting the heads of church groups and their influential lay people to examine possibilities.
I was the lone external facilitator that planted the seed of a movement toward national recovery through the self-development of whole countryside towns. A team would have done much better if it were the reality of a Christian community whose members were properly formed by God so that their individual and collective actions constitute the corporate action of an Ecclesial community, church, or Christ’s risen and divinely empowered Body.

Another Infanta type success by a town, or better, a cluster of towns with the gift of Christ’s wisdom and goodness could not fail to catch the imagination of the top people of a nearby city. A few of them could commit to becoming facilitators for nearby towns or for the top people of nearby cities. Soon the movement could take on national proportions.

Lateral growth of the movement is the responsibility of the people in it.

Its sustained growth is properly God’s work. The program for lateral growth may be structured but not growth in depth.

The movement is openly identified as Christian but may not be identified with a specific sector, religious or otherwise. It is the community’s program with active Christian participation. It does not teach religion but helps those involved in it to witness to and become the Good News.”

The picture sketched above is skimpy of details. It does not presume to represent what ought to be; not even what could be. It simply dresses the author’s vision with threads of his experience in community development and Christian Faith. The author is however still learning to have no expectations other than what, where, and when God wills. He has begun to know better than to ask what he wants and not what God has decreed from all eternity.”

The late Secretary Jesse Robredo of the DILG has become a living example of what Christian Faith is all about. He had that Christian vision of development.

As Mayor of Naga City and later as Secretary of DILG, he resolutely has taken these first steps. Through his sincerity and humility, he was able to win the sympathy of his people, especially the poor and the downtrodden.

Through his passion, he was able to inspire his people to help reorganize the whole institution of the local government. It is up to us to continue the process in our local communities.

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