FrontierWorks recognizes the great need for resources and finances for the world's huge, rural mission fields, and adopt a long-term view towards meeting this need.

     In China for instance, the goal of micro-enterprise projects is to help ministers and laborers from rural areas attain financial sustenance and long-term self-sustainability. Rural churches are often too impoverished to support their own ministries. This is exacerbated by the rural peasant communities being marginalized by China s economic progress so far. The success of these micro-enterprises invariably translates into immeasurable blessings to our Chinese brethrens, and to the furtherance of the gospel in China.

Want to partner with us? Contact us now, let's see how God will work through us!

Have a bun, anyone?

It was cold.

Freezing cold.

     We huddled together in the room, Brother John and pastors from that particular region of China. We were there for hours on a stretch, teaching and sharing with those pastors. Brother John fed their spiritual hunger by showing them Jesus, the Bread of God who brings life to the world (John 6:33).

     And while he taught about Jesus, everyone in the room was also feeding on natural bread as well, specifically, the Chinese buns that were plentiful in that region. We went through stacks and stacks of them. Those buns were the people's primary source of carbo, the carbo we all needed to endure the constant, soul-numbing cold and continue teaching those pastors.

     Then the idea suddenly struck: since EVERYONE needed those buns, and it didn't cost much to set up a simple bun factory (making buns wasn't rocket science), why not set up our own bun factory? As long as that region remained cold and there was no cheaper form of carbo, there will always be a demand for those buns. A demand we could meet easily.

     And that was how that example of micro-enterprise started. That endeavor became profitable straight away. Not only did it supply our people there with natural bread, the profits helped to support pastors as they brought spiritual bread to their flock.

There's something satisfying in that, don't you agree?

Cow Story

     We needed to ramp up the level of financial support for the churches and full-time workers there. The lack of economic progress, coupled with intense government persecutions, have left many of these house churches and their pastors impoverished. We were in a rural part of China, where everyone was in farming, raising crops for sustenance. What could we do to help the community there? We needed something that was complimentary to their existing livelihood.

So we brought in cows.

     It costs about a year of rural area earnings to afford one cow. There were families who hosted the house churches and they did this at great personal risk of imprisonment and torture. We bought those families ten cows each for them to rear and sell for meat.

     As you can guess, it was a huge investment into those families. We not only bought cows for them, they also needed to have feed for those cows (and you know how much cows eat!). We provided them with some resources for the feed, while they cleverly supplemented with plentiful corn husks left over from their cash crops which make good fodder for the animals (and good for digestion too!).

     Those families we invested in re-invested their profits again and again for four years. By the end of that time we had recouped our initial investment and those families had enough profit to upgrade their farming capacities and generate even more farming income. More importantly, they could then sow into other house-church families to get them started.

     Somebody asked, "Aren't you making it even easier for the government to identify the Christian leaders in that community? They just need to look for the families that can suddenly afford cows!" Well, the government officials in that region knew who we were and they welcomed our work. Why? Because of the financial prosperity our investment brought to that community. Those families that prospered had a powerful spillover effect on that local economy. So, the local officials knew better than to turn away valuable foreign investment. The Chinese sense of pragmatism took over. Praise God that we won the day!

     Of course, the most amusing part of the whole incident was this: those farmers didn't know HOW to raise cows. Well, not that much at least. But thank God, a brother-in-Christ working in China for a huge diary MNC taught us everything we needed to know about how to feed the cows, what were the shots they needed, how to pile on the kilos on them, and all that. But when it came to actually getting the project off the ground, it boiled down to two city bumpkins, from urban Singapore, telling experienced farmers how to raise cows.

How can anyone not believe our God has a sense of humour? Moo.