This is the concluding part of the article  published last Friday.

Consider the following five true stories where God used the generosity and love of a few  extremely poor Christians to meet some urgent human needs and to open the hearts of their neighbours to Christ.

Members of a local church in a very poor community decided to look for older non-Christian widows in the community who lived alone and needed help. They believed that this was one way to respond to the Bible’s command to care for widows and others who cannot care for themselves. They offered to help five widows with their housework. The offer was received and the widows were amazed that people who were as poor as they were and who had no relationship to them were willing to help them. Each of these widows has since put her faith in Christ.

The second story is about a  pastor of a local church in a rural area who challenged his congregation with the following words: “You may not have much food, but you can share a small amount of sugar, rice, soap or something else with those who have less than you” In response to what they believed God was telling them to do, the members brought small amounts of food during the week and put them into a common basket at the church. Each week, the church gave the food basket to a different non-Christian family that was very poor. These families had an opportunity to see an expression of the love of Christ from people who were just as poor as they were.

The third story goes thus: A local church identified five families in the community whose home members were too sick to do housework. The church members helped them clean their homes, wash and iron their clothes and clean their yards. Most of these families have since become followers.

And the fourth story:  The church members of a poor, rural community were surrounded by people of another religion. They considered themselves to be an oppressed religious minority. However, the pastor encouraged the women of the church to investigate community needs. At the church service the next week, the women reported they had found twelve non-Christian women who each had only one dress. In the hot climate of the area, the women had to wash their dresses every day. If a woman had only one dress, she had to stay inside until the dress dried in the sun.

The pastor asked if there were any woman in the congregation who had three dresses who would be willing to donate a dress to one of the non-Christian women. Enough women volunteered to meet the reported need.

The non-Christian women were so impressed with this expression of concern that they invited the Christian women to pray for them. Some even asked the Christian women to pray for their unborn children. This experience significantly increased the confidence of this rural church to continue to reach out in demonstration of Christian love to their non-Christina neighbours.

The fifth story involves In a rural community of poor people, there were no wells and the local people where got their water from a polluted river. A visiting Christian with some experience in digging wells encouraged the church leadership to explore what they could do on their own to meet the need for water.

At first, the idea of successfully reaching water with a hand-dug well was not well received. The people thought that the water level was too deep. However, with the outside’s encouragement and promise to help, the leadership decided to try.

They rented some equipment that could be used to help dig wells by hand. They began to dig at the back of the church property. They struck water at 45 feet. There was a great celebration. Non-church members in the community, however, were not pleased.

They thought that the church members would hoard the water for themselves. On the contrary, the church invited the community to share the well with which God had blessed them. Soon, representative from the community began to ask the church leaders if they would help them dig wells in other parts of the community. The church said they would help.

In a little more than a year, 15 wells were dug by hand. Through this expression of concern for the community, the church gained so much goodwill that when the church members invited the community to come to hear a message of God’s love, the church was filled with non-Christian people from the community. Who will care for the needy in our society? Except we care, the people perish.

Akpogena is a Port Harcourt-based Christian devotional writer.

Lewis Akpogena