by Mark Kelly, posted Wednesday, August 19, 2009 (15 years ago)
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--When Hilldale Baptist Church started planning for Vacation Bible School this year, Tim Munoz wanted to find some way their students could reach out to children in need. And when VBS week seemed headed toward leaving the kids short of their goal, Munoz was worried. Then the Lord did something totally unexpected.
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"I had been researching how I can have children relating directly to children in a Vacation Bible School missions project," said Munoz, who has been children's minister at the Clarksville, Tenn., church for more than three years. "I wanted a project where our children could minister to other children. I wanted something that would directly affect children."
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Munoz and the VBS leadership team eventually decided on a project with Baptist Global Response that would improve children's lives in a desperately poor area of Colombia by helping parents start their own egg-production microbusinesses. Southern Baptist missionaries Stan and Debra Owens-Hughes designed the project to help a dozen pastors shift from time-consuming farming activities to livelihoods that would provide better nutrition and finances for their families -- and give the pastors more time for ministry activities.
The project called for building chicken coops and stocking them with laying hens, at a cost of about $517 per family. The pastors would be trained to care for the poultry, with some of the eggs produced used by the family and the rest sold in the community to provide income. The new business would allow the pastors to spend less time with their town's traditional ways of making a living: fishing and raising yucca.
Munoz and the VBS team thought the children would readily understand the need to help hungry children and the cost per family broke the project down into goals the kids could achieve. At $6,200, covering the cost of the entire project wasn't impossible either. Read More
