Today's cover pic is from one of our demo plots that looks FANTASTIC!! As we celebrate what has been a very successful growing season to date, we are ever considering the upcoming harvest...
If the trainees have plots with ears like THIS, there will be a LOT of maize available for us to acquire at harvest time. The only remaining question is this: how much will we be able to acquire? That is where our friends come in. Last harvest TWELVE of us contributed more than $140,000 toward our largest harvest acquisition ever. That project allowed us to increase our presence from 73 church communities to 124. And it allowed us to increase our monthly impact from 2,200 families to over 3,300 families. That is EVERY month since harvest last spring.
We really do try not to be all about growth. Our objective has never been to be BIG. It has simply been to care for as many struggling brothers and sisters as we possibly can. And the bigger we get the more we can do. So maybe our objective has been to be BIG...
In the 2025 Global Hunger Index, Zambia came in with a score of 29.6. That score puts them in the "serious" category. They found 37.2% of their population to be undernourished. With an estimated population of around 22 million souls (our brothers and sisters), that indicates more than 8 million people there are struggling to find enough food to flourish in this life. Trying to break this down into numbers small enough I can work with, let me estimate that their average family size is around 6. That would mean there are over 1.3 million struggling families. And this month we will impact around 3,300.
Now please don't hear me whining or complaining here. We are as big as we are and I am so grateful for our friends and family that have come alongside us, together with several American church communities, and even some American corporations via a donation matching program. We are GRATEFUL!! And we are SO excited to serve these families monthly. We are so excited about the grower training that has been accomplished. And we will continue to work hard here to add ZERO overhead so that everything we raise goes right to our Zambian brothers and sisters.
That said, when I got out my calculator hoping that 3,300 would give me some percentage of the struggling families that we are impacting, the number on the calculator was simply too small to report. And that makes me a little bit sad.
We can do more. We want to do more. And we have SIX Zambians in place managing the operation in such a way that we KNOW the people we are trying to serve are actually being served.
Our team is currently vetting several church communities that have been on our wait list for as long as several months, and there will likely be more that line up before the harvest. But we can only add communities if we raise more funding than we did last year. The way our process has evolved, we have churches and individuals who give MONTHLY and keep the process going throughout the year. But this is one of two time each year we ask our friends to consider something significant. We won't get past $140,000 with $50 donations.
Here is how the numbers have played out in the past: after we purchase the harvest, we can impact ONE struggling family for ONE month for $5. That means $60 into this harvest fund feeds ONE family for TWELVE months. $600 into this harvest fund feeds 10 families for TWELVE months. $6,000 into this harvest fund feeds 100 families for TWELVE months.
Historically we have had a few wonderful donors that have given us $5,000 for the harvest offering and another $5,000 for inputs at the end of the year when the Zambian growers are planting. A $5,000 donation would impact 83 families monthly for a year. But if we are only going to average $5,000 per donor, we would need THIRTY donors to participate (as compared to TWELVE last year). What we really need to continue to grow the program are for some of our friends with LOTS of surplus to consider if you can do even more than $5,000. I know it's asking a lot.
I had the opportunity to drive down to Bethany, Missouri yesterday for a Missions Conference hosted by a high school classmate of mine named John who is a Missions Director down there. It was a very small event, but I had the chance to share our vision and our process with a handful of pastors from the area. I went through what I am now calling The Acts Road (feel free to ask me about that!) with a couple of them. In this conversation we discuss what was going on in Acts 2, Acts 4, Acts 6 and Acts 11, and then we consider WHY was the early church doing this. They were consistently MEETING NEEDS, first within their own community and then from one community to another when it became clear there was a problem in the remote area.
Then I shared with them how Shoulder 2 Shoulder got our name from 2 Corinthians 8, where Paul was writing to the church in Corinth about the RELIEF project he was driving throughout his missionary journeys.
Then I asked them what the most famous verse in the Bible might be. Guess what they suggested.... John 3:16! Surprised? I wasn't. That was the same verse the Zambian leadership ALWAYS suggested when I went through The Acts Road with them in August of 2024 when I led a group from America to be with them.
Then I asked if either of them knew what I John 3:16&17 said - fully expecting them to have no idea, because I have never one time had someone actually know what those verses say, and I was AMAZED!!! A pastor from a church near Bethany KNEW THE ANSWER!! He quoted it with a passion indicative of the fact that this verse was something he BELIEVED and LIVED! So much fun. This is the verse that answers the question asked by The Acts Road... Why did the early church spend so much effort meeting needs around them?
I John 3:16-17 - "We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us - and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?"
That is pretty heavy stuff right there. Stuff that both John and likely even Paul had heard directly from the mouth of Jesus. That's why the early church met the needs around them. It was the way Jesus defined LOVE.
Let me throw out something I have been considering for just the last few days and see what you think about it. Many of you would know how Jesus answered the lawyer who asked him which commandment is the greatest. His answer is recorded as follows:
Matthew 22:37-39 - He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'
Here is what I have been wrestling with: If we are to love God with ALL our heart and ALL our soul and ALL our mind, what does that leave for our neighbor? That is hard to make sense of!! Here is what I concluded: it can only make sense if loving our neighbor as ourselves IS EXACTLY HOW we LOVE God. Then it makes perfect sense.
I believe when Jesus left this earth He left behind a group of followers COMMITTED TO LOVING GOD BY LOVING NEIGHBOR AS SELF. That's why they met every need among them in Acts 2 and Acts 4. That's why they had food lines for the vulnerable among them in Acts 6. And that's why in Acts 11, when the church in Antioch learned that their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem were about the experience a famine, the FIRST thought was this: we need to help!! So, they gathered up some surplus as they individually determined they had, and they sent it to Jerusalem. it was carried by Paul and Barnabus. Paul's very FIRST notable act of service was carrying a relief offering from his home church in Antioch to Jerusalem. And he never stopped managing that relief offering. That's why he mentions it in his letter to the Galatians. That's why he mentions it in BOTH the surviving letters to the Corinthians. And that's why I now read his letter to the Philippians as simply a "Thank you" note to his very first supporting church.
This is why we want to help MORE of our struggling Zambian brothers and sisters. We believe it to be our demonstration of love to them - a group of people most of our donors have never even met, but already consider their "neighbors" - and therefore a proclamation of our love for God.
I realize this was a long one today. If you made it this far, I congratulate and thank you for your trust in my heart and in the heart of Shoulder 2 Shoulder. And I invite you to consider your part in the demonstration of love that is our harvest fundraiser. If you know someone you think may be interested in joining us, please share the vision with them and invite them in. Love you all.
