Teaching Will Prepare Amazon Leaders

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Above: a Chiquitano church elder
works along side a LATCOM Work
and Ministry Team to build a church
in a Lomerio village.

Teaching will prepare Amazon leaders

Sitting in a small mud hut one day I asked an Ayoré elder what was required of a chief when the Ayoré still lived as nomads in the jungles. His response?

A chief protected and provided for his people.

I asked him what that looked like... “protected and provided?” He responded by saying that the one who best understood the jungles and knew where to find food was one who provided for his people. He went on to describe the chief as one who could also fight in battle to protect his people. In fact, the chief would either have to win in battle or die in the fight. Flight was not an option.

As I dug deeper into the concepts of providing and protecting I realized how inadvertently the missionary had supplanted both roles. Civil war had ended, killing was no longer the way to prove one’s manhood, and farming coupled with modern medicine undid most of the forms of leadership in the tribe. The missionary became the de-facto chief establishing a level of protecting and providing that no Ayoré has been willing to undertake since the missionary left 30 years ago.

For some time now I’ve been mulling over the following questions, “What is missing in the way we trained Ayoré leaders in the past?” and “What training is needed to restore a native leadership to the Ayoré people?” That question led me to investigate the beliefs and values that continue to hold them in a survivalist mentality.

What I discovered was stunning. An Ayoré will expend incredible efforts to guarantee that he never go hungry. One of his greatest values is to have a secure daily supply of food, and yet his inability to plan for the future dictates that he must scramble and manipulate on a daily basis so that he never lacks this highest of values. This daily survival mentality will even prompt a father to send his 14-year-old daughter out on the streets of Concepcion night after night to prostitute herself for a plate of food!

No easy task

How do you communicate vision and goal setting to a tribal leader who rarely thinks beyond tomorrow? Yet, that same leader is called on to deal constantly with protecting and providing for the future of his own people. How can we prepare him to confront a fallen world and ungodly individuals and companies that would seek to exploit his people? How do we place all this material into the framework of a biblical world view in a way that is both practical and applicable?

I believe we have some of the answers to these perplexing problems. Much of the materials we’ve been teaching through our ministry to secular leaders and to strategic church leaders can be contextualised to meet the need of preparing powerful Christian tribal leaders.

With the help of a Christian anthropologist, a missiologist, and a few dynamic tribal leaders from Brazil, we are developing a program that could be used to train the leaders of more than 400 tribal groups within the Amazon basin. LATCOM’s reach is stretching internationally while still empowering local ministry.

Now here is where you come in. We have the materials and we have a curriculum team. We need you to ask that God would give us the wisdom to be able to communicate this material in an understandable way. And we need you to prayerfully consider to help us fund this endeavor. Thank you! by Tim Ramsey