Imagine attending a seminar at your church where your pastor is teaching the basic elements of farming. It might not be the type of seminar you’d see in Australia, but in South Sudan—where food is scarce and expensive—farming principles are what will build a more stable community. And what builds community is where the pastors should be, according to Paul Ravestyen at Live Connection.

Pastor training in the fields.

Live Connection is a New South Wales-based organisation partnering with pastors in South Africa, Zambia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Uganda, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Kenya and South Sudan and providing them with a monthly contribution from Australian sponsors so they can better serve their local community. It works similarly to many traditional child sponsorship programs. But instead of sponsoring a child, you’re sponsoring a pastor.

Paul says there are hundreds of pastors trained for ministry on the African continent: “We’re not living in the dark ages where these guys don’t know the Word and aren’t passionate about it. We’re past that point. We’ve entered into a new phase of mission work.”

According to Paul, for the price of sending one western missionary to live in Africa, Live Connection can partner with 140 Sudanese pastors who already understand the language and the culture, and are living in community with their congregation.

“But it’s not good enough for us to just support pastors in countries like South Sudan, in subsistence rural areas: we need to equip them with skills that they can pass on too.”

“In Australia, we’ve got problems like divorce, or how to raise kids, so the church creates programs that value-add to communities on those issues: marriage enrichment courses, mentoring programs etc,” says Paul.

The beginnings of the agricultural training centre being built by Live Connection in Bor, South Sudan.

In South Sudan, the programs a church runs should also aim to meet the needs of its community, he says. The greatest need in South Sudan at the moment is food. How can pastors meet that need? “By becoming better farmers”.

“We’re teaching pastors to teach their people foundational principles of farming. Pastors will go and they’ll have seminars for the community on how to grow great crops.”

According to the United Nations, only about four per cent of arable land in South Sudan is cultivated. Paul, who has been working in mission in Africa for the last 13 years, says basic food and water supplies are expensive in the country because South Sudan doesn’t produce anything for themselves.

“Everything in Sudan comes from Uganda or Kenya. There’s nothing produced in the country itself. So you pay three times more than what you’d pay in Kenya or Uganda, which is seen as a kind promised land compared to places like Bor in South Sudan,” says Paul.

“They need to rebuild the country – it’s in a state of disrepair.”

The United Nations World Food Programme suggests South Sudan has a “huge agricultural potential that remains untapped…approximately 90 per cent of South Sudanese households depend on crop farming, animal husbandry, fishing or forestry for their livelihoods, but productivity across all these sectors is minimal.”

Almost 30 per cent (2.4 million) of people living in South Sudan are food insecure and require assistance. Those statistics, says Paul, is where his plan for Live Connection could make a difference.

In April this year, Live Connections sent a team of volunteers to South Sudan to help build an agricultural training centre in Bor, on the Nile River in South Sudan. The Governor of Jonglei State gave the organisation up to 70 acres of land on which to cultivate the land and build the Centre, which will train rural pastors across South Sudan to model successful farming to their communities.

“The teaching is very rooted in Scripture,” says Paul, of the program based on a successful Zimbabwe model called Foundations for Farming, teaching faithful and productive use of land on the Biblical principles of creation and stewardship.

Learning the principles of farming.

“What we’re actually doing is introducing people to God their creator and discipling people into relationship with Jesus Christ.” And they get practical farming skills while they’re at it.

Churches in South Sudan are “incredibly helpful” says Paul, because they “value-add to the people.” Pastors are building community in a place devastated by 30 years of war—essentially starting from scratch. Those who roll up their sleeves and live life “incarnationally” with their congregations are not only being the mouthpiece of God, says Paul, but his “hands and feet too”.

“I believe that if you support the leader of a church, that leader will do what they can to feed the children, the orphans, the widows.”

And in South Sudan right now, says Paul, a pastor living in a subsistence rural area can best do that by teaching his flock how to be better farmers.

For more information on how to sponsor a pastor with Live Connection, click here.