Money Follows Wisdom (and not vice versa)

Daran has started teaching the Money Matters class (God's Answer to Poverty) that Peter Kopp with African Leadership Partners originally began here in Swaziland. The class is set up help people identify and confront cultural and learned behavior towards money and wealth that is counter Biblical. The first day long class was at Christian Family Church in Tambankulu. He is teaching a six-week version of the class at the United Pentecostal Church of Mbabane. We had over thirty in attendance in Tambankulu and are averaging twenty at the UPC.
The first step in addressing poverty is to teach a Biblical perspective on the responsibilities, uses, and accumulation of wealth. But also to show that poverty is a multifaceted problem that has to be addressed as a connected system: material poverty, physical weakness, isolation, spiritual poverty, powerlessness, and vulnerability.
Maybe a key point of the first half of the class is that even our natural talents, abilities, and dreams are resources that God has given us to use and are a starting point for working out of poverty. It was great to see the proverbial light bulb go of in some of their heads that the cultural and learned response to managing resources (or not) was flawed and the Bible offers concrete principles for managing same. The class ends with a look at the family and finances and teaches about budgeting, planning, saving, investing and borrowing.
Daran has started researching a "Money Matters II" class that will begin where this one left off in teaching business and entrepreneurial skills, business ethics and morality (with the Bible as the moral compass), critical thinking, and problem solving.