The transformative church as a kingdom agent in a village setting.

This project assesses the impact of a theological breakthrough in the understanding of the kingdom of God on the church and the subsequent impact on the community, especially in a village setting. A series of workshops were organized for four local churches in a rural community over a period of eight weeks. The workshops were designed to have two components: teaching component and practical component. The teaching component of the project is aimed at providing the platform for discussions on the kingdom of God so that the plausibility structures of the church concerning their mandate and responsibilities as a community of faith and kingdom agents will be shaped in accordance with scripture. Through the practical component, the love of God was revealed practically in the community in accordance with Bible teachings. There was a “a revolution of serving others,” what Dino Rizzo referred to as “Servolution.” The church went out to the community to serve the people through acts of love and social services and to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. A pre-intervention direct observation, survey, and interviews were conducted to serve as the baseline to measure the church’s initial level of understanding of the kingdom of God before the start of the workshop. Similarly, the initial situation of the community before the intervention was measured to serve as a baseline to assess the impact of the church’s activities in the community. At the end of the project, post-intervention, the same research methods were used to measure the impact of the interventions both on the church and the community. The initial data was then compared to the final data and a positive change was observed in both cases. This led to the conclusion that when the church becomes an embodied witness in their communities by employing social services and acts of love to both tell and show the love of God to their communities, significant transformation occurs in the community; and in the process the church is transformed.