Empower equips leaders through Africa, India and Haiti to combat the root cause and lethal effects of abuse, abandonment, and injustice, in order to heal families, restore communities, and transform culture. Marriage and family are under attack by modern forces everywhere in the world. At the same time, Christian leaders in developing countries struggle with outdated or harmful traditional practic
es. Empower International Ministries works with these leaders, jointly promoting God's love for us and its meaning for how we are to treat each other in marriage, family and community. In cultures that are relatively new to Christianity, or who have been taught faulty interpretation of the Bible, learning God's intent for relationships -- life together in agape love, mutual respect, and forgiveness--often comes as a life-giving surprise. We believe that Christ transforms all aspects of human relationships. We seek to emulate the early Christian church by encouraging, developing, promoting, raising, training and freeing the lives of individuals and families through biblical living and instruction. Strategy
Empower International Ministries works by establishing personal relationships with national pioneering Christians and church leaders who are willing to take risks for the sake of the gospel. Conferences and training events are organized jointly with them to plant a renewed vision of equal regard relationships within the body of Christ in the respective countries. The local leaders (not us) are the cultural change agents, and ones who incorporate this vision into their ministries. We support them in sustained training and resource development in culturally relevant ways. An important component in these relationships is EIM’s openness to what we and the developed world can learn from our fellow Christians in the developing countries, seeking to facilitate cross border relationships between our respective churches. We have encountered tremendous response and have more requests for our programs than we are able to accommodate. Need for this New Ministry
Much of the developing worlds exists in conditions of oppression and despair. These situations are aggravated by restrictions and burdens imposed on men and women because of their gender, or by attributes such as age, ethnicity, marital status and social class. At the same time, the forces that have led to the deterioration of marriage and family in wealthy, developed countries are also being felt in developing countries. EIM offers direction in the midst of massive change, encouraging leaders globally to reject both historic and contemporary secular pattern and choose instead the path of self-giving love, unity and mutual respect. Problems with relationships, gender oppression, and child rearing
Women and girls in developing countries suffer from a variety of abusive practices, including as female infanticide; polygamy; forced marriage of prepubescent girls or widows, the shunning and oppression of widows; isolation and veiling; genital mutilation; domestic violence; sexual assault; lack of access to education; and male usurping of household resources for personal consumption in alcohol, tobacco, and womanizing. They might be sold or kidnapped into marriage, expected to bear large numbers of children, forced to turn to prostitution in order to survive or pay for school fees, or suffer abandonment when their husbands lose interest in them sexually – all while receiving a cultural and too often, religious, message that as females they are not worthy of better treatment. Men also suffer from gender-typed expectations placed on them. Their abusive or self-serving behaviors towards women and children (alcoholism, domestic violence, sexual abuse, sexual infidelities) are often expressions of their own frustrations in dealing with high rates of poverty, joblessness, violent victimization, and pressures to conform to socially-prescribed norms of masculinity. Economic pressures in developing economies lead adults to value children as a source of labor or social status. Hence, parents routinely bear more than they can care for. Children suffer from lack of food, safe water, health services, and education, and may be neglected, sexually-abused, abandoned, or orphaned. Ethnic strife, distrust, and violence is commonplace, as families/lineage groups/tribes scramble for their own survival in the face of limited resources.
