Orphan Villages Model

Vision: To disciple a million orphans using Jesus model to become world changers.

We will group orphans into families of 8-10 headed by mothers who have been trained in parenting at our leadership schools. The families will be grouped into villages containing churches, schools & small businesses.

The Key to the success of these families is the training and support of the mothers that enables them to make long term commitments to the children and to create happy and safe home environments. Parents will attend regular training and support groups that encourage them to grow and create families that laugh and worship together, bringing children fully alive.

As children enter adolescence, we will initiate them and give them the keys to the kingdom. We will give them apprenticeships in the small businesses and schools. We will take them on short term missions and show them how to plant the kingdom in new places.

Although the orphan villages will be largely self sustaining, we will recruit sponsors who we will ask to develop long term relationships with villages, families and individual children. Sponsors will be known to the orphans as uncles and aunts. Sponsors must make a minimum commitment of ten years to a family. This will in most cases require a one year trial period.

Children growing up in these families will have a wonderful sense of belonging to a great extended family in which they have a role and a destiny. As they grow to maturity, they will have family members scattered around the world. At 21, children will go on a one year Matthew 10 experience modeled on the WR. Subsequently, many of them will form teams that will go out and plant the kingdom. Others will become mothers and fathers and still others will staff the training centers & schools that prepare them.

Sponsorship Modeled

Churches, individuals, and businesses will establish long term sponsorship relationships with villages and homes. People on them must go through regular training and receive regular communication in order to learn how to fulfill their long term roles as family members. This training will help them appreciate the issues confronting the children and will help them to embrace them as true family members. As communications technologies advance, the possibility of more frequent and more personal communications will help them bridge the gaps between them. The sponsors role in the children’s extended family will help them understand their own spiritual poverty and embrace their own brokenness. When they visit the village they have sponsored, they will do so within a relational context, not as sightseers and missions tourists. Their relationships will help them embrace their own humanity and participate in the children’s more expansive kingdom vision. The children will actually disciple their spiritually impoverished aunts and uncles, putting flesh on James 1:27, helping them from being polluted by the world as their light shines into darkness.

Starting an Orphan Village

Certain preconditions must be met before an orphan village can be started:

1.     Orphans (a critical mass)

2.     A trained, committed mother for every 8-10 children.

3.     A strong extended family connection.

If a critical mass of orphans exists without infrastructure, we may choose to meet their needs provisionally and incrementally until God provides the infrastructure to establish a village.

The most important precondition to establishing an orphan village is trained and committed mothers. If fathers can also be identified, that is a bonus. The worldwide lack of fathers is an unfortunate reality. Would be fathers must commit to long term relationships with their children and a process of continual learning. 

As we establish orphan villages, we will incrementally add infrastructure, moving from homes, to schools, to small businesses and extended family relationships. A G42 family member will help the village to pray through and realize it’s dream.

Funding Model

Each village will strive for self sufficiency. Children will have responsibilities just as they would in any family. As they get older and take apprenticeships, they can make a greater contribution to the family’s self sufficiency.

A typical orphan village may provide a third of its own food, while their local church provides a third and a third comes from the extended family of sponsors.

The current orphan sponsorship model must be overhauled to allow for greater depth of relationship and sponsor involvement in the life of the village and individual families. This will happen as sponsors are better educated and embrace a long term commitment to the village’s kingdom dream. Sponsors can have important roles in starting schools and small businesses and helping disciple mothers and orphans over time.

We will begin by asking for a one year commitment wherein we heavily invest in training sponsors and orienting them to the specific life challenges and kingdom dreams of their sponsored village. We will invest in identifying creative ways for them to breathe life into the village and develop relationships. This will include financial commitment, prayer for specific challenges and trips to help address specific needs.