Collide Magazine

Blogging Compassion

Shaun Groves - Originally posted Monday, July 21, 2008

I bought a new pair of shoes not long ago. I needed something I could exercise in, something that wasn’t too heavy, neon-colored, expensive, or worn by rappers. I noticed the perfect pair on a friend of mine. He swore by them. Now, I do too. No celebrity spokesman, magazine spread, or TV commercial needed—just a friend’s word.

My friend with the shoes works for Compassion International. He and I were talking one day about the growing popularity and power of blogging. According to blog tracker Technorati, there are now more than 70 million blogs in existence and 120,000 new blogs are birthed every day. The best part is that even the most popular bloggers interact with their fans daily—there’s a tendency among bloggers to treat readers like friends.

What if, we wondered, a blogger could walk through an impoverished neighborhood, talk to parents and children living there, and hear and see for themselves the difference Compassion’s ministry makes in their lives?

AN EXPERIMENT
My friend with the shoes continued our conversation with his boss, who took it to his boss. It was only a matter of weeks before the powers that be decided it was time for an experiment, and they wanted my friend and I to help put it together.

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We formed a small team and began searching for Christian bloggers who had a large and loyal readership, a conversational writing style, and a willingness to live in Africa with complete strangers and mosquitoes and lions for one week. We were heading to Uganda.

A TEAM
Months later, the team flew from all over America to meet up in a Chicago airport before boarding a plane bound for Nairobi and then on to Entebbe. We shook hands, hugged necks, and shared sleeping pills before boarding our plane bound for Uganda: a tattooed worship leader, a production assistant at a mega-church, two stay-at-home moms, a journalist, a pastor from West Texas, a retired creative arts minister, a former White House advisor, and me.

It was night when we landed in Entebbe and began the bumpy drive to Kempala, crammed in a van with suitcases wedged in around us. For most of the bloggers this was their first trip outside of America, their first dance with jetlag, and sharing the experience together poured fuel on the friendships that had already begun to form.

THE AGREEMENT
The next morning two of our team members, Anne and Shannon, and I walked to a sponsored child’s home—dry, red clay beneath our shoes and black faces all around us on the road. A small girl, maybe four years old, sat on the side—no trace of her mother, no pants, no underwear. All she had was an ill-fitting shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a newspaper for a blanket.

I admit I was nervous at this point, wondering if this trip was such a good idea and if a new pair of shoes was the best foundation for a costly experiment such as ours. Compassion paid for the trip in hopes the investment would yield sponsorships for children in need or, at the very least, useful data about the efficacy of communicating its ministry online. I wondered what our bloggers were thinking and feeling, what they would write, and how readers would respond.

I watched Anne’s face for any sign of encouragement or reason for concern. I wanted to speak, to give her a pitch about Compassion’s ministry of hope in this neighborhood, but that wasn’t the agreement. The agreement was we’d give bloggers space to experience Uganda and Compassion. We assured them we would listen or speak when they decided they needed us. Anne and Shannon didn’t need me, so I kept quiet and walked.

BRENDA’S HOUSE
At the end of a small alley with mud packed walls, a plastic yellow jug sat full of potable water. A set of toothbrushes stuck out of holes in the earthen wall beside the doorway and just beyond it, sitting on her bed in darkness, was Brenda. This was her home.

Anne and Shannon shook Brenda and her mother’s hand and were offered a seat on a bed. I watched Shannon, a master stay-at-home mother, scanning the house of her Ugandan peer. Thirty-six square feet. Two beds. One mother. Six children—one of them an eleven year-old girl with a dream.

“What is your dream?” Shannon asked. “I want to be a doctor,” Brenda beamed. For a moment we savored the thought with grinning silence.

On the walk back to our van, Anne and Shannon chattered back and forth processing what they’d just seen and heard: A child fed in a place of hunger, educated in the midst of ignorance, healed in a land of disease, dreaming with despair all around, the gospel story told and made flesh, and all of this for just $32 a month. It was only the first day and already Anne and Shannon understood the immense need of children in the developing world and the importance of sponsors to support Compassion’s ministry to them.

TELLING THE STORY
At the end of that first day the bloggers were encouraged to simply tell their friends what they’d experienced. We told them to be themselves, not marketers or salesmen. We told them to tell their story as they’d told countless stories before. Only this story would be about a girl or boy in Uganda and not a new recipe or an iPhone.

And their readers—their friends—saw the developing world and Compassion International through the eyes of these bloggers and sponsored more than 500 children that week. Those children go to school, have a safe place to play, get immunized, see a dentist, go to bed with a full belly, and are told and shown they are loved by God. They will grow up to be mechanics, teachers, pastors, computer scientists, artists, and doctors. Five hundred children will have children who won’t need Compassion International’s help. Five hundred children were released from poverty in Jesus’ name because a bunch of bloggers helped release 500 Americans from a little of their wealth.

The bloggers who traveled with us to Uganda have been changed forever too. They’ve talked to their Sunday school classes and pastors about the plight of those in the developing world. They continue to blog regularly on behalf of Compassion without being asked.

Not bad for an idea birthed from a pair of shoes.

THE NEXT STEP
Since our trip to Uganda, I’ve taken a job as the facilitator of Compassion’s blog relationships. We’ve launched CompassionBloggers.com, a place where the best posts, pictures, and videos from our overseas trips are archived. Also on the site bloggers can grab widgets and banners for their sites and sign up to blog about a specific need on Compassion’s behalf every month. Bloggers can also go there and register to be considered for a future blogging trip like the one we’re taking to the Dominican Republic in November.

Seventy million blogs—that’s a lot of friends. Compassion International and I are out to get as many of them talking about poverty, children, and Jesus as we can.