Creating Policies -- Is This Ministry????

These past couple of weeks our staff have been working on several policies related to the RAP home. It is quite a painstaking process but we are thankful to our partners at AIM and Chab Dai who have provided us with documentation that gives us a good starting point. We are not into reinventing wheels when others have gone ahead of us. We are happy to leverage off of what our partners have done and learn from their experiences and so our staff along with our consultants have been helping us along the way, providing guidance and direction.

Nary, Malak and Lois discussing policy details

All our documents have to be done in both Khmer and English so today we began a review of all the policies we have created so far with two of our team leaders at the RAP Home---Nary our Operations Manager and Malak our Psychosocial Coordinator. Lois, one of the international workers who has lived in Cambodia for 3 years has worked with one of our partner organizations previously and also has a lot of experience in administration and personnel issues. She is volunteering her time mentoring and coaching our Operations manager and helping us in this process.

As we sat around discussing all these policies, we couldn't help but wonder if creating such policies is really ''ministry.'' So often when we think of the Christian term of ''doing ministry'', we think about outreaches, ministering to people in various ways, having bible studies, preaching or volunteering our time in discipling others. But indeed creating policies as mundane a process as this, is ministry. After all, it is being a good steward of both the resources and time the Lord has given us. Policy development, procedures and guidelines are not the most exciting things to do. In fact, if truth be told, they are boring to do but absolutely necessary to ensure certain standards are maintained.  D.L Moody once said ''there are many of us that are willing to do great things for the Lord, but few of us are willing to do little things." Preparing policies and going through the details to ensure that we have the proper guidelines and procedures are little things, yet they are essential ingredients that provide structure, shape and form to what we are doing and what we are trying to accomplish. Our desire is that they ultimately promote healthy relationships, transparency, accountability, direction, instruction, clarity --- all of this provides a framework and backbone of the operational processes within the RAP home. It is the equivalent of building a firm foundation.  It may all sound clinical in nature but as Paul Tripp once said, ''if Christ does not reign over the mundane events in our lives, He does not reign at all and so throughout this process, we have been praying for the Lord to continue to direct us and give us wisdom in these mundane activities.
 For those of us who are used to working in the business world, we would call this policy development a form of risk management. We want to manage the risks before us by ensuring that we have considered different scenarios and possibilities and to provide guidelines that act as signposts which hopefully will minimize a reactive style management and create a more proactive style to minimize problems. Yet in all of this, we recognize that there are still gaps to fill, but this is really where faith comes in. It is a journey of faith to trust the Lord will fill in the gaps which we have not conceived.

In God's economy there is no division between the ''sacred'' and the ''secular''---for all we do is sacred when we are laboring for the Lord and so creating policies is just as sacred and valuable as other forms of activity!  For inherent in such policies, is a spirit of love that seeks to protect, care and encourage those whom God is entrusting into our care.