The biggest challenge: preserving issues or serving interests?

Quite often, God inspires us to have a magnificent idea: one that can serve our community or even the whole of humanity. When someone has such an idea, they call upon their closest friends to discuss it with them. If the group accepts the idea they will change it into a small project which they can look after.

In a year or two the group will start thinking about developing the project, to make it more organised and structured. The group will collectively decide to change the project into an organisation, because the capacity of the organisation is now wider than the scope of the project that the organisation is serving. In the following years the group will think again and then again about institutionalising their organisation and it will change from a small community based enterprise to a national organisation.

To move from the inception of the idea to the making of the institution, we have to go through a bottleneck. And the most difficult challenge to overcome is to continue to serve the idea – to remember the issue and to preserve our community product, rather than to serve the organisation, its structure and quite often the individuals who run it.

If the organisation fails to focus on the original idea as it grows, it will fail in its objective and will suffer a downfall. This is the problem we face nowadays with political parties, groups, movements and structured organisations, who quite often forget the great idea which led to their existence and instead begin to focus on the group, the party, or individual interests. It is the big challenge facing all of us at times of election or change because all these parties’ interests are not compatible. They don’t compliment each other, but rather each would like to uproot the others, forgetting that the resources they have are national, communal resources, and each community needs to see the resources working.

Unfortunately I have seen this happening not only in political parties, but also inside humanitarian organisations which still claim to champion humanity. But if we are really looking to preserve and grow our civilisation, we have to ensure our organisations and institutions keep serving humanity by being true to their ideals. Only then can they develop it and change it into ideology and global community culture. This won’t happen if they are serving the organisations’ interests.

I hope this will be – for me as well as others – a wakeup call to keep serving the cause of our existence, which is to serve God, through serving his people.