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Willow began looking for churches that were reaching out, regardless of whether Willow would support them or not. "They are not waiting for the West to come in with resources," says Beach. "They are looking inside and saying: What has God given our community to address? Do we have a teacher who can do a preschool or a mentoring class after school? Do we have an entrepreneur who can talk to the youth about business skills? Those are the folks that set our hearts aflutter."

Willow began doing this in the Dominican Republic, then in Costa Rica.

In 2004, Lynne Hybels came back from a trip to Africa overwhelmed by the staggering needs that the HIV/AIDS pandemic left in its wake. "Why aren't we doing anything there?" she asked Willow's leadership. "If we're going to be the church, how could we face God someday without having addressed HIV/AIDS and what's happening in sub-Saharan Africa?"

And so began Willow's work in Africa. Well, except for the fact that it is not Willow's work. It's the work of Africans, and "our sweet spot is the local church," as Beach puts it. In particular, Willow looks for churches with "good leadership," says Beach, "hopefully black leadership, in tough situations, congregations that are mobilized to some degree around HIV/AIDS and the social realities there, with a little bit of a track record of effectiveness."

It wasn't long before Willow found enough such ministries that it could spend over $2 million a year in Africa.

Willow could jump-start this new emphasis because it already had connections in South Africa. The Willow Creek Association holds leadership conferences that currently attract some 5,000 South Africans each year. It was only natural to turn to this network to find churches that were "already in the game."

"We like to work with people first before providing any form of funding," says Willow Creek Association's Southern Africa head, Gerry Couchman. "We get to know the person, we get to know his integrity. We've seen what they are trying to do on their own with very limited resources."

In the last four years, the association has found 28 projects to come alongside. I visited three. Or was it six?

In Cape Town, for example, Lerato's Hope is the nonprofit arm of Pinelands Baptist Church. It partners with existing grassroots organizations that care for, treat, and support poor families affected by AIDS in the townships of Gugulethu, Nyanga, Crossroads, and Philippi.

These areas are home to half a million people, whose salient statistics include the following: The average household earns less than $8 a day; unemployment stands at 60 percent; there are 409 Christian places of worship but 819 liquor outlets; more than 30 percent of all deaths are AIDS-related; and over 50 percent of the population lives in shacks.

Lerato's Hope is named after a young girl. Eight years ago, she was an 18-month-old baby who had been brought to a children's home called Beautiful Gate. Some of Pineland Baptist's families had been running a Sunday school there, and had been taking the residents on outings and forming relationships with the children. But this child, Lerato, was not doing well. She was too weak to talk or walk because she was dying of AIDS.

This was before the days of the widespread use of antiretrovirals (ARVS) in Africa, so no one had much hope for Lerato. When one of the church families began visiting Lerato regularly as she lay in a hospital bed, the doctors told the family not to trouble themselves, that she was going to die. The family refused to accept that: "And if she is going to die," they said, "she's going to die being held and loved."

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March 2009, Vol. 53, No. 3