Hope blooms in Dora: Growing the kingdom of God in Zimbabwe

A transformed community

Fast forward to this year, and Pastor Thanks, now a Transforming Communities trainer, describes Dora as a community that has been transformed. Through expanding the training, mindsets have been changed, water points have been built and self-help groups have been established. Many community members are earning their own incomes through various projects, from rearing chickens, pigs and fish, to growing mushrooms and fruit trees. Parents can pay their children’s school fees and there has been a reduction in SGBV and child marriages.

Villages in the community have joined together to build a local health clinic, and they’re now liaising with the government to supply nurses to run it. Many churches and denominations are involved and working together to continue to transform the community.

Pastor Thanks celebrates that the faith of the community is flourishing: ‘The Bible studies allow people to understand and regain God’s purpose for their lives and they see themselves as worthy of living,’ he says. ‘We are now seeing women on platforms in church, leading Bible studies and prayers, because they have gained confidence through the process.

‘The transformation begins in the church but flows out to the community. Everyone is included and no one is left behind. We are a family, and despite our different backgrounds or beliefs, we address issues of poverty together. Other churches are jumping in, people are becoming church members as they see changes in others, and as a result, the church is growing.’

Planting seeds for the kingdom of God

Transforming Communities training is a small beginning, and might seem insignificant compared to the challenges faced by communities living in extreme poverty. But Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God reminds us that in his kingdom, a small beginning can change everything.

In Matthew 13:31-32, Jesus tells a parable, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.’

Pastor Thanks is faithfully living out this parable, planting seeds in a tree nursery. And those seeds are changing lives. He began by buying 15 lemons for 50 cents. With the seeds from these lemons, he will soon have 100 lemon trees and the nursery has grown to 850 saplings of various types. By using discarded plastic bottles to plant the seedlings in, Pastor Thanks is setting an example of caring for the environment, reforestation and waste management at the same time!

And he’s not stopping there. Pastor Thanks has given tree saplings to the local primary school and many other people, so they can start their own projects. Throughout Dora, there are now many large and established trees that have come from the nursery.

‘As a leader, you must lead by example,’ he says. ‘This can work! We are trying to do a lot of initiatives so that people can learn to utilise available resources to address our issues.’

The seeds bear fruit

One church elder, Augustine, was inspired by the Transforming Communities training to begin a project selling fruit, after growing 35 trees sourced from Pastor Thanks’ nursery. With the income, he can now buy food for his family and they no longer experience hunger.

Augustine has a dream for his future: ‘It has not been easy to water these trees since we were getting water from a faraway place, but with the money that we are expecting from this project, we are hoping to drill a borehole on our land and I have a vision to expand my orchard.’

Much like the mustard seed in the parable, 15 small seeds have led to transformation across Dora. At Tearfund, we see God working powerfully through Transforming Communities training. He is using it to bring transformation through local churches to communities like Dora across the world – to incomes, families, health, education, relationships, church unity, and people’s physical, emotional and spiritual lives.

By April 2025, through over 57,000 churches worldwide, Transforming Communities training had enabled change at scale – resulting in approximately 19,000 roads, 18,000 schools, 9,000 health clinics, and 19,000 places to get clean water being improved or created.* Our vision is to keep expanding the training, and that’s why we have a goal to see 250,000 churches lead transformation in their communities and bring an end to extreme poverty. It’s an ambitious, massive goal. But God is bigger.

Please join us in prayer for Transforming Communities, and if you’d like to give financially to help enable more lives to be transformed, you can do so here.

*You can find out more about the impact of Transforming Communities here.