Strawberries and Covenant Community

A Wycliffe worker in Papua New Guinea once saw hundreds of strawberries floating down the village river. He found out that they were the unsold strawberries from the local market - it was too much of a hassle for the farmer to carry them back to their villages, so the easiest way to dispose of them was to throw the surplus into the river.
Well, there was a city not too far away, and the Wycliffe worker thought strawberries might sell there for a high price. He talked to the farmers and said that if they boxed their extra strawberries, he would fly them to the city and sell them at the markets there.
The idea yielded much profit. The strawberries were selling so well that they soon covered the cost of the plane fuel, a small salary for the workers, and even provided for a high-interest fund that was divided among the farmers at the end of the year.
There were a couple things that made the project difficult however. One was that the village farmers would often cheat by putting rotten berries at the bottom of the boxes - it was a cultural norm for them to cheat as long as they didn't get caught. And cheating was made easier by the fact that no one openly confronted anybody else in the culture. Confrontation was something they never did. Soon enough, the city people stopped buying the strawberries, because they realised how many rotten ones they were getting. The Wycliffe worker explained this to the farmers: "If you put rotten strawberries into the boxes, no one will want to buy them, and soon enough, you will make no more extra money off of these strawberries." He confronted them when he saw the farmers cheating and made each farmer label his boxes for accountability. The project continued to be successful and to benefit the farmers.
Eventually, it was time for the Wycliffe worker to leave. He trained the farmers to handle the money, taught them how to handle the city markets, etc. He left the business in the hands of a few trusted farmers.
Three months later, the strawberry business went under. The city people were not buying the farmers' strawberries, because they were finding, once again, that half of the boxes were filled with rotten fruit. These farmers' culture had worked against them - with no one to do any confronting, the farmers had started cheating again.

My professor told us this story to illustrate the need for establishing covenant community: a kind of community where relationship and commitment to one another is central - community like God intends it, no matter what culture one exists in. The farmers in this story were all Christians - but the Gospel hadn't transformed their cheating or their inability to confront one another.
He argued that the only way one can "teach" covenant community is through simulation - in this case, the Wycliffe worker could have had his farmers simulate the two approaches to the strawberry project; their way and the covenant community way. By role-playing and being in other people's shoes, the truth could have been driven home: the way God intends things to be is really the way things work best... It goes beyond Bible studies and training seminars. People need to be involved and they need to experience the way these values play out.

So, these are the kinds of things I'm learning about in seminary. That day, I learned that there need to be those people who can "train" people in covenant community. And you know what? I think that's something I could do, as a Christian anthropologist! It's even something I could be quite passionate about! And all that, without even having to become a nurse or an engineer or something... Exciting prospect! It reminded me of being in Thailand and having such a strong desire for the Christians there to be living out what they were being taught by the missionaries. I remember being so much more concerned with how Bible studies affected their everyday interactions with one another, moreso than with how many verses they could recite or what they could say about it. I love this kind of stuff - it makes my heart excited.