August 31, 2025 • 30 mins
Roger Wheeler, a real estate agent from Iowa, discovered that comfortable Western Christianity was missing something crucial - the biblical call to share surplus with those in need. What started as orphan care work in Ghana evolved into a powerful revelation about global hunger within the Christian community. When Roger encountered families surviving on less than 1,000 calories per week, he couldn't ignore the contrast with his own abundance.
Through Shoulder to Shoulder ministry, Roger and his brother have now sent over $1 million to feed starving Christians in Zambia, working through 122 local churches with zero administrative overhead. But this isn't just about feeding the hungry - it's about what Roger calls a "food for faith exchange." As wealthy believers give from their surplus, they discover the deeper spiritual life that comes from true dependence on God. Roger challenges us to see ourselves as "a big herd of camels" struggling to enter the kingdom, while those we serve possess a richness of faith we desperately need. This conversation will transform how you think about poverty, wealth, and what it means to follow Jesus in a world of extreme inequality. WEBLINKS Shoulder 2 Shoulder Website Shoulder 2 Shoulder on Facebook Shoulder 2 Shoulder on Instagram
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Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Hello, thanks for listening.
You'll find many more Bleeding Daylight episodes at bleedingdaylight.net.
Please help others discover stories of hope and transformation by sharing Bleeding Daylight with others.
(00:34):
How do we know when we have enough?
How do we know when we have a surplus?
Are we stuck feeling that we don't have enough even for ourselves and so we're unable to share what we have with other people?
Today's guest may challenge your thoughts on our place in the world and our responsibilities towards others.
(01:03):
I'm really excited to introduce today's guest.
Roger Wheeler is a real estate agent who, along with his wife, has spent the last 30 years doing incredible ministry work through their local church.
Everything from foster care and adoption support to short-term missions.
Now they've taken their calling global.
Starting in 2016, they began travelling to Ghana for orphan care and educational work.
(01:29):
And by 2020, they had a revelation that hunger within the global Christian community was something they simply couldn't ignore.
What started as a conviction has grown into an incredible network of collection and distribution.
They recently celebrated sending their millionth dollar overseas.
Rog, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
(01:51):
Thank you, Rodney.
It's a pleasure to be here.
That intro made me sound much more important than I actually am.
I'm just a real estate agent in Iowa, so you could have probably stopped there.
Well, we'll unpick it as we go.
Okay.
There's a lot in the scriptures about bringing good news to the poor, about ensuring no one goes without and caring for the least of these.
(02:13):
And unfortunately, those passages can be overlooked by the Western Church at times.
When was it that God began challenging you to care for those who have need?
It's been a journey with several stops along the way.
My brother and I have done quite a bit of work together, and we were doing the education and orphan care work in Ghana with our wives.
(02:36):
When we recognize this thread in the New Testament where Agabus, a little-known prophet, steps up in the book of Acts and says, Hey, there's about to be a famine in Jerusalem.
They decide we better find a way to feed these people while the food isn't growing.
It actually then reminds Paul, I believe, who was introduced to this concept when he was Saul as a Pharisee, back in Luke 3, when John the Baptist was introducing the kingdom of God.
(03:12):
The people were confused, and they said, Well, what do we do?
This sounds great.
What do we do?
And he says, Well, if you've got two coats, share one.
And if you've got extra food, do the same.
This thread then runs all the way through the gospel message with Jesus.
It goes through Paul's letters.
It goes all the way to the Apostle John in 1 John 3, 16.
(03:34):
Interesting reference there where John says, Hey, if you have this world's goods and you see your brother in need and you close your heart to him, how can the love of Jesus be in you?
And this thread runs all the way through the New Testament, and it started to jump off the pages at my brother and I.
I know that you're not wanting to just talk the theology of caring for the poor, but I'm wondering, do you have any take on why you feel the Western church has really abandoned this call that we see in Scripture to really be creating a religion that is more about self than it is about the other?
(04:10):
And yet, Scripture is constantly talking about caring for the other.
I don't want this to be a negative message at all.
Our message is born out of 2 Corinthians 8, where Paul says, Those with surplus should share with those in deficit.
And it's a really basic message.
(04:32):
And so it seems pretty simple that that's what we would do.
Actually, he references back to the situation in the desert with the children of Israel when God provided manna.
God said, hey, just go get enough for you and your friends and family, and there'll be plenty for everybody.
You shouldn't have any left over.
But unfortunately, the Bible tells us at that point that some people did keep some overnight.
(04:56):
And we know what happened with that.
It began to rot and had worms.
That began this process of those of us with surplus wanting to hold on to our surplus.
It's just natural for us to do that.
And Jesus warned of that many times.
There's this process that says, I want to be a good steward.
I want to be frugal.
(05:17):
I want to be careful.
I want to plan for the future.
It's just that it's the way that our flesh goes as we begin to accumulate extra.
The Bible calls surplus.
It's hard to let go of that.
Which is why I think Jesus says it's harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of God.
(05:37):
The poor are flocking into the kingdom because the kingdom's message is, if you've got extra food, share it with those that have none.
Well, that's a pretty good message for people who don't have any food.
But for the guy that has extra food, it's just a little bit of a challenge.
And so I find myself with all of my friends and my family and all the people that I love, we're just a big herd of camels.
(06:00):
God says it's difficult to get through that little needle.
We often only see what's around us.
And so we can see ourselves as not having extra because we're basing it on what's around us.
And I'm aware that the scripture says, for those of you who are rich in the things of this world, and we often think, oh, that's people who are the millionaires and the multimillionaires.
(06:22):
And we don't realize that those of us that live in Western countries, that's us.
We are those who are rich in the things of this world.
You've been involved in various ministries for quite some time.
When was it that you first stepped out of the U.S. and actually saw the need that existed in a place like Ghana?
(06:43):
I first started seeing need in the U.S. I began doing work on Native American Indian reservations in the United States.
And that's really the closest thing to what you see in maybe some of the third world countries you'll see right in the United States.
I don't want to denigrate my Native American friends at all, but the situation is bleak.
(07:04):
In a couple of places where I've been, Pine Ridge Reservation and Rosebud Reservation in the Dakotas, that began to tell me that what was going on around me in central Iowa, where we're kind of the breadbasket of the world, something began to tell me, hey, it's not like this everywhere.
I had a friend who started a ministry in Ghana.
He was going over and teaching young kids basketball skills as a way to kind of get them out of the slums, some of their difficult economic times in Ghana.
(07:33):
My wife and I went with him on a trip.
When we stepped into the village in Asikuma, Ghana, we saw something we'd never really seen before.
You'd seen African villages on TV and you kind of thought it was maybe a bit of a hoax.
Maybe that's something that was true a hundred years ago or two years ago, but it's not like that today.
You know, I got home last night and I was hungry and I looked around my kitchen and I had lots of options to choose from.
(08:00):
It doesn't occur to most Americans that there are people who live in a meager setting where literally they have nothing to put into their stomach within their reach.
And they've got to figure out, how am I going to feed my children today?
That's a reality.
Over five million Zambians right now are facing food insecurity in real and meaningful ways.
(08:23):
Now, we know that it's not a transaction, but whenever we visit other countries, there is an exchange.
And to be able to share with other people with the excess that we have, as you say, to be able to provide a meal is something that we're able to do.
But there's always a richness that comes from people from other nations that we seem to get so much back from them.
(08:47):
What was it that you started to see in the people in that country of Ghana in that first trip?
What was it that started to speak to you and speak to your heart?
Let me say one thing, Roddy.
I actually think Paul does present it as a transaction.
It's kind of interesting.
We've had to wrestle through this, but in 2 Corinthians 8, which is the basis of shoulder to shoulder, it says, it's not that there may be relief for others and hardship for you, but it's a question of fairness.
(09:17):
And then listen to this.
He says, at the present time, your surplus is available for their need.
So their abundance may become available for your need.
My brother and I wrestled with that.
What do the Zambians have in abundance that we need?
And the answer is faith.
When you wake up in the morning and you don't know how to feed your children, how you're going to feed your children that day, there is a level of faith that is experienced by that Christ follower that I will likely never experience in my life.
(09:45):
We call it a food for faith trade or exchange.
As I give up my resource, by definition, I'm a little less sure of my retirement.
I'm a little less sure of my future.
And so I am growing in my faith as I do that.
That's why the passage that you quoted out of 1 Timothy, where Paul says to Timothy, teach the wealthy these things, and then he gives them a list of things to teach them.
(10:09):
And then he says, so that you will have life in the future, in the future kingdom, but real life now.
We do think of this as a trade.
It's an exchange.
I'm giving something up so that I can gain something.
I believe God works that way in my heart.
And I'm sorry, I took a tangent there.
I don't even know what your question was now.
(10:30):
Sorry about that.
No, no, look, that actually demonstrates exactly the point that I was trying to get to, is that we can sometimes feel that we're the great saviors of the world, that we have so much to offer and others have nothing to give back.
But as you've said so eloquently there, and this has always been my experience when visiting people who are living in a state of poverty in other places around the world, is that there is so much that they can teach us, that we learn so much from them.
(10:59):
And part of the beauty is sitting with them and hearing their experience.
So did that hit you right away or did you actually go with that a little bit of that sense of, oh, look, I'll come and fix them?
Or was there something that hit you right away about their faith?
No, I definitely went into Ghana the first time with kind of that American pride that said, here comes the man.
(11:22):
They were doing some adoptions out of the orphanage where my friend was working.
And I sat down with him and said, hey, if you come across a teenager who needs adopted, let us know because we'd be interested in that.
We were foster parents at the time.
We had had three teenage foster daughters that we had worked with over the last five or six years.
(11:43):
And so we kind of saw her.
So we were a little older.
We're not your normal foster parents.
We were working on an empty nest.
And so we went over to meet Anita.
She must have been 14 years old at the time.
And as you know, people are not adopting 14 year old African girls.
So we went over to meet Anita, really feeling like, as you said, we were kind of the great white savior coming in.
(12:07):
And I feel terrible about that now.
But it didn't take very long even for me to recognize Anita as a double orphan living in an orphanage in a village in Ghana, had a relationship with God that gave her something that I didn't have access to.
There was something special, that idea in James 2 where James says, didn't God make the poor to be heirs of the kingdom?
(12:33):
I saw that for the first time.
Hey, she's got something spiritually that I don't get.
And it's literally because of her material lack here in this life that God said, hey, I'm going to be special to you.
You could just see it in her life.
There is a definition of poverty that says that it's a lack in four essential relationships.
Firstly, a lack of relationship between ourselves and God, then between ourselves and others, between ourselves and the rest of creation, and a relationship with ourselves.
(13:07):
When there's a breakdown in any of those, there's poverty.
When we start to apply that, we start to see that a lot of the people around us who may have plenty in stuff actually are living a life of poverty.
Did it help you to see things back home differently about the way that people are living and living without that depth of faith?
(13:29):
Yeah, it caused the Laodicean Church in Revelation 3 to jump off the page to me where they said, hey, we're rich.
We got it made.
And Jesus says to them, no, you're actually poor, wretched, and blind.
I felt that.
I begin to understand that for the first time.
And that's why in this transaction that shoulder to shoulder is promoting, my brother is primarily concerned about starving people in Zambia.
(13:58):
But my heart is really for the camels back here in the United States in the Western Church.
I really have a concern that there is a spiritual life that is available for us as wealthier people.
I don't say that braggadociously.
I'm just saying God has blessed the Western world with material goods.
(14:18):
And because of that, it makes access to some spiritual life difficult.
It were unwilling to enter into that trade, that food for faith exchange.
I'm interested in how shoulder to shoulder actually works, because there are a number of different agencies that are working in different ways that are filling various needs.
(14:39):
So how did shoulder to shoulder actually begin?
Where did you see the need and what need is it filling?
When we were in Ghana, we had a relationship with one Zambian man.
When we decided orphan care and education was not baseline ministry, but there were actually people who were starving.
My brother actually started looking around the globe saying, maybe we're not in the right location here if we want to feed hungry people.
(15:06):
We use the World Hunger Index.
Zambia is always at the very bottom of the list.
I think they're 120th out of 130 or something like that, which means there are a lot of starving people.
Zambia also is 98% Christian.
When you see Paul establish this process, he calls the collection for the saints.
(15:28):
And we believe we are a 2000 year continuation of Paul's collection for the saints.
He was looking at Christian to Christian.
He was seeing Christian brothers and sisters with excess, with surplus care for Christian brothers and sisters living in deficit.
Because Zambia is 98% Christian, we kind of headed in that direction.
(15:49):
We started actually in 2020 when the world was kind of falling apart.
We said, well, maybe we should be feeding hungry people.
So we connected with a few churches over there.
Started small in December 2019, I believe.
We sent over some gifts to a handful of churches, four or five churches, so that they could have a Christmas meal with their most vulnerable members.
(16:14):
It went well.
We sent some more in January.
We sent some more in February.
And they started saying, well, how long are you going to do this?
We said, well, we don't know, as long as God allows us to continue.
So over time, we have developed a network.
We actually have six employees in Zambia.
They are Zambian men that we know and love and trust.
And we have 122 churches that we work with.
(16:38):
So kind of the calling card of shoulder to shoulder that makes us a little bit different.
Number one, we are a parachurch in that we're a 501c3 set up in the United States.
But all of our distribution goes through the church.
We immediately take the funds that we send from America and send it into the church in Zambia.
(16:58):
So that's the first thing, is that everything gets distributed through the church.
There's no separate organization doing that.
But then the second thing that does, it means 100% of every penny that gets donated to us goes to Zambia.
We don't have American overhead.
Everything that happens here in America happens by volunteers.
(17:19):
We just have a unique distribution model that allows us to be very efficient in the way that we're caring for one another.
The beauty of it is that as you go through the local church, you're actually empowering and resourcing local pastors and local churches to do the thing that God has called them to do.
(17:41):
So in fulfilling the call that God has put on your life, you're actually helping other believers to fulfill the calling that God has put on their life.
That must be incredibly empowering for the local church there in Zambia.
It's a thrill for us as well.
So two years ago, my wife and I went to Zambia.
At that time, we only had about 45 churches.
(18:02):
What we felt God calling us to do at that point was to increase the number of eyes seeing the money going over and the number of hands distributing it.
In the second half of 2 Corinthians 8, again, we're based on this section.
Paul says, hey, I'm sending a bunch of men over and they're going to help you with this.
(18:22):
And he says, we're taking this precaution so no one can criticize us about the large sum administered by us.
And so we felt the need to take the Acts 7 model and assign deacons to the task.
My wife and I actually went and met with all of the church pastors and had them all bring five deacon or deaconesses from their churches.
(18:44):
And we assigned them as special partners with shoulder to shoulder.
The local churches over there have a pastor who receives the funds, who immediately shares them with a team of deacons and deaconesses.
The way it works in the church, there are so many vulnerable there.
We give funds each month to care for about 40 to 50 percent of those identified as vulnerable in that individual church.
(19:11):
And by doing that, we're trying to hit the most vulnerable.
We're hoping the most hungry are the ones that are receiving the funds.
In most cases, we're dealing with people who are eating two to three meals a week.
And when I use the word meal, I'm using that word loosely.
They basically have this food.
It's called enshima.
It's a ball of cornmeal.
(19:31):
It has two or three hundred calories, and they're getting two or three of those balls a week.
So if you can imagine, these people are trying to exist on less than a thousand calories per week.
Our program takes that household, that family, to two meals a day.
Our goal is that, yes, it empowers the churches to care for their people, but then it empowers those people to become participants in the kingdom because they now are consuming enough energy, enough calories, to actually become part of the work themselves.
(20:02):
It's been very exciting, very empowering to see that process take shape.
You've mentioned that you're very concerned for those back home who need that exchange of faith to understand that there is a deeper faith available.
So what's it been like on that side of the world where you're inviting others into this opportunity to give out of their excess, but in return receive this understanding that there is a greater faith that they can be part of?
(20:32):
Yeah, it's really challenging, honestly.
So you'd said early that we just sent over our one millionth dollar.
I think we're at like $1,100,000 now or something that we've sent over in the last five years.
And that's coming from the Wheeler family, my brother, his wife, our children, our family, and 122 of our friends.
(20:53):
So we basically have started putting the word out that we have this process, we have this distribution network, and our friends begin to jump in on that.
And strangers have begun to jump in as well as they realize this is a very efficient way to live in a biblical way.
But generally speaking, when I give the message out, it's difficult for those with surplus, number one, to see they have surplus.
(21:20):
A lot of American Christians see themselves as living the impoverished life in some way.
Some of it is based on some level of frugality or stewardship, and money just looks like there's not enough all the time, when in reality our needs are met very, very well in this country.
That's one of the reasons why I'm excited to be on your podcast, because when I speak with people about this Food for Faith transaction, I would say maybe one in 15 or 20 people, they see that.
(21:53):
The Spirit hits them and they say, I've been looking for something like this.
This makes sense to me.
That's one of the reasons I'm trying to kind of spread the net a little wider to see who those people are that God has put it in their hearts to say, hey, I do have surplus.
Now, how do I most effectively use this in his kingdom?
It's hard to convince a camel that he's fat.
That's just the reality.
(22:14):
I think it was hard in Jesus' day.
It's hard in my day.
It occurs to me that this is a battle that has been going on since Jesus' day.
We see it in the Scriptures.
We see it continue on.
And there seems to be this continual thought that we need to grab everything we can for ourselves.
And yet we know that other people are suffering.
(22:34):
So these friends of yours, once they do start to realize that they are people with excess and start giving, what has been their response?
Have they started to realize that God is doing something new within their lives as they start to give way to what they're being called to do?
They do become intrigued by the ministry itself.
Our goal is to build a Christian community that way, that it feels a little bit like a church.
(22:59):
In fact, we have several people who have joined us who are a little bit disillusioned with the state of the church right now.
Shoulder to Shoulder gives them a platform that says, this is more like kind of what I feel like it should be like.
We have those people who are joining us.
We've moved beyond the just simple food distribution project, although that is the heart of Shoulder to Shoulder, is monthly feeding of people who are starving.
(23:26):
That's the basis of the Shoulder to Shoulder ministry.
But we have moved into more of a development world as well, where we're doing our own farm training.
If you can imagine, if I don't have enough money to buy food, I certainly don't have enough money to buy seed and fertilizer to put in the ground to grow food.
We've began providing farm inputs to some of our farmers who we've trained in the fall, and then we're actually buying harvest from our farmers in the spring when their food becomes available.
(23:56):
So now our process is a little bit different.
We're not going out monthly and buying corn from the dealers very often.
More often, each church is sending their deacons to the storage shed to get the bag of corn that was purchased back in May and distribute it to their people according to the plan that we put in place.
(24:16):
It's interesting that Shoulder to Shoulder is only really a handful of years old, and yet already you've started to begin scaling it up.
So started with just that food distribution and then realizing you need to put it into more hands, and so called the churches and their deacons, and then you've realized the need to help that to become somewhat self-sustaining.
(24:38):
How do you see it growing into the future as you continue to scale it up, as you continue to make a way for more and more people to benefit?
Where do you feel Shoulder to Shoulder can go next?
My brother and I are pretty adamant that we have no plan.
We have no goal.
We have no vision.
We want to be faithful.
(24:59):
That is our word.
We want to be faithful with the work that He gave us.
We never intended to grow from six initial churches to 122 churches now, but that's what God has done.
And the people in Zambia continue to ask us, How long are you going to do this?
Can I count on you providing food every month?
Can we count on you buying harvest every year?
(25:20):
Well, the answer is that's really up to God.
Our goal is to be faithful as long as He allows us to manage this distribution for the saints, this collection for the saints.
But if I can say over the last five years, the first example was when my brother was looking at the next upcoming harvest three years ago.
He said, It looks like we're going to need $40,000 in the spring.
(25:44):
And I think we'd only given maybe a total of $150,000 over the first couple of years.
I said, Rob, I don't think we're going to have $40,000.
I don't know how we'll do that.
As you can imagine, God dropped $40,000 in our lap, and we were able to buy the harvest that His spreadsheet said we should be purchasing.
And we've had a half a dozen of those steps along the way, where as we look at the near term, it looks like God wants us to do something that we really can't do.
(26:14):
And we just kind of shake our heads and say, Well, okay, it looks like that's what we're called to do.
We'll see what God provides around every corner He has provided.
So I honestly, Rodney, couldn't tell you.
Are we now at 122 churches and we're going to stay there for the next decade?
Or will we be 500 churches or 1,000 churches?
We don't have a plan.
We don't have a vision.
(26:35):
Our goal is to be faithful to what God is allowing us to do.
You mentioned earlier that you were keen to have that exchange of food for faith, for the teaching that comes from seeing people who are living out faith.
How has that impacted you over the last few years?
Have you started to see that faith within you grow and within your brother and others that are involved in the project of shoulder to shoulder?
(27:02):
There is no question.
The first time that my brother came to me and said, We need $40,000.
And I said, I don't think that's going to happen.
And then it happened.
That was faith building for me.
The last time my wife and I were in Zambia, which was two years ago, we were assigning deacons in all of our churches.
And my brother had said, Hey, we need to plant $150,000 worth of fields, worth of cornfields.
(27:27):
We needed seed and fertilizer for 1,000 fields.
That was going to cost $150,000.
And so I began to tell the story while I was there.
You guys need to pray for us.
We need $150,000 in America so we can do the planting this fall.
And we don't have it.
We don't have anywhere near that.
We announced that as we were traveling around the country.
(27:49):
We came back.
We began to raise those funds.
We began to put the word out.
By the end of the year, we had sent $150,000 to plant those fields.
The next time that God says, Hey, I think you're going to need to do this.
I'm not going to question it.
The next time my brother says, Hey, the spreadsheet suggests we're going to be 300 churches next year.
(28:11):
I'll probably shake my head and say, Yeah, I think we probably will be then.
I do believe God has called us to the work, and it's clear that what he asks us to do, he's going to provide.
It's been a beautiful faith-building experience for me personally.
What you're doing with Shoulder to Shoulder is quite different to the pattern that has been set up by various agencies.
(28:32):
I can imagine that there are people listening at the moment who might think I still haven't quite got my head around that.
One of the great things that you've done on the website is there's video there that helps to explain step-by-step what's going on, and it actually gives people a view of what's happening there on the ground.
I would highly recommend people head there.
(28:54):
I do have a link to the website in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net.
What else will people find there at the website?
If they're looking for confidence to be involved in what you're doing, if what they've heard excites them, what else will they find on that website that will help them towards that?
They'll see a little bit of a bio about us, the Wheeler family, my brother and I, and we're not important people.
(29:18):
We're real estate agents that are trying to be faithful to what God has called us to, and we want people to see that, that this is just a small-town family doing a small-town thing, trying to be faithful to God.
I think that's evident on the website.
You'll also see bios of some of our people in Zambia, and they are faithful men, and the website will allow you to get to know them a little bit.
(29:40):
You can see a map of Zambia, which will identify kind of the areas where we're doing work.
The other thing is you can donate there.
There's just a button, and you can click to become a one-time donor or a monthly donor, and, man, when people click on that, heaven rejoices.
Certainly the Wheelers rejoice, because we know some people in Zambia are going to eat.
Roger, I want to thank you for your time on Bleeding Daylight.
(30:03):
As I say, people will find a link to the Shoulder to Shoulder website at bleedingdaylight.net in the show notes there, and I do hope that people check that out, and hopefully we'll jump on board and help out as well.
Roger, it's been a delight to hear of your story.
We wish you well for the continued success of Shoulder to Shoulder.
Thank you, Rodney.
Appreciate your work.
(30:23):
Appreciate the invitation.
God bless you and all you're doing.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Hello, thanks for listening.
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(00:34):
How do we know when we have enough?
How do we know when we have a surplus?
Are we stuck feeling that we don't have enough even for ourselves and so we're unable to share what we have with other people?
Today's guest may challenge your thoughts on our place in the world and our responsibilities towards others.
(01:03):
I'm really excited to introduce today's guest.
Roger Wheeler is a real estate agent who, along with his wife, has spent the last 30 years doing incredible ministry work through their local church.
Everything from foster care and adoption support to short-term missions.
Now they've taken their calling global.
Starting in 2016, they began travelling to Ghana for orphan care and educational work.
(01:29):
And by 2020, they had a revelation that hunger within the global Christian community was something they simply couldn't ignore.
What started as a conviction has grown into an incredible network of collection and distribution.
They recently celebrated sending their millionth dollar overseas.
Rog, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
(01:51):
Thank you, Rodney.
It's a pleasure to be here.
That intro made me sound much more important than I actually am.
I'm just a real estate agent in Iowa, so you could have probably stopped there.
Well, we'll unpick it as we go.
Okay.
There's a lot in the scriptures about bringing good news to the poor, about ensuring no one goes without and caring for the least of these.
(02:13):
And unfortunately, those passages can be overlooked by the Western Church at times.
When was it that God began challenging you to care for those who have need?
It's been a journey with several stops along the way.
My brother and I have done quite a bit of work together, and we were doing the education and orphan care work in Ghana with our wives.
(02:36):
When we recognize this thread in the New Testament where Agabus, a little-known prophet, steps up in the book of Acts and says, Hey, there's about to be a famine in Jerusalem.
They decide we better find a way to feed these people while the food isn't growing.
It actually then reminds Paul, I believe, who was introduced to this concept when he was Saul as a Pharisee, back in Luke 3, when John the Baptist was introducing the kingdom of God.
(03:12):
The people were confused, and they said, Well, what do we do?
This sounds great.
What do we do?
And he says, Well, if you've got two coats, share one.
And if you've got extra food, do the same.
This thread then runs all the way through the gospel message with Jesus.
It goes through Paul's letters.
It goes all the way to the Apostle John in 1 John 3, 16.
(03:34):
Interesting reference there where John says, Hey, if you have this world's goods and you see your brother in need and you close your heart to him, how can the love of Jesus be in you?
And this thread runs all the way through the New Testament, and it started to jump off the pages at my brother and I.
I know that you're not wanting to just talk the theology of caring for the poor, but I'm wondering, do you have any take on why you feel the Western church has really abandoned this call that we see in Scripture to really be creating a religion that is more about self than it is about the other?
(04:10):
And yet, Scripture is constantly talking about caring for the other.
I don't want this to be a negative message at all.
Our message is born out of 2 Corinthians 8, where Paul says, Those with surplus should share with those in deficit.
And it's a really basic message.
(04:32):
And so it seems pretty simple that that's what we would do.
Actually, he references back to the situation in the desert with the children of Israel when God provided manna.
God said, hey, just go get enough for you and your friends and family, and there'll be plenty for everybody.
You shouldn't have any left over.
But unfortunately, the Bible tells us at that point that some people did keep some overnight.
(04:56):
And we know what happened with that.
It began to rot and had worms.
That began this process of those of us with surplus wanting to hold on to our surplus.
It's just natural for us to do that.
And Jesus warned of that many times.
There's this process that says, I want to be a good steward.
I want to be frugal.
(05:17):
I want to be careful.
I want to plan for the future.
It's just that it's the way that our flesh goes as we begin to accumulate extra.
The Bible calls surplus.
It's hard to let go of that.
Which is why I think Jesus says it's harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of God.
(05:37):
The poor are flocking into the kingdom because the kingdom's message is, if you've got extra food, share it with those that have none.
Well, that's a pretty good message for people who don't have any food.
But for the guy that has extra food, it's just a little bit of a challenge.
And so I find myself with all of my friends and my family and all the people that I love, we're just a big herd of camels.
(06:00):
God says it's difficult to get through that little needle.
We often only see what's around us.
And so we can see ourselves as not having extra because we're basing it on what's around us.
And I'm aware that the scripture says, for those of you who are rich in the things of this world, and we often think, oh, that's people who are the millionaires and the multimillionaires.
(06:22):
And we don't realize that those of us that live in Western countries, that's us.
We are those who are rich in the things of this world.
You've been involved in various ministries for quite some time.
When was it that you first stepped out of the U.S. and actually saw the need that existed in a place like Ghana?
(06:43):
I first started seeing need in the U.S. I began doing work on Native American Indian reservations in the United States.
And that's really the closest thing to what you see in maybe some of the third world countries you'll see right in the United States.
I don't want to denigrate my Native American friends at all, but the situation is bleak.
(07:04):
In a couple of places where I've been, Pine Ridge Reservation and Rosebud Reservation in the Dakotas, that began to tell me that what was going on around me in central Iowa, where we're kind of the breadbasket of the world, something began to tell me, hey, it's not like this everywhere.
I had a friend who started a ministry in Ghana.
He was going over and teaching young kids basketball skills as a way to kind of get them out of the slums, some of their difficult economic times in Ghana.
(07:33):
My wife and I went with him on a trip.
When we stepped into the village in Asikuma, Ghana, we saw something we'd never really seen before.
You'd seen African villages on TV and you kind of thought it was maybe a bit of a hoax.
Maybe that's something that was true a hundred years ago or two years ago, but it's not like that today.
You know, I got home last night and I was hungry and I looked around my kitchen and I had lots of options to choose from.
(08:00):
It doesn't occur to most Americans that there are people who live in a meager setting where literally they have nothing to put into their stomach within their reach.
And they've got to figure out, how am I going to feed my children today?
That's a reality.
Over five million Zambians right now are facing food insecurity in real and meaningful ways.
(08:23):
Now, we know that it's not a transaction, but whenever we visit other countries, there is an exchange.
And to be able to share with other people with the excess that we have, as you say, to be able to provide a meal is something that we're able to do.
But there's always a richness that comes from people from other nations that we seem to get so much back from them.
(08:47):
What was it that you started to see in the people in that country of Ghana in that first trip?
What was it that started to speak to you and speak to your heart?
Let me say one thing, Roddy.
I actually think Paul does present it as a transaction.
It's kind of interesting.
We've had to wrestle through this, but in 2 Corinthians 8, which is the basis of shoulder to shoulder, it says, it's not that there may be relief for others and hardship for you, but it's a question of fairness.
(09:17):
And then listen to this.
He says, at the present time, your surplus is available for their need.
So their abundance may become available for your need.
My brother and I wrestled with that.
What do the Zambians have in abundance that we need?
And the answer is faith.
When you wake up in the morning and you don't know how to feed your children, how you're going to feed your children that day, there is a level of faith that is experienced by that Christ follower that I will likely never experience in my life.
(09:45):
We call it a food for faith trade or exchange.
As I give up my resource, by definition, I'm a little less sure of my retirement.
I'm a little less sure of my future.
And so I am growing in my faith as I do that.
That's why the passage that you quoted out of 1 Timothy, where Paul says to Timothy, teach the wealthy these things, and then he gives them a list of things to teach them.
(10:09):
And then he says, so that you will have life in the future, in the future kingdom, but real life now.
We do think of this as a trade.
It's an exchange.
I'm giving something up so that I can gain something.
I believe God works that way in my heart.
And I'm sorry, I took a tangent there.
I don't even know what your question was now.
(10:30):
Sorry about that.
No, no, look, that actually demonstrates exactly the point that I was trying to get to, is that we can sometimes feel that we're the great saviors of the world, that we have so much to offer and others have nothing to give back.
But as you've said so eloquently there, and this has always been my experience when visiting people who are living in a state of poverty in other places around the world, is that there is so much that they can teach us, that we learn so much from them.
(10:59):
And part of the beauty is sitting with them and hearing their experience.
So did that hit you right away or did you actually go with that a little bit of that sense of, oh, look, I'll come and fix them?
Or was there something that hit you right away about their faith?
No, I definitely went into Ghana the first time with kind of that American pride that said, here comes the man.
(11:22):
They were doing some adoptions out of the orphanage where my friend was working.
And I sat down with him and said, hey, if you come across a teenager who needs adopted, let us know because we'd be interested in that.
We were foster parents at the time.
We had had three teenage foster daughters that we had worked with over the last five or six years.
(11:43):
And so we kind of saw her.
So we were a little older.
We're not your normal foster parents.
We were working on an empty nest.
And so we went over to meet Anita.
She must have been 14 years old at the time.
And as you know, people are not adopting 14 year old African girls.
So we went over to meet Anita, really feeling like, as you said, we were kind of the great white savior coming in.
(12:07):
And I feel terrible about that now.
But it didn't take very long even for me to recognize Anita as a double orphan living in an orphanage in a village in Ghana, had a relationship with God that gave her something that I didn't have access to.
There was something special, that idea in James 2 where James says, didn't God make the poor to be heirs of the kingdom?
(12:33):
I saw that for the first time.
Hey, she's got something spiritually that I don't get.
And it's literally because of her material lack here in this life that God said, hey, I'm going to be special to you.
You could just see it in her life.
There is a definition of poverty that says that it's a lack in four essential relationships.
Firstly, a lack of relationship between ourselves and God, then between ourselves and others, between ourselves and the rest of creation, and a relationship with ourselves.
(13:07):
When there's a breakdown in any of those, there's poverty.
When we start to apply that, we start to see that a lot of the people around us who may have plenty in stuff actually are living a life of poverty.
Did it help you to see things back home differently about the way that people are living and living without that depth of faith?
(13:29):
Yeah, it caused the Laodicean Church in Revelation 3 to jump off the page to me where they said, hey, we're rich.
We got it made.
And Jesus says to them, no, you're actually poor, wretched, and blind.
I felt that.
I begin to understand that for the first time.
And that's why in this transaction that shoulder to shoulder is promoting, my brother is primarily concerned about starving people in Zambia.
(13:58):
But my heart is really for the camels back here in the United States in the Western Church.
I really have a concern that there is a spiritual life that is available for us as wealthier people.
I don't say that braggadociously.
I'm just saying God has blessed the Western world with material goods.
(14:18):
And because of that, it makes access to some spiritual life difficult.
It were unwilling to enter into that trade, that food for faith exchange.
I'm interested in how shoulder to shoulder actually works, because there are a number of different agencies that are working in different ways that are filling various needs.
(14:39):
So how did shoulder to shoulder actually begin?
Where did you see the need and what need is it filling?
When we were in Ghana, we had a relationship with one Zambian man.
When we decided orphan care and education was not baseline ministry, but there were actually people who were starving.
My brother actually started looking around the globe saying, maybe we're not in the right location here if we want to feed hungry people.
(15:06):
We use the World Hunger Index.
Zambia is always at the very bottom of the list.
I think they're 120th out of 130 or something like that, which means there are a lot of starving people.
Zambia also is 98% Christian.
When you see Paul establish this process, he calls the collection for the saints.
(15:28):
And we believe we are a 2000 year continuation of Paul's collection for the saints.
He was looking at Christian to Christian.
He was seeing Christian brothers and sisters with excess, with surplus care for Christian brothers and sisters living in deficit.
Because Zambia is 98% Christian, we kind of headed in that direction.
(15:49):
We started actually in 2020 when the world was kind of falling apart.
We said, well, maybe we should be feeding hungry people.
So we connected with a few churches over there.
Started small in December 2019, I believe.
We sent over some gifts to a handful of churches, four or five churches, so that they could have a Christmas meal with their most vulnerable members.
(16:14):
It went well.
We sent some more in January.
We sent some more in February.
And they started saying, well, how long are you going to do this?
We said, well, we don't know, as long as God allows us to continue.
So over time, we have developed a network.
We actually have six employees in Zambia.
They are Zambian men that we know and love and trust.
And we have 122 churches that we work with.
(16:38):
So kind of the calling card of shoulder to shoulder that makes us a little bit different.
Number one, we are a parachurch in that we're a 501c3 set up in the United States.
But all of our distribution goes through the church.
We immediately take the funds that we send from America and send it into the church in Zambia.
(16:58):
So that's the first thing, is that everything gets distributed through the church.
There's no separate organization doing that.
But then the second thing that does, it means 100% of every penny that gets donated to us goes to Zambia.
We don't have American overhead.
Everything that happens here in America happens by volunteers.
(17:19):
We just have a unique distribution model that allows us to be very efficient in the way that we're caring for one another.
The beauty of it is that as you go through the local church, you're actually empowering and resourcing local pastors and local churches to do the thing that God has called them to do.
(17:41):
So in fulfilling the call that God has put on your life, you're actually helping other believers to fulfill the calling that God has put on their life.
That must be incredibly empowering for the local church there in Zambia.
It's a thrill for us as well.
So two years ago, my wife and I went to Zambia.
At that time, we only had about 45 churches.
(18:02):
What we felt God calling us to do at that point was to increase the number of eyes seeing the money going over and the number of hands distributing it.
In the second half of 2 Corinthians 8, again, we're based on this section.
Paul says, hey, I'm sending a bunch of men over and they're going to help you with this.
(18:22):
And he says, we're taking this precaution so no one can criticize us about the large sum administered by us.
And so we felt the need to take the Acts 7 model and assign deacons to the task.
My wife and I actually went and met with all of the church pastors and had them all bring five deacon or deaconesses from their churches.
(18:44):
And we assigned them as special partners with shoulder to shoulder.
The local churches over there have a pastor who receives the funds, who immediately shares them with a team of deacons and deaconesses.
The way it works in the church, there are so many vulnerable there.
We give funds each month to care for about 40 to 50 percent of those identified as vulnerable in that individual church.
(19:11):
And by doing that, we're trying to hit the most vulnerable.
We're hoping the most hungry are the ones that are receiving the funds.
In most cases, we're dealing with people who are eating two to three meals a week.
And when I use the word meal, I'm using that word loosely.
They basically have this food.
It's called enshima.
It's a ball of cornmeal.
(19:31):
It has two or three hundred calories, and they're getting two or three of those balls a week.
So if you can imagine, these people are trying to exist on less than a thousand calories per week.
Our program takes that household, that family, to two meals a day.
Our goal is that, yes, it empowers the churches to care for their people, but then it empowers those people to become participants in the kingdom because they now are consuming enough energy, enough calories, to actually become part of the work themselves.
(20:02):
It's been very exciting, very empowering to see that process take shape.
You've mentioned that you're very concerned for those back home who need that exchange of faith to understand that there is a deeper faith available.
So what's it been like on that side of the world where you're inviting others into this opportunity to give out of their excess, but in return receive this understanding that there is a greater faith that they can be part of?
(20:32):
Yeah, it's really challenging, honestly.
So you'd said early that we just sent over our one millionth dollar.
I think we're at like $1,100,000 now or something that we've sent over in the last five years.
And that's coming from the Wheeler family, my brother, his wife, our children, our family, and 122 of our friends.
(20:53):
So we basically have started putting the word out that we have this process, we have this distribution network, and our friends begin to jump in on that.
And strangers have begun to jump in as well as they realize this is a very efficient way to live in a biblical way.
But generally speaking, when I give the message out, it's difficult for those with surplus, number one, to see they have surplus.
(21:20):
A lot of American Christians see themselves as living the impoverished life in some way.
Some of it is based on some level of frugality or stewardship, and money just looks like there's not enough all the time, when in reality our needs are met very, very well in this country.
That's one of the reasons why I'm excited to be on your podcast, because when I speak with people about this Food for Faith transaction, I would say maybe one in 15 or 20 people, they see that.
(21:53):
The Spirit hits them and they say, I've been looking for something like this.
This makes sense to me.
That's one of the reasons I'm trying to kind of spread the net a little wider to see who those people are that God has put it in their hearts to say, hey, I do have surplus.
Now, how do I most effectively use this in his kingdom?
It's hard to convince a camel that he's fat.
That's just the reality.
(22:14):
I think it was hard in Jesus' day.
It's hard in my day.
It occurs to me that this is a battle that has been going on since Jesus' day.
We see it in the Scriptures.
We see it continue on.
And there seems to be this continual thought that we need to grab everything we can for ourselves.
And yet we know that other people are suffering.
(22:34):
So these friends of yours, once they do start to realize that they are people with excess and start giving, what has been their response?
Have they started to realize that God is doing something new within their lives as they start to give way to what they're being called to do?
They do become intrigued by the ministry itself.
Our goal is to build a Christian community that way, that it feels a little bit like a church.
(22:59):
In fact, we have several people who have joined us who are a little bit disillusioned with the state of the church right now.
Shoulder to Shoulder gives them a platform that says, this is more like kind of what I feel like it should be like.
We have those people who are joining us.
We've moved beyond the just simple food distribution project, although that is the heart of Shoulder to Shoulder, is monthly feeding of people who are starving.
(23:26):
That's the basis of the Shoulder to Shoulder ministry.
But we have moved into more of a development world as well, where we're doing our own farm training.
If you can imagine, if I don't have enough money to buy food, I certainly don't have enough money to buy seed and fertilizer to put in the ground to grow food.
We've began providing farm inputs to some of our farmers who we've trained in the fall, and then we're actually buying harvest from our farmers in the spring when their food becomes available.
(23:56):
So now our process is a little bit different.
We're not going out monthly and buying corn from the dealers very often.
More often, each church is sending their deacons to the storage shed to get the bag of corn that was purchased back in May and distribute it to their people according to the plan that we put in place.
(24:16):
It's interesting that Shoulder to Shoulder is only really a handful of years old, and yet already you've started to begin scaling it up.
So started with just that food distribution and then realizing you need to put it into more hands, and so called the churches and their deacons, and then you've realized the need to help that to become somewhat self-sustaining.
(24:38):
How do you see it growing into the future as you continue to scale it up, as you continue to make a way for more and more people to benefit?
Where do you feel Shoulder to Shoulder can go next?
My brother and I are pretty adamant that we have no plan.
We have no goal.
We have no vision.
We want to be faithful.
(24:59):
That is our word.
We want to be faithful with the work that He gave us.
We never intended to grow from six initial churches to 122 churches now, but that's what God has done.
And the people in Zambia continue to ask us, How long are you going to do this?
Can I count on you providing food every month?
Can we count on you buying harvest every year?
(25:20):
Well, the answer is that's really up to God.
Our goal is to be faithful as long as He allows us to manage this distribution for the saints, this collection for the saints.
But if I can say over the last five years, the first example was when my brother was looking at the next upcoming harvest three years ago.
He said, It looks like we're going to need $40,000 in the spring.
(25:44):
And I think we'd only given maybe a total of $150,000 over the first couple of years.
I said, Rob, I don't think we're going to have $40,000.
I don't know how we'll do that.
As you can imagine, God dropped $40,000 in our lap, and we were able to buy the harvest that His spreadsheet said we should be purchasing.
And we've had a half a dozen of those steps along the way, where as we look at the near term, it looks like God wants us to do something that we really can't do.
(26:14):
And we just kind of shake our heads and say, Well, okay, it looks like that's what we're called to do.
We'll see what God provides around every corner He has provided.
So I honestly, Rodney, couldn't tell you.
Are we now at 122 churches and we're going to stay there for the next decade?
Or will we be 500 churches or 1,000 churches?
We don't have a plan.
We don't have a vision.
(26:35):
Our goal is to be faithful to what God is allowing us to do.
You mentioned earlier that you were keen to have that exchange of food for faith, for the teaching that comes from seeing people who are living out faith.
How has that impacted you over the last few years?
Have you started to see that faith within you grow and within your brother and others that are involved in the project of shoulder to shoulder?
(27:02):
There is no question.
The first time that my brother came to me and said, We need $40,000.
And I said, I don't think that's going to happen.
And then it happened.
That was faith building for me.
The last time my wife and I were in Zambia, which was two years ago, we were assigning deacons in all of our churches.
And my brother had said, Hey, we need to plant $150,000 worth of fields, worth of cornfields.
(27:27):
We needed seed and fertilizer for 1,000 fields.
That was going to cost $150,000.
And so I began to tell the story while I was there.
You guys need to pray for us.
We need $150,000 in America so we can do the planting this fall.
And we don't have it.
We don't have anywhere near that.
We announced that as we were traveling around the country.
(27:49):
We came back.
We began to raise those funds.
We began to put the word out.
By the end of the year, we had sent $150,000 to plant those fields.
The next time that God says, Hey, I think you're going to need to do this.
I'm not going to question it.
The next time my brother says, Hey, the spreadsheet suggests we're going to be 300 churches next year.
(28:11):
I'll probably shake my head and say, Yeah, I think we probably will be then.
I do believe God has called us to the work, and it's clear that what he asks us to do, he's going to provide.
It's been a beautiful faith-building experience for me personally.
What you're doing with Shoulder to Shoulder is quite different to the pattern that has been set up by various agencies.
(28:32):
I can imagine that there are people listening at the moment who might think I still haven't quite got my head around that.
One of the great things that you've done on the website is there's video there that helps to explain step-by-step what's going on, and it actually gives people a view of what's happening there on the ground.
I would highly recommend people head there.
(28:54):
I do have a link to the website in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net.
What else will people find there at the website?
If they're looking for confidence to be involved in what you're doing, if what they've heard excites them, what else will they find on that website that will help them towards that?
They'll see a little bit of a bio about us, the Wheeler family, my brother and I, and we're not important people.
(29:18):
We're real estate agents that are trying to be faithful to what God has called us to, and we want people to see that, that this is just a small-town family doing a small-town thing, trying to be faithful to God.
I think that's evident on the website.
You'll also see bios of some of our people in Zambia, and they are faithful men, and the website will allow you to get to know them a little bit.
(29:40):
You can see a map of Zambia, which will identify kind of the areas where we're doing work.
The other thing is you can donate there.
There's just a button, and you can click to become a one-time donor or a monthly donor, and, man, when people click on that, heaven rejoices.
Certainly the Wheelers rejoice, because we know some people in Zambia are going to eat.
Roger, I want to thank you for your time on Bleeding Daylight.
(30:03):
As I say, people will find a link to the Shoulder to Shoulder website at bleedingdaylight.net in the show notes there, and I do hope that people check that out, and hopefully we'll jump on board and help out as well.
Roger, it's been a delight to hear of your story.
We wish you well for the continued success of Shoulder to Shoulder.
Thank you, Rodney.
Appreciate your work.
(30:23):
Appreciate the invitation.
God bless you and all you're doing.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
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