Mission as Midwife
One of the big problems in global kingdom partnership is the naïve assumption that any church our church supports anywhere in the world should look essentially like our church. When that turns out not to be the case, it can threaten the partnership. One African brother expressed it this way to me: “If the baby doesn’t look like the mamma, she often doesn’t want to nurse it, even if it looks like the daddy.”. When that happens, we end up exporting our culture along with the gospel and subverting the impact of the church in other areas.
In a recent blog article, I discussed the problem with Mule Missions. These are ministries that are cultural mixes of the foreign workers and the destination countries. When this happens, the church has not been contextualized to fit the culture where it resides. These kinds of churches can be strong only as long as there is foreign funding and leadership, but they don’t replicate well and tend to live only one generation.
Part of the problem is that we often have a poor mental image of our role in global missions. American churches and missions organizations tend to adopt a parental identity in missions. We see ourselves as the father or mother of churches in other countries. That seems natural in some ways, but it creates all kinds of problems. Jesus specifically told us in Matthew 23:9 not to call anyone father (and likely by extension, mother). There is only one father in the Kingdom of God and we are not him. We may be brothers and sisters to each other, but we are not above our siblings in the faith. I realize Paul sometimes used a parental metaphor for his relationship with Timothy or a church he planted, but he was an apostle, and he was expressing intimate affection not making a power move. While not every use of parental imagery is necessarily evil or forbidden, there is a very real danger of creating an unhealthy abuse of power.
I suggest we opt for a humbler metaphor: midwife. God is the Father of us all. The church universal can be seen as our mother in a way. But, as we serve God in mission, we are helping something be born that does not belong to us. It will not be our child or possession. We are invited by God to join him and come alongside others and play a critical role in the expansion of his family, but we are assistants, servants, and siblings.
This means that God’s children need to look like Christ, but they don’t need to look like us. We can be midwives, traveling partners, or even mentors, but we need to avoid thinking of ourselves as parents lest we seek to produce children in our own image instead of in the image of God seen in the person of Jesus. This will enable us to support expressions of church that fit each culture and help them find faithful ways to honor our common Father in heaven.