We just love heroes and love to pretend to be heroes. Most of the time, this is harmless enough, but hero narratives become a huge problem when it comes to global missions.
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One of the great challenges missionaries from America face is the widespread misperception that Christianity is a western religion that only makes sense to people from western cultures.
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“We don’t want just to throw money at some mission point, we want to be connected to something where we can actually get our members involved.”
I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve heard the above sentiment from church leaders. While I understand where they are coming from and can affirm much of what drives such a statement, I always feel conflicted when I hear this statement. Behind the good intentions reflected in this kind of thinking lurk some problems that need to be identified and screened out.
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Like it or not, the church has often taken in things from local cultures, replaced the meanings, and brought them into the practice of the Christian faith as a way of focusing existing habits on Jesus. We could look at all these things as corruptions of the faith. But are they?
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One of the biggest challenges we face when talking about race is that we don’t have a common vocabulary. For example, using the word “justice” associated with race evokes vastly different reactions. We have had different experiences, so we don’t see the same things or use the same language to describe what we see. Therefore, we misunderstand each other.
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“I just wish I could put you all on an airplane so you could meet the people that have come to know the Lord because of your support.” – Ron Frietas
I can’t tell you how many times I heard Ron Frietas say this to the Alameda church in Norman, Oklahoma, back in the ‘90’s when he and his wife Georgia were our missionaries to Curitiba, Brazil.
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If your congregation is going to have a healthy, impactful, and resilient missions ministry, the things you get involved with globally need to fit who you are locally. If you are out of alignment, you will likely end up in one or more of the ministry dysfunctions I wrote about earlier in this series.
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In my last blog article, I wrote about common dysfunctions of missions’ ministries. I hoped it could help churches in the same way that Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team has helped business organizations avoid the habits that destroy their effectiveness.
However, the real challenge is not just spotting and deconstructing dysfunctions. We also need to construct healthy missions ministries proactively. That is more complicated.
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Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Leo Tolstoy, AnnaKarenina
This is one of the most famous opening lines in world literature. It’s classic. Who can argue with it? Well, call me crazy, but I think Tolstoy is just plain wrong.
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Every morning after tending to the dogs and getting my coffee, I sit down for some time alone with God and the Bible. I’ve done this more years than I can count. However, I’m finding the room increasingly crowded as the years go by. It seems not to matter what part of the Bible I’m in, I run into old friends waiting on me there. There are my old Bible professors and preachers I’ve heard through the years. My parents and grandparents are lurking about in most books, with their repeated admonitions in hand.
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What is the role of the church vis-à-vis the world around us? What is our mission? What is God doing in the world and what is our role in it? Too often, we just haven’t done the work to get to a common understanding of these core issues in Christian circles. If we don’t get clarity around these questions from a biblically informed gospel perspective, we will end up importing ideas from other arenas of our culture as default values.
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Our country and our churches are not in the same place as when I was born in the 1960s. However, the question, “Haven’t we made progress?” always makes me a little nervous. Here is why.
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One of the side-effects of the Coronavirus pandemic has been the quashing of short-term mission (STM) trips. In a flash, a $5 billion-dollar-a-year industry came to a screeching halt. This has been devastating to organizations focusing on STMs and has interrupted a lot of important work. That said, STMs were in need of a thorough evaluation and re-visioning.
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The past year has been hard, and no one is at their best. Grief, loss, and fear have been all around us. We are coming out of the storm shelter and surveying the damage even while the threat of the storm is still around us. We are sad, scared, and angry. The level of bad behavior from typically good and reasonable people has been at an all-time high. We aren’t sure what to do with all that now.
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One of the most common expressions you will hear in global missions is: “It is time for Americans to pass the baton to national leaders.” This is a well-intended sentiment that recognizes that the leadership for kingdom expansion and development needs to be in the hands of national leaders as quickly as possible. That is good and true. But the “pass the baton” expression contains some serious problems that need to be examined and corrected.
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Is missions a parasite or bone marrow for your church? Does it drain the life blood from your church or generate life blood for the church? I’ve seen it do both.
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“I must be dreaming! I can’t believe I’m hearing this. I never thought I would live to see the day that I’d hear an American say such things!”
Those words, spoken with tears and great emotion, were spoken by a church leader from a French-speaking country in West Africa at a leadership conference I attended along with some of my MRN colleagues about 6 years ago.
Everyone loves the idea of peace. We all desire it. No one wakes up in the morning looking for a fight. We don’t like resistance and want smooth sailing and harmony. So why doesn’t that love of peace produce peace?
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During the 22 years I was a preacher in a local church, the most difficult question I was asked routinely was, “How is the church doing?” I never knew what to say. How do you measure this? Should we count how many people show up for Sunday worship? How many baptisms we’ve had this year? Whether or not we’re meeting our budget? How many people are truly on a discipleship track? How well are we impacting our city with tangible expressions of hope, justice, and righteousness? How enjoyable or challenging it is to be part of the congregation?
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Did you know there are no white people in the Bible? Does that surprise you? It’s true, I assure you. Not Adam, Abraham, Moses, Deborah, David, Elijah, Jezebel, Daniel, Jesus, Peter, Paul, or even Lydia or the church in Rome were white. Most of the people in the Bible were Jews of middle eastern origin. The few people in the Bible from the region we now call Europe may have had light-colored skin and would be considered white today, but they were not white in their day.
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