“When the Missionaries came, they brough us the Bread of Life in the plastic bag of western culture. We ate it in the bag, never really tasted it, and now we are constipated.”
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“Brother Bouchelle, how do we defeat the Pentecostals?” This was one of the more surprising questions anyone ever asked me.
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There is much we can learn from businesspeople. There is a place to talk about efficiency and impact. We are called to be good stewards. That said, there are times when God calls us to do things that don't make sense to the business mind. Not everything God is up to can be justified on a balance sheet.
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“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” - Eph. 6:12
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Missions is fraught with challenges because it is based on partnerships between people who are separated across vast distances of space, culture, training, experience, expertise, and roles. What is not as well understood is the gap in understanding between field workers and many of their donors.
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The COVID-19 pandemic created endless problems and shut many things down. But it also gave us a chance to step back and evaluate what we were so busy doing that we may have lost an objective perspective on it. In at least that respect, the pandemic was a gift hidden in a tragedy. This is certainly true when it comes to short term missions (STM).
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It was a perplexing time for me. While things looked good on the surface at the church where I served, I could see massive obstacles ahead and didn’t know how to move through them without losing the critical mass of the congregation in the process. The demographic trends were going to overwhelm us in the next decade. I did not know what to do. We were working too hard for the results we were seeing.
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In Revelation, Jesus' birth is told as it appears in the heavenly realms. We get to peek behind the curtain and see Christmas from the viewpoint of the angels. In this story, Christmas was hardly a silent night when all was calm and bright. It was the beginning of the decisive battle in a cosmic war that determines the future of all the universe.
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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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