Missions is about living in light of our position as image-bearers of God. It’s about giving people a living picture of who God is, what He cares about, and how He acts. It’s about giving other people a picture of what a group of people obeying God looks like. It’s a way for us to join with a long legacy of God’s people in making Him known to all the world.
We must not go overseas to do something we aren’t already doing in our own neighborhood (or, in the parlance of our Jamaican brothers and sisters, “Ya gotta dance a’yad before ya dance abroad.”)
Most short-term participants report having life-changing experiences, including identifying their own culture’s consumerist values, and being challenged to a life of missions, but revert to their old ways within 6-8 weeks. This is primarily a result of 1)poor pre-field preparation, 2) lack of time to process and journal on-field, 3) inadequate post-field debriefing. Is my cross-cultural work driven most by my desire to follow Christ, or my sense of adventure?
- While people have more access to knowledge and information about the world than ever before (internet, virtual tours, movies), the true reality of the world and what most people deal with each day is still far from our experiential knowledge (poverty, hunger, thirst, lack of med help, fear, spiritual darkness, disease, political oppression, etc.)
- World population is growing rapidly
- 20% of the world live on $1 a day; 20% live on $2 a day; 20% live on more than $70 a day
- More than 2 billion children live in our world, half in poverty; 1 in 4 children have to work instead of go to school; 8% of people in the world own a car
- 40% of the world has inadequate sanitation; over 1 billion lack safe drinking water
Globalization may make people in different places look the same, but their cultures are vastly different
The western church has been overtaken by the Global South as the trendsetter and the center of Christianity.
A radical sense of community is what made the early church attractive – what is needed is not self-sufficiency among the poor, but a way of partnering across cultural and economic differences that affirms Christian solidarity, the interdependence of the Body of Christ. When 40% of the world earns less than $2 a day, can there ever be a point where majority-world churches are totally self-sufficient?
Our mission trips usually assume we have something to offer the churches and communities we visit, but there is much to learn from them as well
While non-Western leaders say their #1 need is leadership training, most do not want to use Western models to meet that need
The way we anticipate a situation will strongly influence how we engage in it
- What are the realities of the majority world church? How do those differ from our assumptions about the majority world church and its people?
- What makes the place and people tick?
- What is the history of the church? Of the work with which we are partnering?
- What will we be doing? What are we aiming to achieve?
- What do we expect to learn from them?
We cannot take what ought to be modus operandi for all of us every day as Christians and suddenly call it a “missions project.”
Most of the reports about the positive impact we have had on a community come from the goers, not the intended receivers.
Most locals would rather see money spent on buying local products and giving locals jobs. What if we committed to spend at least as much money supporting the projects we visit on our short-term trips as we do on getting us there?
Seizing the moment and making a difference are compelling forces in our cross-cultural experiences, but often our desire to jump in and do something can reflect a human-centered approach to missions rather than a God-centered one. Our inspiration and zeal overpower our ability to step back and engage in serious reflection. We look for “what works” and measure success based on our effectiveness and efficiency. But the local church knows what works and they have to remain there long after we have left.
We tend to both 1) look for similarities between locals and ourselves, then 2) generalize an isolated trait to the entire culture. When we’re in a cross-cultural context for only a brief amount of time, we interpret everything we see through our own cultural framework rather than learning, over time, to identify with another culture.
We tend to think that church is church wherever we go.
We interpret the Bible through our own cultural contexts, often asking what the Bible means for us instead of asking what the Bible meant in its original context.
Inevitably, the issue of poverty will be encountered by trip participants.
Generosity brings with it the subtle but important issues of power. We must not imply that we are blessed because of our wealth, while those with less than us are not. We also must not believe that those we serve want what we have. We do not wish to import the idol of consumerism. There are ways we are both poor, and both rich. Nor do we wish to imply that we know what they need.
There is a clear ethical responsibility that comes with encountering poverty.
The tendency to find common ground - wherein we tend to focus on similarities instead of seeing differences and where we generalize unique situations and people to an entire culture – is seamlessly related to our tendency to oversimplify the complex issues we encounter on short-term trips. If we never ask the deeper questions, we’re at the risk of missing some core issues.
Our level of interest in and commitment to connecting with the culture as a whole will directly shape how well we do our work in subtle but profound ways.
The success of our trip will be judged by our behavior rather than our accomplishments. Our behavior on the field will determine our success or failure in the eyes of the intended receivers. Our behavior post-field, after six weeks, or six months, will determine success in the eyes of the senders.
We cannot truly serve those we do not know and love.
The biggest challenges lie in communication, misunderstanding, personality conflicts, poor leadership, and bad teamwork
