The Church in Mission

There is so much interest in short term mission trips, at least on the receiving end. I’m not so sure this is generating as much interest on the sending end. I am including one more for those who are interested. It comes from missionary and theological educator, Archibald Woodruff, working in Brazil some 20 years partnership with the Independent Presbyterian Church in Brazil. Here is what he has to say:

These are my reflections on Missiology, 34/4 (2006), a special issue devoted to Short-Term Missions (STM’s). The journal is published in Wilmore, Kentucky, and the guest editor of this issue is Robert J. Priest. I was sent a copy by the PCUSA in Louisville, and reflections were invited. I will share these reflections also with my Brazilian church and with Joe Small, both for reasons that will emerge in this paper.

The strong concerns about the all-too-vigorous STM movement did not exactly come out of the blue. Fairly recently I received, from María Arroyo, an eloquent paper (or grito) on the subject by Dennis Smith (By the way, Dennis has had significant professional contact with Leonildo Silveira Campos, a sociologist of religion who belongs to my Brazilian church). Brazil is blessed by distance and high air fares and has thus been spared the tidal wave of STM’s with which Central America and the Caribbean have had to deal. Nevertheless, we do have experience here with mission visits. Personally, I find these articles painful to read in places, because I was part tourist and part STM myself before, at the age of 45, I became a long-term missionary. This part of my history has made me a bit more patient with mission visitors, perhaps, than some of the other long-term missionaries are.

My first recommendation: I hope that, in addition to sending this issue of Missiology to PCUSA missionaries, you have sent it to partner churches or at least some of them. Certainly our Brazilian partners are partners in missiology as well as partners in mission. Also, the article by Edwin Zehner recommends a greater role for partner churches in supervising STM’s, and it seems pointless to debate this without input from partner churches. I will return to the issue below.

Second recommendation: Educate our people about the missionary churches. At my missionary orientation at Stony Point 20 years ago, Marcia Borgeson played a sort of group game with us, calling on each of us to describe our idea of a missionary. Is a missionary somebody wearing a pith helmet? Well, instead of having an idea of a missionary person, I had an idea of a missionary church. That was because, mostly on a lark, I had spent a year at the Waldensian seminary in Italy. To me, a missionary church is a church that sings certain hymns and where the preacher likes to preach on certain favorite texts. For the Waldensians, that seemed to be the missionary instruction in Matthew 10. And I was sent to a missionary church, the Independent Presbyterian Church of Brazil, which sings different missionary hymns and preaches different missionary texts, but which has a mission dynamic that is not always present in the PCUSA. What I’m thinking of is a lot to ask, since PCUSA people don’t learn much church history, let alone mission history. I wonder if 02% of our people know who Francis Mackemie was, and what proportion of them know that Mackemie was sent to our shores by the Presbytery of Donegal. A terribly small percentage of them must know about the Waldensians (Presbyterians under another name) who planted churches all over Italy without foreign personnel, or about the Brazilian Presbyterians who walked out of a Synod meeting in 1903, over one of the issues of the day on which they had taken a conservative position-and have kept up a missionary spirit ever since. Our people need to know more church history, and that includes mission history.

Our people are probably sensing inarticulately that the flame of Christian faith is burning brightly in some places in the world, and that their back yard isn’t one of them. Who wouldn’t want to be in touch with that? If people were clearer about wanting that, then they might start to open up to alternatives to the work camp as a way of achieving it. As for the receiving church as supervisor of STM’s, each church must speak for itself. What I can say is that (1) asking the receiving church for active supervision is to make a demand on the receiving church, and (2) once the receiving church calls the shots, the experience may not correspond to the visitor’s expectations. Living through that is part of what it’s all about, but there does need to be a Plan B for a very young person overseas who just can’t deal with it (We’ve had one).

The recommendation in one of the articles that people go for an experience rather than a mission looks good from receiving end of these visits, but it can’t fly without a good deal of baggage that just isn’t there in the U.S. church. But that’s where a long term goal has to be.

On the fund-raising matter, I am pessimistic. If there is to be funding in the future for anything other than STM’s and church planting, then education about the missionary churches will need to be part of the mix. Managing STM’s in a different way probably won’t cut it. Reason: there are people out there who would have liked to be missionaries but couldn’t, so they sent their money for missions. Now they can go themselves. Only the perception of missions as something bigger than the individual missionary, even the career missionary, can possibly do it.

Third, while taking seriously the alternative “models” of what these people are doing on a two-week trip, I wouldn’t take the word “mission” out of it. If my recommendation number two were successfully implemented, the two week trip would be understood as the privilege of participating in something bigger, which my 20 year career also is. Of all the mission visitors I have been aware of in São Paulo, the most demanding and least adaptable have been the ones who had the weakest identification with mission traditions.

Fourth, while local partnerships (Presbytery to Presbytery and church to church) present many of the same problems as the STM trips do and some more besides, they seem preferable to the two week visit that is complete in itself and has no follow-through in the subsequent life of its participants.

Fifth, the PCUSA does receive STM’s and there is room for more. The Mission to the U.S. program has been important. It helped to create a reciprocity of which my coming to Brazil was a part. It has been a setting for dialogue among Christians from different countries, and significant dialogue seems to be missing from the STM’s as described in the journal articles. At another level, a Brazilian seminarian once approached me after a STM group had just painted a wall at one of our seminaries. He wondered if he could go and paint something in the U.S. He is a mercurial young man, and I don’t know how serious he was. But I was serious in saying that it probably wouldn’t be terribly hard to arrange; we could probably find a PCUSA church that does Habitat for Humanity work and could receive a summer visitor. This particular young man, however, wound up making an STM within Brazil, to the Amazon region.

Sixth, the question of tourism calls for research and reflection in its own right. While Miriam Adeney’s recommendation seems superficial (Be considerate to the maid), the importance of the question is beyond question, and so is the resemblance of the STM and other forms of tourism. Two political magazines that Linnis and I receive, the Progressive and the Nation, have come down differently, although these two magazines carry many of the same authors and come down on the same side of most issues. The Progressive, more than once, has given voice to native Hawaiians who say, “Don’t come here on vacation and then try to show solidarity with us. Show your solidarity by staying home.” Hawaii, going by what they say, is saturated with outsiders, not to mention their golf courses. I ran that past a student from the Dominican Republic, who said, “Lógico” (“Of course”). Going by what she says, the Dominican Republic has a thoroughly toxic tourist industry that buys very little locally and impedes fishermen’s access to the ocean. The Nation said once that instead of burdening local populations with one’s search for an educational experience, one should just enjoy the beach and spend money, on which the local population may depend. Somebody, somewhere, must be working on this.

Seventh, David M. Johnstone’s views on follow-through after an STM look good to me, as far as I can tell without being a professional educator. Essential. I add, from my own life: Before I became a long-term missionary, I had significant cross-cultural experiences, but they were not in a mission context. They were in an educational context-and I got an education.

Eighth, none of the articles even mentioned music. Church visitors are sometimes asked to sing. You can say that’s old fashioned (but work camps go back a long time, too) and that it’s a superficial form of communication (but painting a wall is superficial communication, too). In Brazil, and probably in some other missionary countries, the singing is taken seriously. This gives some seriousness to the idea of young people sharing each other’s music. Also, if you have any rudiments at all of a language, the words to a praise chorus projected on a wall can often be followed. The next time STM’s are studied, the role of music in them might be worth a look.

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