http://www.pcusa.org/missionchallenge07/#

http://www.pcusa.org/missioncelebration/ 

• a video narrated by Hunter Farrell available online at: http://www.pcusa.org/missionchallenge07/index.htm
• Mission Challenge ’07 materials are you can see now at http://staging.pcusa.org/mc07
• a new “simplified giving” Web site went live a week ago: www.pcusa.org/mission so you can trully designate your funds to specific missionaries and projects

Take full advantage of these resources and let’s promote God’s great mission, also in this way!

Posted on Aug 2, 2007 15:45pm CST.
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All Things Catholic – John L. Allen, Jr.

If there were any lingering question about whether there’s a spiritual boom in China today, it now has a two word answer: Yu Dan.

A 42-year-old female talk show host and pop culture icon, Yu Dan is the author of Notes on Reading the Analects — a sort of Confucian Chicken Soup for the Soul — which has sold somewhere between 3 and 4 million copies, making it one of the biggest best-sellers in China since Mao’s “Little Red Book.” Dan’s success illustrates that China has become, according to writer Zha Jianying, the “largest soul market” in the world. With a population of 1.3 billion, China is trying to fill an ideological void left by the collapse of Communism as anything more than a system of political control, and the dislocations of astonishing but uneven levels of economic growth.

There are so many wounded, helpless souls that are desperate to find something to believe in and to hold onto after these drastic changes — Jianying told Reuters in May.

Dan’s post-modern Confucianism is not the only spiritual option riding this wave. In northwestern China, an estimated 20 to 30 million Muslims are also in the grip of a revival. According to a 2006 report in Asia Times, new Muslim schools are opening with a strong accent on Islamic orthodoxy, young Chinese Muslims are studying across the Middle East and bringing new missionary energies home, and rising numbers of Chinese Muslims are making the annual hajj to Mecca. China’s post- Deng Xiaoping economic opening has expanded opportunities for Muslim nations, especially Saudi Arabia, to fund Islamic enterprises in China.

Perhaps the most remarkable burst of religious energy is in China’s Pentecostal Christian population. At the time of the Communist takeover in 1949, there were roughly 900,000 Protestants. Today, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, which puts out the much-consulted World Christian Database, says there are 111 million Christians in China, roughly 90 percent Protestant and mostly Pentecostal. That would make China the third-largest Christian country on earth, following only the United States and Brazil.

The Center projects that by 2050, there will be 218 million Christians in China, 16 percent of the population, enough to make China the world’s second-largest Christian nation. According to the Center, there are 10,000 conversions in China every day.

Religious data is notoriously imprecise in an officially atheistic state, and not everyone accepts these eye-popping estimates. In the 2006 update of his book Jesus in Beijing, former Time Beijing bureau chief David Aikman put the number of Protestants at 70 million. Richard Madsen, a former Maryknoll missionary and author of China’s Catholics, told me he would put the number still lower, at 40 million. That’s in line with the CIA World Factbook, another widely consulted resource.

Even those conservative estimates, however, would mean that Protestantism in China experienced roughly 4,300 percent growth over the last half-century, most of it since the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and 1970s. A four-part video series issued in 2003, called “The Cross: Jesus in China,” and produced by Chinese documentarian Yuan Zhiming, interviews many of the leaders of this revival, whose evangelical drive is palpable. Notably, Protestantism took off after the expulsion of foreign missionaries, meaning most of the expansion has been home-grown.

Curiously, this booming “soul market” seems largely to have bypassed the Catholic church. In 1949, there were 3.3 million Catholics. The most common estimate today is 12 million. Over that time, China’s population increased by a factor of four, which means that Catholicism has done little more than keep pace. A half-century ago, Chinese Protestantism was three and a half times smaller than Catholicism; today, it is at least three and a half times larger.

In a 2003 interview, then-Bishop Joseph Zen of Hong Kong (now a cardinal) said that Protestants are “winning” the contest for the souls of the Chinese.

Of course, given the harsh persecution of Chinese Catholics, the fact that the faith survived at all is in some ways a miracle. Those persecutions continue into the present; just last week, three Catholic priests were arrested in Inner Mongolia for refusing to submit to China’s state-sponsored Catholic association. The heroism of Chinese clergy and laity is without a doubt one of the most inspirational chapters in church history.

Yet persecution has not fallen on Catholics alone. Protestants, Buddhists, Daoists, Muslims, the Falungong, and others have similar stories of martyrdom to tell. One Protestant pastor told Aikman, “Chinese prison is my seminary. Police handcuffs and the electric nightstick are our equipment. That is God’s special training for the Gospel.” Despite similar experiences, Catholicism seemingly has not experienced the same recent surge.

Why not? Veteran China-watchers generally offer four explanations.

(1) Lack of Ecclesial Infrastructure

According to a 2005 analysis by Maryknoll Sr. Betty Ann Maheu, there are 6,000 Catholic churches in China but 3,000 priests, which would mean that roughly half the Catholic churches in the country lack a resident priest. Overall, the priest-to-Catholic ratio in China is about 4,000-to-one, better than Latin America (where it’s 7,000-to-one) or the Caribbean (more than 8,300-to-one,) but considerably worse than in Europe (1,100-to-one) or the United States (1,300-to-one). A significant number of Chinese priests are also in jail or placed under other forms of supervision.

Maheu says that in the short term, the priest shortage in China is likely to deepen. There was a vocations boom in the early 1980s, she said, but today numbers are dropping, as expanding economic opportunities makes recruitment and retention more difficult. Madsen says that even in Shanghai, normally held up as the most dynamic urban Catholic community in the country, most seminarians come from rural Catholic villages whose populations are in decline.

China has 110 dioceses and 114 active bishops, which in theory means that most dioceses should have a bishop. At least a dozen bishops, however, are in jail, under house arrest or subjected to severe surveillance. Because of doubts over the legitimacy of bishops who have registered with the government, their leadership is often contested. Given chronic tensions between China and the Vatican, dioceses sometimes remain vacant for extended periods. Some of the youngest bishops in the world today are in China, many appointed in their early 30s, in part out of fear that the opportunity to name another one might not roll around again soon.

Maheu notes that there are more than 5,000 religious women in China, saying the growth of religious life has “great potential” for the church.

(2) The Sociology of Chinese Catholicism

Historically, Catholicism in China was almost entirely a rural phenomenon. Madsen says that despite run-away urbanization, 70-75 percent of Catholics are probably still concentrated in largely homogenous Catholic villages, especially in Hebei and Shanxi provinces in the northeastern area around Beijing. Even the urban footprint of Catholicism, he said, is largely composed of villagers who have relocated to the city, and experience suggests it’s sometimes difficult for them to maintain the faith in this new environment.

The tenacity of these Catholic villagers is the stuff of legend. China’s Catholics tells the story of a village in Shanxi Province where a family planning team arrived in 1985 to try to distribute contraception in accord with the state’s “one-child” policy. Villagers surrounded their car, and when the team retreated to their living quarters, the villagers hurled rocks through the windows. Eventually the team had to be rescued by the police, and fled the area.

Yet the rural character of the church also means that it is handicapped in terms of missionary expansion, since preserving Catholic communities is often a higher priority than making new converts. Catholics are under-represented in urban areas, which are creating the most vibrant “growth markets” for new spiritual movements.

The insularity of some rural communities, Madsen says, also means that many reforms triggered by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) never really arrived. Even in cosmopolitan Shanghai, the first Chinese-language Mass wasn’t celebrated until 1989. (Ironically, this is one point upon which Chinese Communists and Catholic traditionalists agree. Both prefer Mass in Latin, in the case of the Communists because it means that most people won’t understand it.)

(3) Internal Division

Chinese Catholicism is deeply lacerated over the question of cooperation with the Communist regime. For the most part, China-watchers say, Catholics who tolerate state oversight do so not out of enthusiasm for the official project of a “self-governed, self-funded, self-propagated” church, but rather because it seems the best survival strategy. Nonetheless, Catholics who reject this option out of unwavering loyalty to the pope, and who often endure prison, harassment, and discrimination, frequently regard “open” Catholics as compromised.

In their most extreme form, the divisions can turn violent. In 1992, an “open church” priest in Henan was murdered by a disgruntled seminarian who claimed that he had been denied ordination because of his ties to the unofficial church. The priest collapsed and died after drinking from what was literally a poisoned chalice at Mass.

Recent years have seen significant efforts to heal this breach. Conventional estimates are that as many as 90 percent of bishops ordained without the authority of the pope now have received Vatican recognition. Catholics from both the open and the unregistered church often worship together and receive the sacraments from the same clergy; it has become a mantra that “there is only one Catholic church in China.”

Yet the bitterness is hardly a museum piece. Pope Benedict XVI released a “Letter to Chinese Catholics” in May, which called for unity and pledged that Catholicism is not an enemy of the state, but also insisted that the church cannot accept interference in its internal life. Notably, Benedict revoked faculties given in 1978 for “underground” bishops to appoint successors and to ordain priests without contact with Rome.

Fierce debates broke out over how to interpret the letter. One testy exchange has been between Belgian missionary Fr. Jeroom Heyndrickx, a frequent Vatican advisor on China, and Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong, an outspoken critic of the Communist regime.

In early July, Heyndrickx published a commentary on the pope’s letter with the Union of Catholic Asian News, stressing that it called for dialogue and unity. Among other things, Heyndrickx suggested it would be desirable for unregistered bishops to come out into the open.

Zen published a tough response on July 18, which began by saying that Heyndrickx has lost the “vast consensus and positive regard” he once enjoyed among Chinese Catholics.

“Fr. Heyndrickx’s every initiative needs the approval of Mr. Liu Bainian, of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, and has to be carried out according to conditions imposed by him. Mr. Liu’s prestige has thus been steadily built up,” Zen wrote, referring to the official state regulatory body for Catholic affairs.

Zen went on to argue that there is still a need for the clandestine church in China, and that in many, if not most, cases, bishops should not apply for registration. Those who act without the authority of the pope, he said, should be subject to canonical sanctions.

Heyndrickx shot back on July 20: “I have learned that it does not take much courage to use the media to prove one’s own views and criticize others, while it takes a lot of guts to sit down with those who disagree with you and have long personal dialogues to overcome differences and seek the common ground.”

Whatever one makes of this exchange, it illustrates the tensions that course through Chinese Catholicism, making it difficult to exploit new missionary opportunities.

(4) Missionary Strategy

Much Catholic conversation about evangelization in China is usually phrased in the subjunctive: “If China were to open up on religious freedom …” or “If the Holy See and China were to establish diplomatic relations …” The implicit assumption is sometimes that structural change is required before Catholicism can truly move into an expansion phase.

Pentecostal talk about mission, on the other hand, is very much phrased in the simple present. Most Pentecostals would obviously welcome being arrested less frequently, but in general they are not waiting for legal or political reform before carrying out aggressive evangelization programs. The most audacious even dream of carrying the gospel beyond the borders of China, along the old Silk Road into the Muslim world, in a campaign known as “Back to Jerusalem.” As Aikman explains in Jesus in Beijing, some Chinese Evangelicals and Pentecostals believe that the basic movement of the gospel for the last 2,000 years has been westward: from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Europe, from Europe to America, and from America to China. Now, they believe, it’s their turn to complete the loop by carrying the gospel to Muslim lands, eventually arriving in Jerusalem. Once that happens, they believe, the gospel will have been preached to the entire world.

Most experts regard that prospect as deeply improbable; Madsen said he doubts more than a handful of Protestants in China take the “Back to Jerusalem” vision seriously. Aikman is more sanguine, reporting that as of 2005 two underground Protestant seminaries in China were training believers for work in Islamic nations. In any event, it’s revealing as an indication of missionary ferment.

One exception to the general Catholic hesitancy is Bishop Jin Luxian of Shanghai, a controversial figure because of his willingness to register with the government, but someone who enjoys the respect of many senior Catholic leaders internationally. Luxian, the subject of a flattering profile in the current issue of The Atlantic, is revamping his cathedral to draw upon traditional Chinese aesthetics, part of a larger program of forging an authentically Chinese expression of the Catholic faith.

“The old church appealed to 3 million Catholics,” he said. “I want to appeal to 100 million Catholics.”

The Future

By universal consensus, China is an emerging global superpower. Its economy grew at an average annual rate of 9.4 percent over the last 25 years, and today has a GDP of $11 trillion, making it the second-largest economy in the world after the United States. Foreign companies have poured more than $600 billion into China since 1978, far eclipsing what the United States spent rebuilding post-war Europe in the Marshall Plan. China now has a middle class of 200 million people, 80 million of whom are quite well-off. The country exports more in a single day than it did in all of 1978.

How things shake out religiously, therefore, is of tremendous strategic importance, even for people who don’t feel any particular spiritual stake in the result. If Christianity ends up at around 20 percent of the population, for example, China could become an exponentially larger version of South Korea (where Christians are between 25-50 percent of the population, depending upon which count one accepts) — a more democratic, rule-oriented, basically pro-Western society. On the other hand, if dynamic Muslim movements create an Islamic enclave in the western half of the country, with financial and ideological ties to fundamentalist Wahhabi forms of Islam in Saudi Arabia, at least that part of China could become a wealthier and more influential Afghanistan. If growing religious pluralism in China becomes fractious, it could mean that a well-armed and wealthy superpower is destabilized by internal conflict, posing risks to global peace and security.

Catholicism could potentially offer a positive ingredient in China’s new spiritual stew. In part, the church could realize significant numbers of new members, even if mere statistical growth is not an end in itself — as Benedict XVI said recently, “statistics are not our divinity.” Perhaps more importantly, Madsen believes, a dynamic and growing Catholicism could be an important force in building a healthy civil society in China.

For that to happen, however, the four liabilities outlined above would somehow have to be addressed. At present, it’s difficult to see that happening. As Maheu said in 2005, “Short of a series of miracles, the journey of Catholicism in China will continue, in my opinion, to be uphill in the foreseeable and even distant future.”

One key to Pentecostalism’s worldwide expansion, however, is that Pentecostals live in constant expectation of just such a series of miracles. Perhaps rather than waiting for the “one step forward, two steps back” ballet between Rome and Beijing to reach conclusion, Chinese Catholics will steal a page from the Pentecostal playbook, and embrace a vision of “the future is now.” It would be fascinating to watch them try.

Westerners often assume, however, that overseas projects just cannot get along without us and consequently, faithfulness in world mission becomes a matter of writing checks. Glenn Schwartz of World Mission Associates, in his recent book, gives good insight and offers sound advice to churches who seek to encourage self-reliance and curb dependency in their desire to further God’s rule throughout the world. Check it out:

• When Charity Destroys Dignity. Overcoming Unhealthy Dependency in the Christian Movement. by Glenn J. Schwartz (World Mission Associates) available through www.wmausa.org

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.

Technorati: Short Term Mission Trips, Partnership in Mission, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), mission partnerships,

Frame the experience less on an emphasis on the “great commission” and more on Biblical texts which talk about servanthood. By engaging in projects of manual labor in such a manner that we are serving in a subordinate position, traditional roles can be reversed, stereotypes can be corrected, and humility can help overcome our ingrained spirit of triumphalism (Birth). We go and work as servants and followers, not as leaders.

I do not think it is necessary to de-emphasize the “great commission” since that is one of the greatest biblical motivations of many STMs. Rather, one simply needs to teach the “great commission” properly; in other words, remember that making disciples of Jesus (Matthew 28.19) and “teaching them all that I have commanded” (Matthew 28.20) entails being sent as Jesus himself was sent (John 20.21), above all, as a servant (John 12.26; Romans 1.1). Sherron and I are saying the same thing here. I’m simply clarifying that the “great commission” does not need to be emphasized any less in the process.

Sherron suggests two lists, one which presents problems or cautions and the other which offers ways to correct some of them. Here go Sherron’s reflections based on an article by Robert Priest in the periodical, Missiology, 34/4 (2006), a special issue devoted to Short-Term Missions (STM’s):

Yellow Lights for Reflection: Concerns and Cautions with STM groups and workers:
Questions for STM groups and workers to ask themselves in reflecting on their experience

“It is not good to have zeal without knowledge, nor to be hasty and miss the way.”
Proverbs 19:2 (NIV)

1. Does (did) the experience increase our natural ethnocentrism or decrease it? “When individuals internalize the culturally contingent values of their own social group and develop a preferential loyalty to their own ‘in-group’ and its culture, along with negative opinions and attitudes towards out-groups-those from other ethnicities-this ethnocentrism is a contributor to inter-ethnic prejudice and conflict. Does the enormous phenomenon of STM help American Christians to become less ethnocentric?” (Priest, et al:443-444).
2. Do we follow touristic patterns and ethics in STMs? One important aspect of this is the way we support the local economy and community. What do we take with us? Adeney asks: Who gains and who loses? Another is the question of local ownership and sustainability of their future. Tourists aren’t concerned with these issues. Rodrigo Maslucan, a pastor from our partner church in Peru, has written a paper on STMs and questions them when the motive is more tourism than mission or service. Do we go to see and enjoy exotic places or to authentically and respectfully engage the local people? Are our motives altruistic or status-seeking? Travel gives status.
3. Do STMs contribute to the increase or decrease of long-term mission personnel and support for mission? “It is possible that more money is now supporting short-term missionaries than career missionaries” (Priest, et al:434). STMs divert resources from support of career missionaries. If we could calculate all the STM groups from the PC(USA), this is probably true. People lament that the number of our denominational mission workers continues to diminish. The grassroots movement of direct involvement and STMs is irreversible and not bad, but it probably does affect the total number of long-term missionaries we have. As Priest comments, the cure can become part of the cause of funding problems which displace long-term personnel. Obviously, the PC(USA) needs and wants both short-term and long-term mission workers.
4. Does (did) the experience decrease materialism and produce lives of simplicity and sacrificial stewardship in the STM participants or temporarily increase our “gratefulness”?
5. In terms of “status-bridging” (vertical connections across marked differentials of wealth and power), does STM “serve the interest of the privileged rather than the marginalized”? (Priest, et al:442). The poverty/wealth gap usually shocks U.S. Christians. How do we deal with this?
6. Does (did) the experience increase our interethnic social relationships at home? The majority of STMs come to Latin America. How does this affect our interaction and treatment of the Latinos/as in the U.S. (who number is greater than the total of 7 countries in Latin America.) How do our partnerships in Africa and Asia affect our relationships with Afro-Americans and Asian-Americans at home?
7. We usually say that our STM experiences are transformational for those who go. Is our learning or transformation long-lasting? “The problem comes when the ‘raising of awareness’ results in no action and people only feel connected to mission, or that they have performed their duty but continue in normal cultural patterns without a nod toward new directions for service and mission” (Linhart:454).
8. Do we truly get to know and understand the people we meet and see or do we simply construct stereotypes? Here the advantages of language skills and long-term church-to-church or presbytery-to-presbytery partnerships is obvious.
9. While STMers want to get close to people, “trying to achieve predefined goals quickly-ten houses built-can trample on culture. Individual drive can become more important than respect for local elders, courtesies, or time frames. Projects can become more important than people” (Adeney:468).
10. Were there missed opportunities to build stronger relationships through more contact and an attitude of openness and missed opportunities for authentic mutuality of experience? (Van Beek)
11. How do our hosts perceive and evaluate American spirituality? We may not be prepared to hear the answer to this provocative question. Birth suggests that it might change the focus of our work from evangelistic pretensions to humble service.
12. Have we heard and heeded the “the missing voices”? Have we heard the opinions, perspectives, evaluations, and suggestions of our host churches? Zehner records some of those voices which speak of “Americans’ rush to take action without considering the long-term effects on local churches” and say that “Americans seem unaware of the cultural influences in their own readings and perceptions of the Bible” (510). He further cites “the missing voices” which speak of cross-cultural insensitivity, arrogance, domineering attitudes, overstepping boundaries. “North Americans tend to ’step in and take control’” (511). Rodrigo Maslucan is one of the “the missing voices” who presented his paper on STMs to the Peru Mission Network. I know that the PC(USA) took intentional steps to hear the voices of leaders from our partner churches in the preparation of the “Gathering for God’s Future” approved by the General Assembly in 2003.

Conditions Which Foster Positive Outcomes and Help Do STM “The Right Way”

In his “Introduction to Theme Issue on Short-Term Missions,” Robert J. Priest mentions some of the problematic issues I (Sherron) have listed above, then he states that “positive outcomes are possible if done in the right way. By itself, for example, a short-term missions experience is as likely to increase ethnocentrism as decrease it. But when accompanied by appropriate coaching and culture learning exercises, then ethnocentrism decreases” (427). He goes on to say that in the first article he and others provide research on “the conditions which foster positive or negative outcomes.”

In my second list I (Sherron) would like to list some of the “the conditions which foster positive outcomes” which I gleaned from the articles in Missiology. However, I would like to preface it with some comments about the PC(USA). The policy statement “Presbyterians Do Mission in Partnership” which was adopted by the General Assembly in 2003 concisely points to “another way” of engaging in mission. If we follow this policy, I think we are on the way to avoiding most of the problems in my first list. The greater context for this policy resides in the fact that for over 150 years the PC(USA) has developed and nurtured long-term relationships which have become mutual church-to-church relationships with 163 churches around the world. World Mission Area Coordinators, Regional Liaisons, and long-term mission personnel cultivate and maintain these partnerships. Presbytery-to-presbytery and congregation-to-congregation partnerships and mission networks fit into and reenforce the denominational partnerships. A good number of long-term mission workers on the field are trained to orient and receive STMs. Mission to the U.S.A. brings the voices of our partner churches to the U.S. to teach us. Thanks to our partnership policy and practice, as well as our educational materials, such as When God’s People Travel Together, Vol. I, II, and III (available through Presbyterian Distribution Service) and my book Called as Partners in Christ’s Service: the Practice of God’s Mission (Geneva Press), the PC(USA) is able to help congregations understand and practice partnership, which mitigates many of the problematic aspects in my former list.

Conditions Which Foster Positive Outcomes and Help Do STM “The Right Way”

1. Frame the experience less on an emphasis on the “great commission” and more on Biblical texts which talk about servanthood. By engaging in projects of manual labor in such a manner that we are serving in a subordinate position, traditional roles can be reversed, stereotypes can be corrected, and humility can help overcome our ingrained spirit of triumphalism (Birth). We go and work as servants and followers, not as leaders.
2. This role reversal implies that the “receiving local church must be respected as a source of authority and as the key to any long-term ministry gains” (Priest on Zehner: 429). The initiative, invitation, and leadership of the “receiving local church” are essential.
3. Engage in profound and honest reflections, using questions like those I pose in my first list, which “call into question participants’ taken-for-granted assumptions and habits” and consequently “create dissonance” which Johnstone suggests is the path to learning and transformation (429). Leaders must not only evoke these reflections and dissonance, but also model new habits of thought and practice. Leadership is essential.
4. Be intentional concerning stewardship outcomes. I think we need to be open and define ways that STMs can help the overall denominational mission program rather than undercut it.
5. Hold training sessions to learn about culture, the national churches and members, and God’s perspective on race, differences, and world mission.
6. “Short-term teams do best when they work under long-term missionaries or locals, and when they are part of a multi-year series of exchanges” (Adeney:468). The World Mission program unit of PC(USA) tries to follow and facilitate this approach.
7. View short-term missionaries as “trainee” subordinates rather than as “helpers” and put their supervision and spiritual formation directly in the hands of the overseas churches they serve making the partner church the teacher. Here Zehner goes a step farther than Adeney. The interesting suggestion here is the image of “trainee.” I have suggested in an earlier article that we need to rethink our images and roles as mission workers, both short-term and long-term. Desire more “culturally egalitarian forms of work and relationships” (Zehner:512). Obviously, as Arch Woodruff suggests, we need to have these missiological discussions with our partner churches and negotiate with them the role they want to play. I would add to this the importance of having invitations from partner churches and that they should be the ones to define the nature of the “work” to be done. The national leadership Independent Presbyterian Church of Brazil has asked to be included as the first ones who receive groups and give them orientation to the country and church and are accompanying groups who visit them. Their orientation includes a brief history of their denomination. The “trainee” image perhaps is not the best one for typical STM groups who stay 7-14 days. It works better with our Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) program which takes youth to sites for a year and places them under local programs and churches. Perhaps the best image for groups is that of “learners.”
8. Take the time to acknowledge and articulate what you learned from the host culture in their presence, so they will not feel the learning is merely one-sided. You may have learned a lot from the host culture and church, but they may not know that.
9. Be intentional about reflection and internalization (processing) after a STM experience with a trained facilitator.

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