As members of the Church of Jesus Christ, we believe in and trust in the Triune God: the steadfast love and grace of God, the redemptive and reconciling work of Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world, and the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. As an entity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and part of the Reformed tradition, we understand ourselves to be part of the larger Body of Christ in the world, the ekklesia: we are called, led and empowered by the Holy Spirit to walk together with God and each other in covenant relationship as we participate in God’s mission in the world God so loved and loves (The Book of Order, G3.0000-0401,“The Church and Its Mission”).

STRATEGIC STATEMENTS

VISION STATEMENT

God’s people connected in effective mission: a compelling witness to Jesus Christ in a globalized world.

MISSION STATEMENT

To engage with U.S. Presbyterians and global partners for faithful and effective participation in God’s mission in a globalized world, growing together as communities of mission practice.

CORE VALUES

Dignity

Created in God’s image and forgiven by God in Christ, we are all called to treat each person with dignity and respect, following the model of Jesus, standing together with those who are marginalized.

Empowerment

We will focus on long-term relationships, building the capacity of each member of the Body of Christ to engage in God’s mission in sustainable ways. We will strive to be aware of issues of power and context as well as the gifts and hopes of others.

Holistic Ministry

We seek to bring about the realization of God’s vision for our fallen world: the redemption of the whole creation, including both personal sinfulness and the unjust structures of society. A Christ-centered proclamation of the gospel requires that we share the gospel through evangelism, minister in compassion, and advocate for justice.

Partnership

Our work with partner churches and organizations around the world and with U.S. Presbyterians is based on mutual respect and trust leading to common prophetic witness and to mutual transparency and accountability. Whenever possible, we work in God’s mission with other members of the ecumenical family and with partners of other faiths.

Relevance to God’s World

We embrace the call of God to respond with creativity and integrity to a rapidly changing and interdependent world where local and global concerns converge in new ways. We will maintain our centeredness in Christ as we follow the example of our spiritual ancestors: “The church reformed, always reforming” (Book of Order G-2.0200).

Stewardship

From the beginning God has called humankind to care for the created order; therefore we will strive to restore God’s creation and to use its resources respectfully and responsibly. We, as individuals and as an organization, with all that we have belong to God; therefore we place under the Lordship of Christ our time, talents, and financial resources; our political and economic choices; our relationships; and our very lives.

DIRECTIONAL GOALS

Communities of Mission Practice

Presbyterian World Mission, in collaboration with U.S. Presbyterians and global partners, will inspire, equip and accompany each other in communities of mission practice to engage in God’s mission.

Faithful and Effective Mission

Presbyterian World Mission will increase faithfulness and effectiveness in our shared participation in God’s mission as we learn and act together with U.S. Presbyterians and global partners.

Strategic Engagement in Critical Global Issues

Presbyterian World Mission, in partnership with U.S. Presbyterians and global partners, will strategically focus on critical global issues that adversely affect God’s creation and the human family.

Achieving Organizational Excellence

Presbyterian World Mission, as a learning community, will achieve organizational excellence through resource and knowledge management, strategic thinking, staff development and healthy work-life balance.

COMMUNITY OF MISSION PRACTICE CONCEPT PAPER

Presbyterian World Mission

February 2010

Historical Background

Beginning in 1837, the Presbyterian Church’s Board of Foreign Mission sent mission workers into the world to preach, teach, and heal. Our mission workers worked in Brazil, Congo, Egypt, China, and other countries to plant the church and help it to grow into a witnessing, serving community. Thousands of women and men came to faith in Jesus Christ and the churches grew. This direct mode of mission was a good and faithful response to God’s call to our church at that time.

In the 1950’s and 60’s, as Presbyterian communities in these nations multiplied and matured and as the developing world’s clamor for self-determination in the waning years of the age of colonialism grew, our church discerned a movement of the Spirit and reformed its mission policy to recognize and respect the role of national Christian communities and their leaders in the nations we had considered to be “the mission field”.  Our more direct mode of mission to communities around the world was transformed into an equipping mode of work, focused in large part on empowering the national churches to grow in membership, leadership and capacity to serve their communities through ministries of education, health, development, and evangelism. The PC(USA) was one of the early pioneers in working in partner-ship with national Christians and the results have been a noteworthy growth in membership, leadership and capacity, as well as a powerful multiplier effect that resulted from shifting the work of our mission workers from an exclusive focus on direct feeding, healing and proclamation to equipping the local church to feed, heal and proclaim the Gospel. This paradigmatic shift from the direct mode of mission to working in partnership characterized by mutuality was not an easy one. But the fruits of the last half century of mission in partnership have proven that our forbearers rightly discerned the Spirit’s call.

Today, we believe the Spirit is calling our church to a deeper understanding of partnership. As globalization has increased international communication, travel and awareness and seen the convergence of global and local concerns, U.S. Presbyterians have responded by increasing their participation in international mission. If, in 1960, Presbyterians worked primarily through one, centralized international mission agency (COEMAR in the UPCUSA and the Board of Foreign Mission in the PCUS), today there are thousands of Presbyterian “mission agencies” making mission decisions every day: the Validated Mission Support Groups and other Presbyterian mission organizations, presbytery international partnerships, congregational mission committees, congregation-to-congregation “twinning” relationships, etc. This seismic shift in the understanding and practice of mission has opened the door to direct involvement of U.S. Presbyterians at unprecedented levels. Greatly increased involvement and giving and the opportunity for personal and congregational transformation have been some of the positive effects of the change. But our global partners note that our mission efforts have become highly uncoordinated and, in some cases, less responsive to the needs as perceived by the local community.

This shift, from one highly centralized agency to thousands of highly decentralized agencies, is a massive one and invites Presbyterian World Mission to reform its self-understanding and the focus of its work to include many U.S. Presbyterian mission constituents—congregations, middle governing bodies, validated mission support groups and other mission organizations– as partners in mission, and to continue its commitment to engaging in God’s mission in a spirit of humility and mutuality. This deep change invites us all to consider new ways of being a connectional church. In the last century, our church did an excellent job of including the voice of global partners in our mission reflection and action. The new context requires that, in addition to maintaining our close and mutual partnership with global partners (because we believe that God speaks with particular clarity to God’s people in each place) and ecumenical partners (because of our understanding of the linkage between mission and unity), we are called to discern and engage in God’s mission with U.S. Presbyterians. The Dallas Invitation, signed by 64 mission leaders from across the PC(USA) and affirmed by the GAC and General Assembly in 2008, affirms this movement and invites Presbyterian World Mission to support “new patterns involving new cooperation and partnerships within the PC(USA)”. In order to accomplish this deepening of partnership in mission, Presbyterian World Mission proposes to work intentionally in “communities of mission practice”, creating and nurturing spaces of prayer, reflection, discernment and discipleship which

transcend national borders and allow global partners, U.S. Presbyterians and Presbyterian World

Mission to come together as partners in God’s mission. The concept is described below.

An Invitation to Expanding Partnership in God’s Mission, the results of a consultation held in January 2008, and…

Doing Mission in Christ’s Way, created in a workshop held in October 2009.

I think you will find them both very thought provoking, especially helpful for local church mission committee’s and groups preparing to for an overseas mission trip.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Did you know that the Presbyterian Church in Madagascar has more members than our Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)? Did you know that we have a close working partnership with two different Presbyterian Churches in Ghana: the Presbyterian Church of Ghana and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Ghana? Did you know about the efforts of American Presbyterians to establish relations with the emerging house churches, many of which include people with a Reformed and Presbyterian background, in all the “stan” countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan)? Did you know there are new efforts to connect our church with the peacebuilding efforts which have been bearing fruit in Ireland for many years, through the work of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland? Did you know about the longstanding effort of American Presbyterians to stand with our brothers and sisters in Columbia against the violence in that nation? Our Columbia Mission Network, in a powerful ministry of compassion, has provided for the General Secretary of the Presbyterian Church in Columbia when he, his wife and young children needed to leave Columbia because of the death threats received in response to their Christian witness? Did you know that because of the influence and support of American Presbyterians, the Presbyterian Church in Honduras, after years of effort, has finally had their legal petitions with the government, which is dominated by Roman Catholic officials, approved. Now the Presbyterian Church has official standing as a religious organization in Honduras. This means, for the first time, that the Presbyterian congregations in Honduras are able to legally own their church buildings and property. Given the lack of social infrastructure in Haiti, do you know about the incessantly difficult work which American Presbyterians are doing to bring a long-term, sustainable, mission effort to that poor country? Did you know, after generations of conflict and war, the church is emerging with amazing life and vitality in Vietnam and Laos and that American Presbyterians are partnering with those congregations? All of this work is being carried and supported by the burgeoning, new Mission Networks of our Church.

2 June 2008

Dear colleagues in mission,

I want to share with you an historic decision by our Church’s General Assembly Council (GAC). Last month, the Council voted unanimously to reverse a 50 year downward trend in the number of PCUSA mission coworkers by approving a budget for the approval of the 2008 General Assembly that will increase the number of long-term, fully compensated mission personnel. Due to attrition, by this year’s General Assembly in June, we will have just under 200 mission coworkers (this does not include our nearly 70 long-term mission volunteers). The GAC voted to increase the number of our mission coworkers to 210 in 2009, and to 215 in 2010. We are thanking God for this remarkable decision.

But you know how U.S. audiences are tempted to focus on the 7 second sound-byte. Let me go a bit deeper about this important decision and the on-going conversation from which it emerges.

First, let me say what the decision does not mean:

• It doesn’t mean that the hundreds of faithful Presbyterian missionaries who preceded you and me in international mission were wrong when they “worked themselves out of a job”. A couple who gave most of their life to mission work in the Philippines called to ask if an increased number of mission workers means a change in our Church’s historic commitment to partnership and to empowering the church in every place to do ministry on their own. Absolutely not, I assured them. Our Church honors the work they did and notes the multiplier effect that their work has had for the cause of Christ by empowering the partner church to continue in ministry long after the mission worker leaves the country. Our mission workers pioneered “equipping ministry” long before it became a buzzword in U.S. pastoral theology.
• It doesn’t mean that the face of PC(USA) mission has suddenly, curiously, become an American face. We continue to work in partnership around the world. While many of our congregations continue to equate “mission” with “PC(USA) mission worker” (or “missionary”), integrity requires us to acknowledge that most of what God is doing in the many places we work is done primarily through our global partners. Whatever our own sense of call, whatever the financial resources we may have in our pocket, we still owe to our partners the major “say” in the direction of mission in the communities where God has placed them. While Mission Challenge ’07 effectively highlighted the work that our mission personnel are doing, the WM staff team working on World Mission Challenge ’09 is looking at innovative ways to present to the Church a more accurate vision of our work—one that includes our global partners.
• It doesn’t mean that our long-term national or international mission volunteers are not part of our mission personnel. The historical records do not follow the numbers of our long-term mission volunteers with any consistency, thus the GAC had to rely on the number of mission co-workers to provide the base-line. Nor does it mean that international mission personnel are any better or more “worth counting” than national or local mission personnel. Many faithful Presbyterians follow Christ’s call across the street or across the nation and these are equally valid callings, as our Church recognizes. Nor does it mean that Presbyterian mission workers sent by the GAC are better than faithful Presbyterians sent by other Christian, or even non-Christian, organizations. But Presbyterian mission workers sent by the GAC are sent by the whole Church and are responsible to live and minister according to the commitments of our Church as expressed in the decisions of our General Assembly.
• It doesn’t mean that our Church’s faithfulness can be measured by the numbers of mission coworkers we send out (nor by the number of PCUSA members, nor by the total amount of money given by PC(USA) members annually, etc.). The new realm that Jesus inaugurated is more than a “numbers game” and is not, in the final analysis, about budgets and numbers projections. It is found in the quality and integrity of relationships and each of you is giving testimony to these redeemed relationships as you teach, heal, plant churches, educate our Church for mission, work for justice and reconciliation, and help people through difficult times.

But let me share briefly what I believe the decision does represent:

• It clearly represents a major shift in denominational mission policy to dedicate more resources to the sending of international mission personnel. Note that, in order to fulfill the objectives, $4 million must be raised in both 2009 and 2010. This will require much more than the committed leadership of our colleagues in the Communications & Funds Development (CFD) area– it will require CFD and World Mission staff, mission personnel, global partners and mission leaders throughout the denomination to use mission stories to build a bridge between our congregations and the high quality mission work you and our global partners are doing together. This will be one of our greatest challenges in 2009 and 2010 and we cannot achieve it without your help.
• It represents an earnest attempt to recognize that faithfulness requires that we respond to the call of global partners around the world to share mission personnel with them. We currently have more than 40 prioritized, but unfilled, positions where our partners and we agree we should send mission workers. In addition, our Church is called to consider new areas, new partners and new ways of working that will challenge old models of partnership.
• It expresses that our Church highly values the role our mission personnel play in international mission. This is primarily because of the work all of you and your WM staff colleagues do each day.

The rest of the letter contains information mainly for mission co-workers, but Hunter closes like this:

The Bottom Line…

I sometimes think I have the easiest job in the Presbyterian Center because our global partners, mission personnel and World Mission staff in Louisville are highly dedicated, skilled and called to this work. I’m the guy who gets thanked—sometimes, a gazillion times a month—for the good work all of you do every day…which only makes me more grateful for God’s way of working through “wounded healers” like you and me. Your faithfulness helps me to see God’s faithfulness more clearly.

Pray for a continued spirit of expectant anticipation for the changes that God is birthing among us!

With you in Christ,

Hunter Farrell, Director
World Mission
Presbyterian Church (USA)
hunter.farrell@pcusa.org

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!

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,

Technorati: Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Presbyterian mission