Through the data collected, VerBeek found no lasting difference, positive or negative, on the Honduran families and communities whose homes were built by North Americans compared to those who never saw a short-term missions team. In fact, in a moment of candidness, the Hondurans confided that if given the choice, they’d rather see the money raised by each team who traveled to Honduras channeled toward building twenty more homes and employing Hondurans.[60]
At the very least, we need to resist the temptation to overstate our level of impact. Our desire to inspire our friends and family members often leads us to give the impression that what we did was the first, best, biggest, and most effective such effort ever accomplished in this place.
The findings and critiques of researchers and majority world church leaders should make us more cautious in our language. Is God really not in Ireland? Are we really introducing worship to the Indonesian church, one of the fastest-growing churches in the world despite the immense amount of persecution there? Are we teaching south Indians to plant churches, or given the rate of growth in their church-planting movements, should they be teaching us a few things about church planting?
Accuracy or inaccuracy of such statements is not my primary concern. What do these assumptions do to influence how we engage in short-term endeavors? How do our expectations shape the way we come across to the local believers who receive and host us? When we fail to step back and serve with eyes wide open, we cause many local pastors to feel as this African leader did after hosting an American pastor who came to train African church leaders for a few days. “He never once asked to see anything that I had done—that just made me feel like nothing we have is worth anything.” If our eyes are open to the realities of the majority world church considered earlier, it will change the expectations that shape our engagement.
Concluding Thoughts
We need to open our eyes to see how our motivation for short-term missions influences how we engage in our ministry and service. Be encouraged. Honesty about what does and doesn’t occur through short-term missions allows us to see our trips as an integral part of our lifelong journey of following Jesus rather than just a two-week project. As we take our eyes off ourselves and begin to look outward, we see our short-term experiences as a way to encounter God’s work in local churches around the world.
Conflicting perspectives on why we should participate in short-term missions is the most important place to begin to serve with eyes wide open. We’ll revisit the motivational aspects of service in part 3 as we explore improving our CQ for serving cross-culturally.
4
Urgency
“Just Do It!”
Through the eyes of North Americans . . . Through the eyes of majority world Christians . . .
We’ve got to do something. The window of opportunity is now! The time for change is ripe. We must seize this opportunity. You too quickly get into the action without thinking through the implications for our churches long after you go home.
Time—it’s a precious thing. Rarely is a day of my life not carefully scheduled. Even my vacation days are twenty-four-hour time blocks to be conquered. After all, planning our family vacation is a way to be sure our family maximizes our “play time” together. I pride myself on getting a lot done in a day’s work. I’m obsessed with efficiency. I stand in line and come up with ways things could be done better and quicker. Ah yes, when it comes to time, I’m terminally American, though admittedly, not every American is as obsessed with efficiency as I am.
Seizing the moment and making a difference are compelling forces in our cross-cultural experiences. Clearly, this can be a good thing. There are urgent needs that need strategic intervention. But if we aren’t careful, our desire to jump in and do something efficient can reflect a human-centered approach to missions rather than a God-centered one. This chapter explores our North American tendency to take action and take charge of a situation before fully understanding the context. North Americans as a whole and particularly North American Christians are not known for reflection or for pausing to think through the long-term consequences of our actions. Let’s explore this and compare it with how Jesus approaches the issue of urgency and time.
The North American Way
Think of the number of clichés and proverbs that are part of our everyday vocabulary. We put huge value on time. We believe it’s a scarce, valuable resource. We say:
“Time is money.”
“We need to do this sooner rather than later.”
“There’s no time like the present.”
“Make every minute count.”
“It’s now or never.”
“Haste makes waste.”
“The early bird catches the worm.”
Our North American obsession with time and urgency makes us want to schedule and control everything. Long gone are the days when kids made the best of playing with the neighbors next door. We schedule play dates and organize “community” with fellow church members in small groups. Our lives are so packed that we need vacations to get away from home, but even our vacations are often full of one planned event after another. An urgency drives the North American way, part of which is a gift we can offer the global church. Our history as a land of pioneering immigrants who rebelled against the Old World has allowed us to be a force for good in the world. We don’t merely sit back and talk about how things could be different; we make them different. We take charge of situations and seize the moment.
Our obsession with making the most of every opportunity and the entrepreneurial spirit of our North American heritage are not without positive impact, but they are also loaded with problems. Our pillaging of Native American land and culture to make a place for ourselves was deplorable. Our frequent unwillingness to collaborate in a global process that takes more time and effort often results in death—literally! Our drive to make everything happen now rather than seeing what unfolds can lead us to be judgmental of people in more laid-back cultures.
Richard Dooling’s novel White Man’s Grave is a riveting story about Michael Killigan, a Peace Corps volunteer who goes missing in West Africa. Michael’s best friend, Boone, leaves Indiana to go to Sierra Leone to look for Michael. With good reason, Boone has a sense of urgency about finding out what’s happened to his friend. His urgency goes beyond his immediate mission, however. He applies it to everything he encounters in Sierra Leone. For example, one day Boone observes a baby who isn’t breathing normally, and he says, “I can’t stand it. I have to do something.” In response to Boone’s urgency, his African host says:
“That’s when white people are most dangerous. When they try to make things ‘better’ for Africans. When white people are trying to enslave Africans or rob them, the Africans usually know what to do. They’ve dealt with slave traders, invaders, and plunderers for centuries. They usually quench the world’s thirst for slaves by capturing some of their enemies and selling them to slave traders. But when white people come in with a lot of money or ‘know-how’ and try to make things ‘better,’ that’s when things go to hell. Why can’t white people just visit? Why must they always meddle? It’s as if you were invited to dinner at someone’s house and during your brief visit you insisted on rearranging all the furniture in the house to suit your tastes.”[61]
Urgency, taking charge, and making the most of every opportunity—they’re part of what it means to be a North American.
The Evangelical Way
The activist, urgent, take-charge ethos of North American culture is mirrored in the subculture of North American evangelicalism. Pragmatism—doing whatever works in the most efficient way—rules the day in most North American churches. Our inspiration and zeal overpower our ability to step back and engage in serious reflection. We struggle with a messiah complex that Jesus himself never had, and he was the Messiah!
The question that has dominated much of North American evangelicalism over the last several decades is, “What works?” Success is measured and defended based on effecti
veness and efficiency. If preaching doesn’t draw a crowd, then figure out what will. If the symbol of the cross or reciting creeds hinders someone from coming to church, get rid of them. Business practices based on urgency and efficiency drive the agendas of many churches.[62]
A great deal of our evangelical urgency stems from this mind-set: “Hurry up and get to work for Jesus! The clock is ticking.” Urgency is central to our approaches to missions. For example, the AD 2000 movement was a significant force in missions at the end of the twentieth century. AD 2000 called the global church to embrace the vision to see a church for every people and the gospel for every person by the year 2000. There was an appropriate desire to work harder to focus our resources and attention on the people who had yet to hear about Jesus. At times, however, this much-needed focus on the unreached peoples of the world translated into some very human-centered plans for living out God’s mission.
The short-term missions movement itself was built on a sense of urgency. George Verwer, founder of Operation Mobilization, was frustrated by the time it took to mobilize adults from the West for the mission field. He saw the vastness of the need to evangelize and wanted to get at the task now! He was impatient to get on with the work by every means at his disposal.
As Verwer looked around, it seemed the people with the most availability were college students on summer vacation. So he came up with a plan to forgo using traditional missionaries and instead mobilize college students to get at the job. In his mind, this was a lot more effective than looking for someone who would have to be uprooted from a job and a house and spend time learning a language. The short-term missions movement has grown astronomically in the fifty years since then.
The very title of one book—Maximum Impact, Short-Term Mission—assumes an urgency to what we’re doing. The authors write, “For every additional hour required of preparation, for every additional characteristic demanded of recruits, there will be thousands—perhaps millions?—who remain sidelined as too average, too real, too foolish to that particular expression of ‘Missio Dei.’ In our feeble attempts to birth a missionary without spot or blemish, the world continues to go to hell without Jesus.”[63]
The North American pastors I studied demonstrated a strong sense of urgency in their international training efforts. One pastor said, “If all the other countries get on board with what we’re training . . . we could see the return of Christ much sooner, possibly even this generation.” He believed his training efforts could expedite the return of Christ. Though most of the pastors studied didn’t defend urgency quite that way, nearly all of them did embrace a desire to see measurable results, something that allowed for a laser focus on seeing maximum impact in a short amount of time.
In contrast, here are the kinds of comments I heard as I collected data from our brothers and sisters in majority world churches when they spoke about short-term missions:
“You too quickly get into the action without thinking through the implications for our churches long after you go home.”
“You come here for two weeks. We’re here forever. We’re not as panicked about finishing all the projects as soon as you are.”
“You assume we aren’t focused because we haven’t written up our mission, vision, and values like you have. But we are very clear about what God is doing in our midst.”
“Your strategies and plans are helpful. But where’s the Holy Spirit?”
It’s hard to respond to the world’s needs without a certain degree of urgency. But when does our urgency cause more harm than good?
Jesus’s Way
When looking at Jesus’s approach to life, we find an interesting tension between his ruthless focus on an urgent mission and his ability to take time for “interruptions.” Clearly, there was a sense of urgency in how he went about mission, but he didn’t seem to talk about it with an overly designed strategy or with a clock ticking in the background. This is evident as far back as his childhood.
By age twelve Jesus was hanging out in the Jerusalem temple talking with the Jewish leaders. The temple was by far the largest religious structure in the world, known widely for its wealth and magnitude. Jerusalem was more like a temple with a city around it than a city with a temple in it. The temple was the center of religious, social, and political activity—the epicenter of the entire nation.
So it was a pretty big deal for a twelve-year-old Jewish boy to wax eloquently with the esteemed leaders of Jerusalem. If Jesus operated in the “North American way,” perhaps his reasoning about his experience in the temple would have gone something like this: “This is a God thing. The window of opportunity is now! It’s not every day a young Jewish boy gets an audience with the movers and shakers of Israel. So I need to forgo this carpentry stuff with my dad and leverage this opportunity. There’s no time like the present. Carpe diem!”
Yet as far as we know, Jesus spent the next eighteen years secluded with his simple family in lowly Nazareth. Even as the Son of God, Jesus didn’t forgo the necessity of preparation, which mainly took place out of the public eye. And though Jesus didn’t demand perfection out of those he called to join him in mission, he also didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get them to the task at hand.
Jesus also didn’t seem to be very good at closing the deal with people. He often walked away from people after having left them with a rather nebulous statement. That doesn’t seem like maximum-impact short-term missions to me. Yet somehow Jesus seemed to believe that the Father was capable of continuing redemptive work in the lives of people long after he “walked away” from them.
Once Jesus embarks on his public ministry, Luke keeps reminding us that Jesus did have a destination. Again and again Luke tells us that Jesus was “making his way to Jerusalem.” Here are just a few examples:
Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem.
Luke 9:51
Jesus went through the towns . . . as he made his way to Jerusalem.
Luke 13:22
Now on his way to Jerusalem . . .
Luke 17:11
Jesus took the Twelve aside and told them, “We are going up to Jerusalem.”
Luke 18:31
Jesus . . . went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.
Luke 19:28
Jesus is pretty clear about his destination. He has to get to Jerusalem. The destination of a lifetime awaits him there. So there’s clarity about his mission and its urgency. Everything runs through the filter of getting to Jerusalem. But his sense of urgency doesn’t prevent him from being compassionate, generous, and spontaneous. Along the way he heals countless people, he teaches his disciples and the crowds who gather to see him, and he doesn’t seem hurried or panicked.[64]
What a different picture from how I live. What a contrast to the urgency that seems to drive some of our assumptions about what we must do when we engage in missions cross-culturally.
Concluding Thoughts
The very nature of short-term projects in and of themselves brings a sense of urgency. When we’re engaged with a group of people or in a region for only a short amount of time, we have an even greater sense of needing to make the time count. In listening to short-term participants throughout the years, I’ve often heard, “We’ve got to do something. The window of opportunity is now! The time for change is ripe. We must seize this opportunity.”
There is certainly some value to the urgency that characterizes the North American church. Frankly, I think our ability to offer vision, planning, and direction to the dreams of others is one of the most valuable contributions we can offer the global church, but we must do so carefully. It must happen in ways that are shaped by the local church that was there long before we arrived and will be there long after we leave. Most of all, we must not live as if God’s mission is somehow contingent upon our plans and strategies. Jesus remains on the throne and continues his redemptive work with or without our frantic sense of urgency.
5
Common Ground
“They Don’t Fly Planes in India W
hen It Rains”
Through the eyes of North Americans . . . Through the eyes of majority world Christians . . .
If there were any surprises for me, it came in how similar everything is to everything back home. I might look like the kids in your neighborhood on the outside. But what’s on the inside is totally different.
I had just finished speaking at a conference in St. Louis, and Mike, a twenty-two-year-old Christian college student, was elected to drive me to the airport. It was pouring rain.
“It’s a good thing you aren’t in India right now,” Mike said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because they don’t fly planes in India when it rains,” he replied.
“Really?!” I responded. “What makes you say that?”
“Well, I just spent two weeks there. We had a couple domestic flights, and whenever it was raining, they canceled our flights. I guess they don’t have the technology we do for flying in this kind of stuff.”
I couldn’t decide whether to smile and nod or tell him about the countless times I’ve taken off from Indian airports in the midst of torrential downpours.
We have a strong tendency to overgeneralize our unique cross-cultural experiences because of a desire to find common ground and make the foreign seem familiar. There are a couple ways this gets played out in short-term missions. One tendency is to look for the similarities between the new culture and something we’ve experienced before—usually our home culture or another foreign culture we’ve encountered. The other way we try to establish common ground is by taking isolated incidents or people and applying what we see in them to everything or everyone in a culture. This is one of the most common pitfalls we make when we encounter a new cultural context.[65]
Serving with Eyes Wide Open Page 6