The 20th of November is the Day of the Revolution, a significant patriotic holiday here in Mexico. Lauryn and Molly’s classes at school each entered floats in the parade in our town. Below are a few photos:
Lauryn and Molly in their traditional Mexican costumes
Flag presentation ceremony at our central town square before the parade
Molly and her float
Lauryn and her float
A few other entries from the parade
Or at least that’s what it feels like I’m having right now. We on CPT have been taking more care the past year and a half with the answer to the million dollar question asked by locals: “Why are you here?”
We have stayed away from saying, “We’re missionaries.” This because what we mean by the term ‘missionary’ and what locals understand by it are two entirely different things; their understanding carrying quite negative connotations. So officially, we belong to a non-profit community service/development organization that is here to meet the physical and spiritual needs of our region.
People always want to know where we get our money from. Saying something like, “Well, people back home send us money to live off of and then our job is to go around and talk to people all day,” has never seemed an entirely satisfactory answer for them. It makes us come off as somewhat rich and lazy in the eyes of the locals. We do try and work jobs in keeping with the mission of our community service organization (and hopefully in keeping with the kingdom of God). That’s what has three of us trying to start a water filter business right now and Pam teaching English classes. The problem there is that the 10-20 hours of “real work” we do each week is still a far cry from the taxing 60-hour-a-week schedule many of our friends here have.
These complexities have me and the rest of CPT asking some tough questions right now about exactly what our role is here and what our identity in the community should be. Add to the mix a number of tough challenges and considerations (a number of which I’ve shared on this blog) coming out of our reading of Donovan’s Christianity Rediscovered, and we’re not exactly sure which way to turn.
Contemporary wisdom on multiplication and church planting movements says we should never minister in a way that cannot be easily reproduced by our disciples. If that’s the case, we wonder if living fully off of missionary support and spending all our time in prayer and meetings can ever be easily replicated down here, or if locals trying to adopt that model would hinder a movement. Dabbling in “work” a few hours a week and then doing a lot of discipleship outside of that also doesn’t seem very reproducible, though it is expedient. Working a full-time schedule and getting in what disciple-making work we can on the side is what most or all of our followers here will probably need to do. So in that respect, the model can be replicated. But one can ask whether our role as outside missionaries should be different, even if it’s not reproducible.
I really don’t know, but I think I need some answers.
(Above photo courtesy of Pizamanpat)
The following passage from pages 120 and 121 of Christianity Rediscovered provides a good outline Donovan’s understanding of the role of a missionary, developed throughout his book. Read it, cross-cultural missionaries, and reflect on it. It has been challenging me greatly, though I do not yet know what the outcome of that challenge will be:
But before dreaming of world evangelization we would have to change our approach to young mission churches. [Protestants can substitute the Protestant equivalents in the following sentence:] Today before we count our work finished in the young churches, we feel compelled to leave with them a staggering complexity of buildings and institutions and organizations; church buildings and their accouterments, seminaries to train candidates for the priesthood, catechetical centers to train teachers, novice masters and superiors to begin religious congregations, lay organizations, diocesan and chancery structures and a promise of continued financial assistance and subsidies.What if instead of this unending process we considered our work a truly finishable task and left these churches only what St. Paul left them? At first sight, this seems much less than we feel compelled to leave with them. In reality, it is more than we dare to give them.As you sit watching the sinking sun you wonder if there were still time for missionaries, somewhere, somehow to be able just once to carry out missionary work as it should be carried out:To approach each culture with the respect due to it as the very place wherein resides the possibility of salvation and holiness and grace.To approach the people of any culture or nation, not as individuals, but as community.
To plan to stay not one day longer than is necessary in any one place.
To give the people nothing, literally nothing, but the unchanging, supracultural, uninterpreted gospel before baptism.
To help them expand that gospel into a creed and a way of life after baptism.
To enable them to pray as Christians.
To leave them the bible towards the day when they can read it and use it as a living letter in their lives.
To insist that they themselves be their own future missionaries.
To link them with the outside church in unity, and the outside world in charity and justice.
To agree with them that baptism is indeed everything; that the reception of baptism is the acceptance of the total responsibility and the full, active sacramental power of the church, the eucharistic community with a mission.
To encourage them to trust in the Spirit given at baptism, and to use the powers and gifts and charisms given to the community by the Spirit.
And then the final step.
The final missionary step as regards the people of any nation or culture, and the most important lesson we will ever teach them–is to leave them.
(Above photo courtesy of Will Pate)
This one just for fun:
The following essay has been floating around on the internet for years. I thought of it Sunday night at a staff fellowship we had and shared it with a few GFMers. You can get the straight story from the Wikipedia entry, but basically, this essay was actually submitted by a guy named Hugh Gallagher when he applied to New York University.
Those who have seen the No Touchey Kung Fuey dorm cleanup skit on a mission trip with GFM may remember that one of Bubba’s talents is baking 30 Minute Brownies in 20 minutes. I got that line from this essay. Enjoy!
from http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/joke/essay.htm
ARE THERE ANY SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCES YOU HAVE HAD, OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS YOU HAVE REALIZED, THAT HAVE HELPED TO DEFINE YOU AS A PERSON?
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.
I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.
Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I’m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.
I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don’t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat 400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.
I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.
But I have not yet gone to college.
In this excerpt from page 82 of Donovan’s Christianity Rediscovered, he reflects on the gospel being rejected by a Masai village. Donovan spent an entire year making difficult weekly treks out to this particular village to bring the Christian message. He shared with them everything he had to share, they understood it all, and he felt they were very ready for baptism. When decision time came, though, they rejected the gospel. I admire Donovan a lot for his response at that point. He did not try to talk to them more, share in a different way, or make the gospel more palatable. Masai villages make decisions as an entire community, and he did not then try and single out individuals who he thought might be willing to be baptized. He simply thanked them for their time and attention and, recognizing his work there was done, walked away.
Here are his reflections on the episode (remembering that he speaks from a Catholic perspective):
But there was an end to my work with these people. There were no moves left to make. The only reason I came these thousands of miles was to bring them this Christian message. They rejected it. There was nothing else I could do. My missionary obligation to them was finished.Perhaps the most important lesson I was ever to learn in my missionary life, I learned that day: that Christianity, by its very essence, is a message that can be accepted–or rejected; that somewhere close to the heart of Christianity lies that terrible and mysterious possibility of rejection; that no Christianity has any meaning or value, if there is not freedom to accept it or reject it. It is not an automatic thing, coming like a diploma after four or eight years of schooling and examinations, or after one year of instruction. It must be presented in such a way that rejection of it remains a distinct possibility. The acceptance of it would be meaningless if rejection were not possible. It is a call, an invitation, a challenge even, that can always be refused. The Christianity of a born Catholic or of a produced Catholic (the result of an automatic baptism following a set period of instructions) which is never once left open to the freedom of rejection, to the understanding that it is a thing freely accepted or rejected–is a dead and useless thing.Since that day, I have never seen those people of that village again, but I remember them as I remember no other people that I have come across in all my missionary years. For me, at least, they are distinct. They are unique. I feel a tremendous respect for them. They taught me something that no other people in Africa have ever taught me.
But it took a long time for that lesson to sink in. Day after day I found myself returning in thought to that moment at high noon in the hot equatorial sun when I heard no! for the first time. And I never remember any other time when the silence and the solitude of the African nights seemed so complete.
(Above photo courtesy of TangoPango)
The following is from Vincent Donovan’s Christianity Rediscovered, pages 103-105. In reading the entire book you can see that Donovan was by no means opposed to leadership in the Church; he was only opposed to that kind of leadership which separated the laity from God, resulting in a new incarnation of the Old Testament priesthood that Jesus did away with:
As I learned more and more about the pagan religious life of the people I had been working with, I took it all in with mixed feelings. I realized that these actions of theirs and the belief of the people existed in a context of life that was filled with piety and goodness. I felt a sense of respect for the life I saw, because I could only agree with St. Paul that all nations can seek and find God, and that each nation goes its own way with the evidence of God available in the good things he gives each nation. But as I witnessed the work of the witch doctor I also felt sad and slightly sick, if not ashamed. Every single thing I saw him do, I recognized, not from my acquaintance with other pagan religions, but from my experience as a priest in our own Christian religion.The temples or sacred places kept up at the people’s expense and labor; the class apart, witch doctors or priests, the privileged ones, the ones who make themselves the most important in the religious community, the ones who alone can talk to God, whether it be through words of incantation and blessing, or words of consecration and absolution; the ordinary people, especially women, completely at the mercy and whim and arbitrariness and exclusiveness of the holy one–not reaching the throne of God, or even understanding the word of God, except through him; the discrimination against women; the offerings for the sacrifice, and the daily sacrifice itself; the manipulation of sacred signs and relics; the air of unfathomable mystery about it all. There is scarcely a pagan trick that we Christians have overlooked or missed.
But surely all this is the very reason why the Christian religion came into being. This is why the early Christians cried out in anguish that their religion was different from the pagan religions, why they felt it necessary to disassociate themselves from temples, altars, sacrifices, and priesthood.
Was it for nothing that Christ entered once and for all into the holy of holies and offered the one and only Christian sacrifice?…
…I really could not go to the Masai and tell them that this is the good news I had brought them: they would no longer have to rely on the power of the pagan witch doctor; now, they could transfer their trust to the power of the Christian witch doctor. That is no good news at all. It is not worth traveling eight thousand miles to impart that news. Does not the good news consist in the proclamation that we no longer need contemporaneous mediators or a privileged caste to lead us to God? Is it not so that we believe that the people of God, the laity, can reach even to the throne of the living God, by the power given to them as a Christian community by Christ? Is not this what the good news is all about?
St. Peter described this new situation: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people set apart to sing the praises of God who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people at all, and now you are the people of God” (1 Pet 2:9, 10).
In insuring that a young church has everything necessary to become a mature, adult, and independent entity, more important than financial subsidies for the clergy, and academic programs and seminary structures for candidates for the ministry, is the imparting of a truly basic, Christian understanding of the ministry and priesthood.
(Above photo courtesy of sparky4927)