Tag Archives: Consuming Mission

There’s Something About A Name

By Rev. Dr. Robert Haynes

Some years ago, I learned that a name is a powerful thing. For example, while working to complete my undergraduate degree in education, on various occasions my professor would observe us as we taught lessons in classrooms at nearby schools as we prepared for the time when we would have our own classrooms. On one particular occasion, I was teaching a group of students whom I did not know very well since I was only at the school a few times and only for short periods of time. As a result, I did not know the students’ names. My professor picked up on this immediately. In her critique of my teaching, she admonished me for my lack of connection to the young people. “Rob, you cannot reach them if you do not even know their names.” That lesson has resonated with me for over twenty years.

Everyone and everything have been given a name. These names signify an actuality, an existence, a being. The one who gives us our names has a certain power over us. Many of us receive our names from our parents. The names that my wife and I gave our own children came through careful prayer and reflection. The naming of our children was a sacred act which we took seriously. If someone were to come along now and try to change their names for some reason it would be an attempt to disrespect not only our son or daughter, but also to undermine the parental role of name giver. A name is a social reality. Referring to someone only by a racial category, by a class identity, or by a statement of (in)ability can be an attempt to de-humanize the individual. Categorizing them as such without recognizing their individual humanity can be a move towards mere objectification. Consider the biblical accounts when a person’s name is removed as a signal of a “social death” and even an attempt to remove their existence from the community (e.g. 1 Sam. 24:21; Ps. 9:5; 109:13).

In a world where evangelism and discipleship are increasingly personal and always highly relational, truly loving someone in Christian ministry means knowing, and using, the person’s name. It may seem like an easy thing, but I encourage us to be honest with ourselves. How many times, at least in our own minds, have we referred to someone as “the lady in the back pew” or “the guy with the beard who comes to the soup kitchen”? They have names that are precious to them and to those who gave it to them. We honor their humanity when we actively work to learn—and remember—their names. The use of someone’s name acknowledges them for who they are, it brings honor to them, it signifies a personal respect, and it recognizes their humanity. Referring to someone in a manner that does not use their name can objectify that person. For example, calling him “the guy next door” all the time or merely referring to her as “the lady in the wheelchair” fails to embrace the individual who is created in the image of God that is before us. People are more than the titles we try to impose upon them.

Leaders, pastors included, may sometimes try to disconnect their own name from the title and role they hold. There is a great example in the American television show, The West Wing. In this fictional story, the President of the United States is faced with a difficult moral decision. He calls his life-long priest to the Oval Office to advise him. The priest, who has known President Jed Barlett since he was a child, is in awe by the powerful position that Jed now holds and does not know how to properly address him. He asks whether to refer to him as “Jed” or “Mr. President.” Bartlett’s response in poignant. He asks to be called “Mr. President” so that he can be reminded of the separation of the person he is and the office he holds. The decision before him is difficult and he does not want to be personally held responsible. Therefore, at least in President Bartlett’s mind, being called “Mr. President” excuses him personally from what he is about to do. Those who serve in Christian ministerial leadership do well to remember that we bear a Name that cannot be separated from our own. By our baptism and our call, we bear Christ’s Name in our ministry. We have a new status: we were once dead, now we are alive. While we may not have been given a new name, we do bear Christ’s Name in a way that cannot be separated from our own being (e.g. Rom. 6:2; 1 Cor. 1:2; Acts 11:26; 2 Pet. 4:16).

There is just something about a name: our own names. There is a beauty in the Name that we bear. And there is a beauty in looking past what we see on the outside of the person before us, and instead see the name they have been given. We have been called to reach them with the love of Christ, and we just will not be able to reach them until we know—and embrace—their names.

Dr. Haynes is the Director of Education and Leadership for World Methodist Evangelism and the author of Consuming Mission: Towards a Theology of Short-Term Mission and Pilgrimage. He is an ordained member in The United Methodist Church. He can be reached at rob@worldmethodist.org. To learn more about, or to order, Consuming Mission, visit www.ConsumingMission.com.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_facebook][vc_tweetmeme][/vc_column][/vc_row] [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Evangelism and The Short-Term Mission Trip

By Rev. Dr. Robert Haynes

With the coming of spring and the anticipation of summer, many churches in the United States are preparing for the Short-Term Mission (STM) “season.” Churches frequently use a domestic or international STM trip as a standard part of regular programming for youth and adults of all ages. STM has been billed as a way for American churches to spread the Good News to those in impoverished and underserved areas of the world. The wide-spread and growing practice deploys teams that are often comprised of church members with willing hearts, ready hands, and a desire to bring about a change. However, the role of evangelism in Methodist STM deserves further examination.

STM began and grew as a populist movement with roots in evangelistic motivations. Some of the first short-term trans-national mission trips began in the 1950s. Under the guidance of groups like Operation Mobilization (1957) teams of young people from the United States headed overseas to minister to those who had not yet heard the Gospel. Many of these teams departed with suitcases full of Gospel literature and a burden to share the Good News of Jesus Christ. They distributed hundreds of millions of evangelistic materials in countries throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

STM, which I define as two weeks or less, has continued to grow. Today, approximately 2 million Americans, from 100,000 churches and thousands more non-profit agencies, participate in STM annually. This multi-billion dollar venture involves millions more in their targeted countries of service. However, do contemporary STM teams retain the evangelistic fervor with which some of the first teams set out? My own research of United Methodist STM indicates that often times STM participants can overwhelmingly affirm the value of the trips for them personally, yet often struggle to define their role in the larger Mission—are they missionaries, evangelists, friends, servants, or something else?

One possible reason for the ambiguity of the purpose of the trip may be that frequently STM trips are to places where churches are already established. In general, STM trips are to places that are already new centers of global Christianity. Seven of the top ten destinations for American STM teams are in Latin America or the Caribbean, locations that have a long history of active church ministry and which has seen important growth in recent years. Additionally, because these international service trips, done in the name of mission, often work in established church communities, many STM team members see themselves as now free from the directive to engage in faith-sharing endeavors that historically accompanies missional service. In fact, many American STMers perceived a greater faith in their hosts than they themselves possessed. This leads to an interesting outcome. Team leaders and members often do not feel a need to share their faith because, “Everyone’s already a Christian, anyway.” Because there is a strong perception of the Christian devotion in the mission hosts surpassing that of the STMer, for many, there is an expectation that the devotion in others would lead to a deeper devotion in themselves. They expected to grow in their own faith while on the trip in part by what they observed in their mission hosts.

This can occur for a variety of reasons and in a variety of service contexts. John, a pastor colleague, recounted the time he was serving as a long-term missionary in Eastern Europe during the 1980s. When the radical political changes of the late 80s and early 90s opened Eastern Europe to travelers from the West, his ministry was flooded with requests to host STM teams. After just a few teams had come and gone, he quickly realized that people were coming not to primarily serve in ministry, but to “do some good” while touring places that had been closed for generations. John had to then train his European staff members to evangelize the American STM team members who were coming to be “missionaries” in their own country. Could the same be true today?

I am not suggesting that people stop traveling, stop serving, stop learning, or stop building meaningful relationships with churches around the world. Quite the opposite. However, anything done in the name of Christian Mission should seek to faithfully engage the biblical foundations of mission it claims to embody. Doing so means that two important principles should be embraced: 1) Evangelism is mission, but 2) Mission is not merely evangelism. In other words, through careful biblical training pastors and other mission leaders should prepare their STM teams to share their faith with both their mouths and their paintbrushes. Under the explicit direction of their mission hosts, STM leaders should provide tools for their team members to engage in culturally appropriate faith-sharing—just as they should do at home.

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Consuming Mission and Short-Term Missions

By Rev. Dr. Robert Haynes

From the earliest days of my pastoral service my leaders and mentors encouraged me to lead and develop short-term mission (STM) trips. They assured me that these trips would provide life-changing opportunities for those in my ministries. In addition, the people in the communities we would serve would receive the benefits of medical care, children’s ministry activities, or the construction of a new facility. This seemed like an easy decision to make.

However, few significant, lasting changes were made. The deeper I went into the practice, I began to wonder just who exactly the STM trip was to benefit.

My new book, Consuming Mission, is a product of asking what happens on a STM trip, who serves whom, what are the expectations of STMers on their trip, and what theologies shape and inform their activities.

Written for pastors, mission leaders, seminary students, and professors, Consuming Mission is an illuminating ethnography of current STM participants and is representative of the wide age ranges and demographic backgrounds from which STMers come. Since STM is a grassroots movement, hearing directly from the STM participants to understand their theologies and motivations for service is key to understanding the current practice and how to shape it for the future. It is the product of in-depth interviews with United Methodist STM leaders and practitioners from four different states and four different annual conferences.

A biblical motivation for mission is foundational to Wesleyan Methodist theology. Therefore, I asked team members and team leaders about their biblical motivations for STM.

Surprisingly, this was one of the most difficult questions for participants to answer. Participants often hesitated to answer and apologized for not being more familiar with the Bible when trying to recall a verse or story. Answers to this line of questioning varied and were among the most difficult to elicit during our discussions. Some pointed to verses where Jesus’ followers are command to “go” and to “serve.” Many team members and leaders referenced Scriptural principles that pointed to aid and comfort for the STM participants themselves. However, generally speaking, scriptural references in regard to service in the name of mission were slow to come from the interview participants.

Additionally, none of the teams in the interview pool reported using a cohesive Bible study or mission text to help shape their pre-trip planning or in-country service. Most recalled using Bible verses as a part of the pre-trip meeting devotionals, but these devotionals were but a small part of the meetings, which were usually consumed by logistical planning.

When there is a vacuum of biblical and theological missional training, something will fill that vacuum of motivation. For most STMers, the vacuum was filled by the desire for an “experience.”

Consuming Mission gives an in-depth examination of the role “experience” plays in the American consumer culture and missions. Many economists say that we are living in an “experience economy” which is driven by the high value placed upon things like experiential encounters, vacations, and everyday activities. Consider the high prices commanded at theme parks like Disney World and Universal Studios. Diners pay a premium price for meals in restaurants with walls covered in music or movie memorabilia. Tour companies are offering vacations to increasingly exotic places in an effort to satisfy the yearning of their customers who want to top last year’s adventure vacation.

The influence of a desire for an experience is pervasive in the interviews with STMers in Consuming Mission. Such an influence can be seen, for example, in some of the responses when I posed a common question around STM, “Why not just send the money?” Many with whom I spoke rejected the idea for fear of missing out on the “experience” for themselves.

The experience they were seeking for themselves was frequently seen as the chance to grow in their own faith. Many people expected to be influenced by their mission hosts and the perception of a superior faith on the part of those hosts. When talking about their STM activities, participants often describe their time, money, sacrifice, and service, applied in the name of mission, as a way to purchase an experience akin to personal growth commonly sought by pilgrims.

Historically, a pilgrimage is an event when people travel to another place where they understood God to have worked before, could work again, and they expected God to work in their lives while they were there. They expected to come home different than when they left. They expected to be transformed by the experience.

Consuming Mission illustrates that many people are using STM to do just that: to use acts of service, done in the name of mission, for self-edification that functions as a pilgrimage. In STM, the cathedrals and shrines of historical Christian pilgrimage perceived as sites of the miraculous are replaced with what is perceived as substandard housing and malnourished children.

Many ministries have developed STM programs with the primary goal of consuming an experience for the implicit, and sometimes explicit, benefit of the participants. Yet, this is not a motivation for mission service demonstrated in the biblical text nor in Wesleyan theology. Rather, a cruciform attitude towards service, exemplified by Christ and taught in Wesleyan missional theology, displaces self-fulfillment as a motivator for activities done in the name of Christian mission.

To address such issues in this approach to mission, we must move beyond simply trying to correct a few “best practices” and move deeper to their underlying causes. Developing appropriate mission theology is important because theologies shape motivations and motivations shape practices. If we want to make a long-lasting change to the practices, the theologies that shape them must be further developed. Through the careful engagement with biblical mission theology, I point out the ways in which the missio Deishould be the “consuming mission.”

At its best, STM seeks to address many real-world issues. However, STM is failing to realize its potential due to a lack of robust theological reflection by its leaders and participants. The STM movement can, and should, function as an instrument of the missio Dei to strengthen the church around the world. When the practice moves away from pilgrimage towards a more robust practice of mission, it can begin to embrace such possibilities.

I am not suggesting that people stop traveling, stop serving, or stop learning. Quite the opposite. An increased awareness of the work of God around the world can only lead to good things. A life-changing pilgrimage should be applauded. Coming to a deeper understanding of the cultures of other nations leads to a better worldview.

Yet, tensions remain. Deep problems arise when those who participate in practices deemed “mission” do so with the primary aim of bettering themselves or experiencing something new and exciting. Unhealthy practices in the name of mission (e.g. ethnocentrism, paternalism, and developed dependencies) come forth.

Consuming Mission takes steps to confront such traits in STM and calls upon mission leaders to reshape this ubiquitous practice to more faithfully reflect a biblical missional engagement in the Wesleyan Methodist tradition.

Post originally appeared on UM&Global on 06 February 2019.