LOUISVILLE — Hunter Farrell, the new director of World Mission for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), calls this a crossroads time for Presbyterians — with the health and vitality of the denomination at stake.
“I believe we in the Presbyterian church are at a crossroads, a kairos moment, a time when we’re going to have to choose which direction in which to go,” said Hunter Farrell, director of World Mission for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Farrell was speaking to more than 600 people who gathered in Louisville Oct. 2-5 for the World Mission ’07 “Celebration of Grace” convocation — an effort by the denomination to jump-start enthusiasm for international mission and to build closer connections between the national staff and Presbyterians involved in world mission at the local level.
One option, Farrell said, is to accept a paradigm shift in understanding. That shift would recognize that the Presbyterian church needs to change from being “a membership organization primarily concerned with providing needed services to our members to that of a missional church, a church that understands itself to have been sent into the world” to share the good news of Jesus in a way that’s both passionate and respectful.
The other option, Farrell said, “is that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) fades away into extinction, like a dinosaur unable to adapt to a changed environment.”
Of course, there are many choices to make along the way, many realities Presbyterians must confront as they struggle with how to make a witness to their faith in a complicated world.
For example, what are the difficulties as people of wealth (Americans going to developing countries, or people from the suburbs driving down to the inner city) interact with one another?
How can people of different faiths — Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others — learn to listen to one another and to speak honestly about what they both hold in common and about their differences?
Two speakers particularly laid the groundwork for thinking systematically and theologically about how the PC(USA) approaches world mission, and how that approach is changing. Both Farrell and Sherron George, a missiologist who also is the denomination’s regional liaison and theological consultant for South America, have served overseas, in the Congo, Peru, and Brazil. They speak both with big-picture understanding and on-the-ground knowledge.
Among the points they made:
- “Missiology matters.” How and why people get involved in mission — their motives and their practices — are important, George said. Those involved should take seriously God’s word and God’s world, and should respond “creatively and boldly” in ways that are appropriate for particular contexts.
- Even with an explosion of mission work at the grassroots and the downsizing of the national staff, the PC(USA)’s World Mission staff still has a significant role to play. George described that as a “horizontal” role as educator, facilitator, equipper, and connector of those around the church involved in mission. She spoke repeatedly of the passage in the fourth chapter of Ephesians, which describes the parts of the body of Christ “joined and knitted together,” and “each part working properly.”
- Mission done well takes place in context — the context of a particular country and culture. Sometimes too much individualism creates “congregations with donor-driven projects,” George said, and fragmentation of approach that “destroys our credibility, the proclamation of the gospel and our very identity as Presbyterians.”
- Through all the storms and changes, Presbyterians have not abandoned a commitment to mission. George said she’s written a chapter for a forthcoming book called Faithfulness in the Storm, outlining the history of Presbyterian mission work in recent decades, and showing God’s faithfulness in “using frail Presbyterians” as part of God’s plan for the world.
- Holistic mission includes evangelism, witness, compassionate service, social justice, and the integrity of creation. “God’s mission is cosmic, holistic, and universal,” George said. “Christ, the head of the church, fills the body, which then shares with the rest of creation,” she said. “So, fill her up. Yes, we’re empty. We leak. We can do nothing on our own. We are intrinsically selfish, with self-interest and mixed motives.”
- God provides for the whole world. And the Southern hemisphere church understands, she said, that concept of fullness — of God’s work extending to the fullness of human rights in Colombia, for example, or to the fullness that comes in working for clean air in the Peruvian mining community of La Oroya or working to rebuild after the recent earthquake in Peru.
- “The Southern majority church now has the responsibility for the evangelization of the rest of the world,” George said. And those in the northern and southern churches “are equals,” she said. “Rich churches and poor churches are equals” and “we do mission not for others, but with others.” The mission which flows forth must be non-competitive and done in partnership, a reflection of the grace God lavishes on the world. One of the most difficult challenges in the post-colonial world, George said, is to learn from the Southern church “exactly what kind of mission workers from the north they still need and want in this new era of mission.”
- God’s mission involves reconciliation and breaking down walls of division. But there are signs all around of new walls being erected — between Mexico and the United States, around Palestinian enclaves in Israel, between Christians and Muslims, between people with differing views within the PC(USA). Christians must figure out, George said, how to tear down the barriers they have a role in erecting, and how to live and work across barriers in a globalized, multicultural world.
Farrell spoke of the “hallmarks,” the core values of Presbyterian mission work that Presbyterian mission leaders have identified in conversations he’s had recently around the church. “You can’t rush in,” in other countries, Farrell said. It takes time to learn the complexities of language and culture. He spoke of “an abiding concern for the least of these,” the need to work for both justice and compassion.
And mission needs to come from “humility, the desperate longing to be in mission as Christ was in mission, with utter humility,” Farrell said.
He traced the history of more than 170 years of Presbyterian mission work — translating the Bible to many languages, founding schools and hospitals, training church leaders.
And after the great movement towards national independence in the 1950s and 1960s in Asia and Africa, Presbyterians painstakingly learned new models of working in mission, primarily working in partnership with national church partners in other countries.
And now, changes in communication and technology, in the frequency of international travel, in the global economy, and in patterns of how people view denominations and how they spend their charitable dollars are bringing new challenges. Last year, 1.5 million Americans traveled overseas on short-term mission projects, Farrell said.
That raises new questions. Some are beginning to ask, for example, whether the money American Christians spend on traveling overseas for mission trips is worth it.
An example: one group spent $37,000 on plane tickets and donated $5,000 for construction materials to assist with a project at Nile Theological College in Sudan, Farrell said. But he recalls Bill and the late Lois Anderson, long-time PC(USA) missionaries, wondering aloud whether that money spent on travel might have been better used to enable Sudanese carpenters and masons, “who are desperate for a job,” to do the work themselves.
And some in the PC(USA), for example, young people and those from small congregations, “half of our church,” Farrell said — may not be able to afford expensive plane tickets. But they should not, he said, be left out of international mission work.
In the midst of all this change, many voices are involved in the conversation, including what Farrell describes as “mission initiators” in presbyteries and congregations.
One challenge at the crossroads, he said, will be to find ways to build these partnerships — internationally and across the PC(USA) — in ways that honor the hallmarks of the ways in which Presbyterians traditionally have done mission, but also can be agile enough to leap into the realities of a changing world.
