Hunter Farrell, former missionary to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Peru began service as director of global missions for the General Assembly Council this past summer. Outlook editor, Jack Haberer, recently discussed with him his take on missions.
JH: You spent the first third of your career serving in African missions, both on site in the Congo and here in the General Assembly as an area coordinator. Peru must have been quite a change for you. Tell me that transition.
HF: I had lived as a foreign exchange student in high school in Chile and spent a year of my time at the University of Texas at Austin abroad at the Catholic University in Peru. I spoke Spanish and had a love for Latin-American culture, so I was looking to get back there when I applied to what was then the Division of International Mission in Atlanta. John Pritchard got hold of my application and said, “Come to Zaire.” … I went at age 24, did a year as a volunteer in mission in Zaire, and fell in love with Zaire, the people, and with the way Presbyterians do mission.
I was kind of a border church member in many ways. I was a convinced Christian, but I just didn’t see fitting into church as social club. I was looking for ways to connect my faith with the needs of the world.
… I was blown away by how the church was in mission, and the vitality of Christian witness in extremely poor communities, characterized by massive malnutrition, dirty water, and yet people were still working to improve the quality of life, to share God’s love with the people around them, bringing people to church.
JH: What brought you out of Zaire to work in Louisville at that time, and then, ultimately, to go to Peru?
HF: We were on furlough; we had finished our second term in Zaire. Leadership of the church asked me to consider becoming regional coordinator for East and West Africa. I did so for seven years. It was wonderful work. I loved the people I worked with. But I sensed a call to move back into more community-oriented work and to more intensely cross-cultural work, which has always been my primary calling. The opportunity to do that in Peru came.
One of our children we had adopted in Peru. To be able to return to allow him to grow up in the country of his birth meant a lot to us as a family …
JH: About your time in Peru, tell me about the “Joining Hands Against Hunger Network.”
HF: Joining Hands brings together 14 Peruvian church denominations and Christian non-profit organizations, who together are committed to looking at some of the causes of poverty in that context and working together to improve people’s quality of life — generally working with the poorest fourth of Peru’s population — people who live on less than a dollar a day. It’s a population that’s very difficult to effect any change in, but Joining Hands has found some powerful ways by linking with North American Presbyterians, primarily in Giddings-Lovejoy Presbytery.
… Joining Hands in Peru looks specifically at care for God’s creation, at economic justice and at human rights as three areas where the poor are suffering the most in this age of globalization.
With the fair trade work, we’ve been able to double and triple the income of about 250 artisans over an 18 month period — that’s with the help of the Presbyterian Women’s Birthday Offering and with the support of a wonderful fair trade team that our Joining Hands Network has formed.
JH: What brings you back to Louisville? Was it hard to leave Peru for this opportunity?
HF: The hardest thing about this change for the family has been having to say good-bye to Peruvian friends and colleagues. … We [first] came to Louisville back in the 90s, and saw it as a temporary chapter in our lives. We come back now and sense that this is a longer calling to this particular work. But a conversation with Linda Valentine and another face-to-face meeting with Tom Taylor convinced me that there is an openness at the very top of the church’s leadership for a new day in mission; and that so excited me, so challenged me that I went back home, talked with Ruth and got a circle of friends, Peruvian friends, to pray with us, and a resounding confirmation of that calling came from them and then with the GAC to accept that call.
JH: Tell me about some of the strengths you see in our global missions.
HF: The quality of our mission personnel; the commitment of our staff here in Louisville; the wealth of knowledge and commitment of our partner churches. That combination is an incredible strength that I inherit. I think that the greatest untapped strength for us is the local and regional interest and commitment to world mission all over this church. … I see my work more in a networking capacity than in an “allocation” framework; traditionally we allocated personnel and resources to different places in the world. Now it’s much more about networking, helping people to connect around a common vision, to begin to respond to the movement of God’s Sprit all around this world — where the church is well established, where there is no church — in both contexts.
JH: What about the weaknesses to redress, or hopes for the future?
HF: Some of the criticisms that some groups in the church have launched against the denomination have had an extremely negative impact upon our church’s capacity to send missionaries and support Christian witness all around the world. My greatest hope is tied to that: that together we’ll be able to communicate clearly what the church is doing and some of the remarkable and inspiring stories of faith that are going on and to restore that confidence that the church has traditionally had in its capacity to send and support missionaries, to support Christian witness around the world, and to send missionaries to new places where there is no church.
JH: In its peak, we once had about five times as many career missionaries serving abroad as we do right now. That reality generates much criticism. How do you unpack that part of our story?
HF: I know many godly, committed, retired missionaries who gave their lives and their careers to working themselves out of a job. They trained a country of inspired leadership at the national level, at the local level, in the context where they were, whether in Pakistan, or Japan or Zaire. Then they came home. It would be inappropriate to send mission workers to that place to do that job. And so, we need to praise God and stop beating ourselves up about that.
However, I think there’s a continued calling for the missionary vocation in our church today, in this century. And I am deeply grateful to God and excited as heck to see in Linda Valentine, Tom Taylor, and the GAC executive committee the incredible enthusiasm to redress that decline in mission — the number of mission personnel — and to send more and more missionaries. That is incredible, given the bleak financial future of the church, according to some forecasts.
