LOUISVILLE — Hunter Farrell has learned a lot in his years serving the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Congo and Peru. One of the things he’s learned: “There’s a cost to being missional.”
Now Farrell, the new director of world mission for the PC(USA), is challenging Presbyterians to think in new ways.
He’s sending signals that the denomination’s national staff is ready “to move into a new mode of doing mission,” that it wants to work in real partnership with “mission initiators” from local congregations and presbyteries.
He sees some signs that the tide may be turning in the climate of mistrust. Giving for international mission that is unrestricted — not designated for particular causes — is up this year for the first time in years, Farrell said, as is giving so far to three of the PC(USA)’s four special offerings.
And Farrell said before he took the job, he asked two questions of the denomination’s top leadership:
How committed are you to global mission?
And how much freedom are you willing to give the world mission staff to reshape the way the Presbyterians respond to the needs of the world?
“I had a very clear sense they were on board,” he said. “They were ready to dare to change.”
Speaking to the Association of Presbyterian Mission Pastors, meeting in Louisville Nov. 28-30, Farrell also challenged Presbyterians at the local level who are involved with international mission to think about what they are doing and why.
He spoke, for example, of the shift of resources from supporting long-term mission workers, people who go somewhere and stay, learning the language, developing deep relationships, to funding short-term mission trips of a week or two.
Farrell said he believes that while short-term trips can be transforming experiences, at the same time “our effectiveness has dropped in the last 20 years primarily because of this short-term phenomenon,” shifting resources “so John and Jane Q. Presbyterian can take a mission trip.”
Farrell says he does understand the value of those trips, because they often provide “a God-given moment” for people to step away from their gadgets and warm showers and the comforts of affluence, and to reassess their identity as Christians.”
But they also can function as “just Christian tourism,” he said, with Americans spending a lot of money on travel that could be used instead for mission work that’s more prophetic and challenging.
When they worked in Peru for nearly a decade, Farrell and his wife, Ruth, interacted with a lot of American Presbyterians on short-term mission trips. They made a promise to each other, he said, that “we would never be silent when people would laugh about the roads” in rural Peru.
People would joke about the roads, the bumps and jars they’d survived in the country, the potholes that threatened to swallow the vans. Those jokes were told like survival stories.
But the Farrells countered with the reasons why the roads are so terrible. In Peru, every child is born with a debt imposed of nearly $8,000 — a fee, in essence, that the government must pay before it can provide schools or good roads or other public services.
Americans need to consider, when traveling to the third world, that “it is in fact Christ’s one world. It is God’s world,” Farrell said. “And to struggle with what that means, to be attached vitally, all of us adopted into the same family, is an awesome responsibility.”
Farrell spoke in part from his own experiences. As a young missionary in Congo, for example, he often used the traditional greeting of “brother” in addressing a man who’d become his friend. But the friend responded one day by saying, “Don’t call me ‘Brother’ unless you’re willing to share everything you have with me.”
In that community, food was scarce. Farrell understood that his friend was inviting him into a relationship with “not much food, but abundance.”
North Americans involved in mission need to recognize how much their view is shaped by affluence and comfort, Farrell said, to see that “we are among the richest people in the most powerful country in the world,” and with that comes responsibility.
And they need to learn to see the people of the developing world as equals, people with vital lessons to teach. “They’re more than exotica,” Farrell said. “They’re more than objects of our mission. They’re partners in Christ’s mission with us.”
He spoke of a holistic ministry of evangelism, justice and compassion that doesn’t stop at building houses, but goes on to address the underlying causes of poverty and homelessness.
Too often, “we do programs — that’s easy,” Farrell said. “We do programs to sort of fix the problems out there. But God calls us into something much deeper than that. God calls us into radical transformation.”
