Along the way it also has become an example of an international mission partnership that started small, kept the connection, and lasted — evolving into greater understanding along the way.
“Like many mission projects, it was a sincere response on the part of people who love Christ and want to be obedient to the call to mission. They have been blessed with great resources, material resources, so they respond to need with a sincerely generous heart,” by sharing what they’ve been given.
But over time, the partnership has changed to a relationship of mutuality, Yamaguchi said. It’s been “a shift away from the model of the benevolent American privileged church relating to the other partner as the needier one, away from assuming that greater material privilege implied greater value.”
People have visited back and forth, from California to Kenya and from Kenya to California.
“We have invested a lot in building relationships, in spending time together,” Yamaguchi said. “It’s required some re-education for some of the American partners to slow down the initial inclination to want to do something and build something and fix something. It’s required some stepping up on the part of the Kenyan folks to accept the role of being equal partners and initiators and not acquiescing to a traditionally passive role.”
But the Americans have learned, for example, about the powerful role that elders play in the Kenyan church. Both presbyteries have about 60 congregations, but while the California churches typically have a pastor (or even more) for every church, each Kenyan pastor serves six or eight congregations (or even more) in a growing presbytery.
“The elders have all kinds of responsibility for teaching and evangelism and organizing the parish and caring for people and preaching,” Yamaguchi said. “Pastors come around for sacraments. It’s really an amazing thing; we have so much to learn from them.”
The model at work in this partnership is that “God is already at work in both places,” Yamaguchi said, not that “we have something good to give them that they need. … We have our impoverishments here in Los Ranchos. We have our blindnesses. We have our great failures of faithfulness and trust, and we have our great idolatries. … We have lots to learn from each other. But the assumption that our way is better because we have more money, while that’s put very crassly, I think that’s how we think sometimes.”
Los Ranchos was influenced, Yamaguchi said, by an immersion experience in Mexico about a decade ago, provided by an organization called Partners in Hope, that brings people from the U.S. to live side-by-side with people in impoverished neighborhoods in Mexico City and teaches them to think about models of mission such as community development and cooperative efforts and micro-lending.
They “help confront the Santa Claus syndrome,” Yamaguchi said, “where missionaries show up with a big sack and unload the sack.”
The group Los Ranchos sent was intentionally diverse, ethnically and economically, including a student from Kenya and people of Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese descent. The group learned from the people they met in Mexico, and also from one another.
That trip proved a turning point in the presbytery’s thinking about how partnerships can work and the value of collaborating with people who come from other places and backgrounds, Yamaguchi said.
Now, people from Los Ranchos are in almost daily cell phone and e-mail contact with the leadership of Limuru Presbytery. As the Kenyans attempted to build up a system of health clinics, the California Presbyterians made a series of trips to determine “what would be the most strategic, most effective way” to assist – learning and listening before doing anything, following the Kenyans’ lead.
Los Ranchos also strengthened a partnership with Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, which “has come on board with huge enthusiasm,” Yamaguchi said.
Hoag has sent medical professionals to Kenya at the hospital’s expense and is working with congregations in Los Ranchos to develop health care ministries and parish nursing.
The partnership continues, seen as a blessing in Kenya and California too.
