With those words, Hunter Farrell, head of world mission for the PC(USA), set the tone for the Mission Celebration ’09 convocation — a gathering of more than 700 Presbyterians involved in grassroots mission work around the world, in everything from water purification projects in South America to working with girls caught in the sex trade in Southeast Asia.
In the 1960s, “you prayed and you wrote a check,” Farrell said. But now, short-term mission trips have become the norm, for congregations both big and small — with Robert Priest, a professor of mission and intercultural studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, estimating that about two million Christians from the U.S. now travel overseas on mission trips each year.
With that kind of volume, the denomination’s global partners are pushing the PC(USA) to go deeper in relationship and to reconsider some of the approaches of the North American church that don’t always work so well in the southern hemisphere, Farrell said.
The celebration, held Oct. 22-24 in Cincinnati, served as the culmination of a major attempt this fall to build support for and understanding of the denomination’s international mission efforts, and to strengthen connections among those involved with these efforts at the grassroots.
From late September through mid-October, about 45 PC(USA) mission co-workers traveled around the United States, visiting 150 of the denomination’s 173 presbyteries, in what was called Mission Challenge ’09 — speaking in church basements and on college campuses and wherever folks would listen about their lives and work. The idea: help Presbyterians in the pews to understand better why this work matters, and to convince them to financially support the denomination’s world mission efforts.
The Mission Celebration was preceded by meetings of most of the three dozen mission networks, in which Presbyterians are involved — in certain geographic areas or among particular people groups, such as in central Asia or El Salvador or among the Kurds, gathered to share ideas, inspiration and resources.
There was plenty of celebration at this gathering, but also some frank talk about what could be done better. Changes in technology and the ease of travel mean that many Presbyterians can go overseas themselves for a mission trip of a week or two, or connect directly with Christians in far-away places via cell phones, Skype, Twitter, and e-mail.
With such an emphasis on short-term mission, the PC(USA)’s global partners are pushing for Presbyterians from the U.S. go “go deeper” in their relationships with Christians from other countries, Farrell said.
First, they want Americans to go deeper in understanding the root causes of poverty and injustice. Many of the international partners “have a very sophisticated understanding of the causes of the problems they struggle with every day,” even if the visitors from the U.S. do not, Farrell said in the opening plenary.
His example: the “Live Aid” benefit concerts from 1984 and 1985, which raised more than $100 million in aid for people suffering from famine in Ethiopia. More than one million Ethiopians died from the famine. “All of us felt better because we had done something to help out,” Farrell said.
But later, disturbing facts emerged, he said. In reality, there had been enough food in the 1980s to feed all in Ethiopia, despite the civil war, but a corrupt government kept the food from some rebellious provinces. “The government manipulated the media and even international aid organizations,” Farrell said. Some have concluded that the humanitarian effort may have actually prolonged the war and contributed to human suffering. In such circumstances, “our compassion is simply not enough and can in fact worsen the situation,” he said.
So the partners want a deeper understanding on the part of North Americans of such things as globalization and the politics and history of particular countries – of some of the forces on the ground which produce the realities with which they live day-by-day.
Second, the partners want Presbyterians from the United States to go deeper in speaking of their own faith. “Our partners are often surprised at how secular we seem to be,” Farrell said, and how awkward it sometimes seems when American Presbyterians are expected to pray with and for others and to share their stories of faith. The partners want to hear the stories of how their visitors have been transformed by faith, Farrell said, and want the visitors to listen to their stories of transformation as well.
Third, the partners want clearer indications of how Presbyterians from different parts of the church are collaborating with each other, they want a deeper sense of partnership from within the PC(USA).
“Our partners are often surprised at how disorganized we are,” Farrell said. And sometimes they say, “You can do better than this.”
