Western Christians in Global Mission: What's the Role of the North American Church? by Paul Borthwick

Author:Paul Borthwick [Borthwick, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2012-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

European mission mobilizer Richard Tiplady writes:

To be effective in world mission, North Americans need to “learn” a lot more. The average American (forgive me) is amazingly ignorant of world politics, non-Christian religions, culture outside their own continent and even world geography. You have your media and education system largely to blame for that. (We’ve all met the tourist who cancels a trip to Paris because there’s a war going on in Bosnia! Or the person who thought turban-wearing men from the Punjab were Muslims.) With the rise in short-term mission from America, we need to see a rise in “pre-visit” learning and appreciation of non-North American cultures.[7]

Genuine servanthood. Too often, we who go to serve on crosscultural short-term missions practice self-congratulatory servanthood. We live in the hut, eat the local food, endure the heat and use the squat toilet, all the time quietly congratulating ourselves on our willingness to serve.

The irony is this: I might be feeling proud as I “sacrifice” my North American comforts to be with my Majority World family, but they don’t necessarily see me as a servant. They welcome me as a guest, but to them, I am just living the way they do all day every day, fifty-two weeks a year. I am not acting as a servant; I am simply a new member of their family.

True servanthood is serving people in a way that they interpret as servanthood. When Jesus rose to wash his disciples’ feet in John 13, he didn’t need to tell them he was being a servant. In their culture, they knew exactly what he was doing.

Although written for a general audience, Duane Elmer’s Cross-Cultural Servanthood has maximum usefulness in training for short-term mission teams.[8] The exhortation to serve others in a way that they interpret as servanthood runs throughout the book. The challenge for short-termers is to discover and observe genuine local expressions of servanthood and then to do them.[9]

Humble Forward Progress

One of the themes that I advocate throughout this book is that mission in a globalized world requires that North Americans listen to the advice, feedback and training of our non-Western colleagues. Hear these words from Bishop Hwa Yung of Malaysia, as he addresses the past mistakes of Western missions but then urges our renewed participation:

The very fact of Western guilt [over past mistakes made in mission activity] may be one of the supreme evidences for the enduring validity of the gospel in the post-Christian West. For it shows that the gospel has the power to shape the conscience of a culture, even when its propositional claims have been forgotten or largely rejected by that culture. Seemingly, despite being abandoned by many Westerners, the gospel continues to simmer in an unquenchable manner in a society that once acknowledged Christ.

What do we conclude from this? That yes, Western guilt should lead to repentance for presumptuous, insensitive, ethnocentric, and triumphalistic missions. The wrong conclusion, however, is to suggest that we must forgo Western missions because such missions have lost integrity. The

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