Santa Rosa

For all of us in short-term ministry, there are defining moments. Here is one of mine.

I made the call early one October morning to some ministry partners in Ensenada, Mexico to see how they were doing. As I was bringing a short-term team in a few weeks, I wanted to make sure everything was still on schedule.

When Eduardo answered the telephone, I asked how he was doing. Now Eduardo was a positive kind of guy so I was unprepared when he told me stuff was not going well. He said that the government was in the process of evicting every resident of Santa Rosa, a small village where the Mexican Baptists had planted a church about three years earlier.

I listened as he told me that apparently there had been a land dispute, and the people of this tiny pueblo were caught in the middle of it. He told me how the government of Mexico, backed by federal troops was in the process of going door to door, telling the people to get what they could carry in five minutes, and get out.

Over the next few days they entered the houses and threw everything that was left into the back of a semi truck. House by house they went until the village was empty of people and belongings. They then drove the truck about 5 miles away, and dumped all the belongings along the side of the road, leaving what for many were a lifetime of memories shattered and broken.

Then the bulldozers moved in. Systematically they demolished every single house there. Then they crushed the school house that had been built by the federal government, toppled the pole that the day before had flown the Mexican flag and turned to the church, which I had helped build over the last year. It was gone in a few minutes.

Once everything was gone, they strung barbed wire around the area and posted armed guards at the former entrance so no one could reenter the area.

As a bit player in this drama that playing out in front of me, I got on the telephone to one of my board members who was well connected with the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles. At his urging, they looked into the situation and found that at the very least, the way the federal troops were acting was a clear violation of Mexican law.

They said that if one of the leaders of the village would swear a formal complaint in Ensenada, they could stop the action, save the peoples belongings, and maybe their houses. I relayed this info to both the American missionary and the Mexican pastor serving there and received the same answer.

Their work was concerned with souls. Fighting for the rights of the very people they were serving was not their calling. That was government work.

O Youth Pastor, Where Art Thou

A while back I had the opportunity to run into Drew Dyck, one of the people responsible for putting together and getting the word out about a new resource from Christianity Today called Round Trip Missions. Round Trip Missions is a web based resource to help short-term team leaders rethink, plan, raise funds, and generally do all the stuff necessary for a successful short-term mission experience.

Drew asked me to consider writing an article for them based on one of my earlier blog posts. After about ten seconds, I of course said yes and am pleased to say they liked it and you can now read it online here.

If you like it, and even if you don't, please take a moment to leave your thoughts over at Round Trip Missions. The truth is there are some problems within the short-term mission industry. We need people to weigh in and let us know how we are doing.

Only by hearing the voices of those we serve, and those who serve with us, will we be able to improve.

Thanks, and enjoy the read!

Mission, Missions, and Missional

I got a call the other day from a well known national ministry. They found the number for Adventures in Life in the telephone book and assumed we were a church.

As such, they were calling to ask me, as a supposed youth pastor, if I was interested in my students participating in a mission trip in Las Vegas.

A few years back I was working with a denominational group that was putting together a missions conference for their local congregations. One of their goals was to celebrate what God was doing as the members of these local churches served God in their neighborhoods.

As I talk with pastors and leaders about missions, I constantly hear about a renewed focus on local mission opportunities.

These experiences have got me to thinking. Is it possible that the church, in our rush to embrace the term missional, has defined all of what we do as mission so that we feel better about ourselves?

Think about it like this. If youth pastors are missionaries, if sharing Jesus with the barista at Starbucks is mission, if giving socks to homeless people is missions work, then what isn’t mission?

It is as if we have decided to define all that the church does as mission, so that we can look at ourselves and conclude we are doing a good job missionally. We have changed the descriptions enough so that no matter how little, or how much, the church does, we look heroic.

So here is what I am wondering. How much does this new thinking impact the church and her involvement in cross-cultural international mission? Is it possible that we are raising an entire generation of people who see no need to leave our shores and involve themselves in the work of God “over there?”

Could it be that with these new definitions of mission and being missional locally, we are robbing the church of some of the very people who 50 years ago might have gone “to the ends of the earth?”

I am not sure what the answers are to all of this, but I just can’t stop thinking about it.

What are your thoughts?