Adventures in Life Ministry, Oaxaca, and Short-Term Mission Success

I feel like Adventures in Life Ministry has won the lottery.

At least, never having ever bought a ticket, I feel like I think people feel when they win the lottery.

Let me explain.

Pastor Steve checking on the progress

In 1999, AIL Ministry went to Oaxaca to talk with a group of pastors and leaders to talk about coming alongside their ministries.  We were hoping to help them realize their dreams for ministry.  We did not go there to tell them how to do their ministries or to tell them what we were going to do.

We went to listen and offer our help in any way we could.

For the first couple of years we were essentially in a dating relationship with our new friends.  We helped a couple of churches in their outreach plans and then one day Pastor Saul asked us to help his church build a training center for Zapotec Leaders and Pastors in the Tlacolula Valley, 25 miles east of the capital city.

We broke ground on that training center in 2005.  This October, the National Baptist Convention of Mexico will be holding the first official training event there.

It is part of the national strategy of the Baptist denomination to reach the indigenous people groups of Mexico and teach cross cultural mission strategies to young missionaries for worldwide evangelism.

Let me put this in practical terms... The largest Protestant denomination in Mexico is now using the facility that Adventures in Life Ministry built in Oaxaca to train national leaders not just to reach the indigenous peoples of Mexico, but to inspire and send missionaries around the world.

This is a really big deal, and here’s why.  That little facility that AIL Ministry built with the tithes and donations of people and churches in the United States is set to train and empower a new generation of missionary leaders.

I cannot think of a better example of effective short-term mission.

From the US Standards of Excellence for Short-Term Mission, to which Adventures in Life belongs, lets see how our STM in Oaxaca stacks up to the 7 Standards....

1. God Centered... The entire idea of this project was centered around sharing the love of Jesus Gospel message in a largely under-reached population and extending God’s Kingdom here on earth.

2. Empowering partnerships with a focus on local initiatives... The center was the dream of local churches that were already working in the area.  They were looking for a way to improve their mission.  AIL Ministry came alongside them and helped make that dream a reality.

3. Mutual Design... Both local leadership and AIL Ministry worked hand in sometime difficult hand to get this center done.  It was a team effort all the way through.

4. Comprehensive Administration... AIL Ministry worked hard to raise the funds necessary for the center and together with our local leadership, strove to be good stewards of both the people and financial resources God had entrusted us.

5. Qualified Leadership... Again, together with locals, AIL worked to make sure that participants in this project had the tools, training and resources needed to successfully complete our portion of the project.

6. Appropriate Training... We made sure that when people took part in our STM, they saw how it was connected to God’s larger plan in Oaxaca, were prepared culturally and came with an attitude of a learner-servant, respectful of the local church.

7. Thorough Follow-Up... This is where we are now.  The ministry is now in the hands of local indigenous leadership in Oaxaca and the National Baptist Convention.  We will continue to work together whenever and however we can, but this season of work at Tlacolula has been completed.  It was a short-term mission for Adventures in Life Ministry and that mission is now over. 

One of our teams working on the water system at the training center

 But while our mission is over, the ministry moves forward.

Some of the strongest criticisms of short-term mission are a lack of long-term impact and a focus on projects designed by Americans for American ministry.  From the start, this project was birthed, fed, and nurtured to completion by the local church in Oaxaca.

It was not easy.  There were times when like any married couple we fought.  I remember one particularly bad day when I was literally yelling at Pastor Saul insisting he was wrong.  But we got it done.

Together... in Christian partnership.

And now that little ministry center in Tlacolula, directed by local Oaxacan leaders, will begin training cross cultural missionaries to share the Gospel of Jesus in Mexico and beyond.

I feel fortunate, blessed, and incredibly honored to have played a part in making this happen.

If you’ve ever contributed to Adventures in Life Ministry, participated on one of our Oaxaca teams, or prayed for our ministry, you should feel likewise... because this is the fruit of your ministry and investment in Adventures in Life.

Thank you for being part of extending God’s Kingdom not just in Mexico, but around the world through your investment in Adventures in Life Ministry.

Short-term mission... long term impact.

Photos courtesy of Mission Focused, a ministry partner of Adventures in Life... check them out here!

Judgement from God? Sorry Dr. Dobson, I think not...

Accompanying all the publicity about the shootings in Newtown, CT recently have been the tragically cliche like responses of many on the religious right.

Almost immediately these closet theologians came out claiming the multiple deaths were evidence of God’s judgement.  Much like after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the tsunami that hit Japan, Facebook and Gmail lit up with messages exhorting us to return to God or face countless death and destruction until we got the message.

Dr. James Dobson, long a hero of conservative evangelicals had this to say on a recent radio broadcast... “...a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that's what's going on."

Often when pastors and leaders make an attempt to explain the mind and actions of God, they look to passages like this one found in Jeremiah 22...

Why has the Lord done such a thing to this [us]? And the answer will be “Because [you] have forsaken the covenant of the Lord [your] God and have worshiped and served other gods.”

Let’s not mince words here.  Clearly we can see in the teachings of the prophets a distinct warning from God that, in essence, He will not be mocked.  He wants His people to be holy and set apart for His purposes.  

In this understanding of scripture, Dobson, and others like him over the years, men like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and more recently Mike Huckabee have been correct in calling America to a faith rooted in a solid belief in God Almighty.

However it is precisely at that point where many in the evangelical community are now parting with a view that God is bringing these calamities, both natural and man made, onto us because of a lack of faith and/or trust in God.

The problem isn’t a lack of faith and trust in God.  The problem for the Dobson/Huckabee crowd is the fact that evangelicals have moved on.  

We are just not that into a faith where those on the inside determine, through some sort of external observation, who is and who isn’t Godly enough.

Let me give you an example.

A few years back the son of a very dear friend of mine in Mexico was riding in the back of a pickup truck.  While waiting at a stoplight in Guadalajara, they were rear ended, resulting in near total paralysis from the neck down for a previously young healthy 16 year old boy.

I will never forget walking with the father after that accident.  He grabbed my arm to ask me a question.  Hermano David, he asked with tears welling up in eyes, do you think my son is paralyzed because God is refusing to hear my prayers due to lack of faith on my part?

This man, one of my heroes of faith for his constant trust in God through the most trying of circumstances was questioning his faith.  Why?  Because a pastor had told him that God hears and answers the prayers of a faithful man.  Obviously, because he wasn’t getting the answer he desired, it was due to a lack of faith.

Just like an earthquake, a hurricane, a tsunami or even a mass shooting are due to a lack of faith and rejection of God.

Excuse me, but what a load of crap. 

But let’s for a moment, take this theological belief seriously.

What should be our response?  What would be the return to God that the prophets, men like Jeremiah, Amos, Zechariah and Isaiah, envision?

Jeremiah, like the other prophets, in that same passage where he admonishes us for turning our back on God, calls us to defend the cause of the poor and needy... that, he says is what it means to know God.  That he says, is the Good News!

That is the response we are called to live... a response of justice, love and mercy, to the least of these.  We are called to live the Good News, serving, rather than condemning others.  It is a call expressed over and over again in the prophetic literature of the Old Testament and affirmed by Jesus in the New Testament.  

Yet for some reason the response I frequently hear regarding returning to God from many on the religious right is to demonize gays, self deport immigrants without papers and cut welfare payments like SNAP and WIC.  I never hear them trumpeting God’s call to stand on the side of the poor or the least of these, proclaiming justice, mercy and peace.

I have no problem saying America and everyone else on the planet should turn to God, just as James Dobson and all the others have expressed.

I just have a problem that the way they seem to want that faith lived out bears little or no  resemblance to how the prophets and Jesus have called us to live. 

75 Innocent Children Killed Everyday... and who notices?

The killer walked in unannounced, like a demon stalking his prey.

One moment everything in the village seemed fine and then that tranquility was shattered as the killer took the little girls life.  No one saw it coming.  No one saw the demon leave

A few miles away, the scene was the same.

Little Bernabe was quietly sleeping in his mother’s bed and then the same killer who earlier in the day had struck down a beautiful girl named Lilia struck again, and Bernabe was gone.

And so it went across the hillside, one village after another until at the end of the day, 20 beautiful children with their whole lives in front of them were no more.

Yet this was just in one small country in Latin America.

Sadly, the scene was going to play out in exactly the same way around the world in a macabre reign of global terror against the “least of these.”

By the end of the day more than 75 children died at the hands of this insidious killer.

Sadly, few people outside of these impoverished villages were even aware.  Beyond a few close friends, few tears fell and not one world leader attended a funeral for even one of these young innocent victims, all of whom died before ever reaching the flower of their life.

There were no words calling us to action, no promises that we would not allow this to happen again.  There was no Huffington Post, MSNBC or any other media outlet leading the charge to stop these senseless deaths.  President Obama provided no words of comfort for the victims parents or their villages.

In fact, even though every one of these 75 children who died could still be alive today, not one Senator or Congressman has taken up their cause.

Perhaps what is even sadder is that while 75 innocent children died that day, the demon would strike again the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.

And the deaths will continue.  Each year more than 25,000 children die of hunger and hunger related illnesses.  Many of these deaths could be prevented, if only we had the will.

While the deaths in Newtown, Connecticut have transfixed the United States and others around the globe, others are asking who is speaking for the rest of the world.  Who is speaking up for children with names like Bernabe, Abideme, Olufemi or Faiza?

If the deaths of 20 children in Newtown are reason enough to warrant 24/7 coverage from the likes of CNN, why not the 75 children that will die today, and tomorrow for lack of food?

The world currently produces enough food to provide every man, woman and child a daily diet of 2500 calories.

We could totally stop this stalking demon in his tracks if only we had the will.

Will you speak for the 75?

Read more here...

And here...

And here...

and finally, here too...