Disillusioned

I sat at my piano a long time this morning and apart from fiddling around with “Prelude in C” I was staring at the photos on the wall. There are three above the Kimball upright, all from Africa. One I purchased from a friend who was selling them to raise money for a well in Zimbabwe. The other two I took myself a year ago, in Rwanda. What got me thinking about Africa this morning was one of my former students who is currently on a team raising money to leave on a trip in October. The “prayer card” is on my fridge. It is a nice glossy 4x8 cad with four pictures on the front, all of this girl and her cute personality.

So there I sat looking at the Africa pictures, thinking about my students’ upcoming trip and even my own trips in the past.  I just felt, well, disillusioned about the whole way missions is being done. I’m frustrated inside at the commercialized level at which the “business” of missions has risen. Churches and mission organizations and youth groups and spiritual leaders behind pulpits of glass have pounded into our heads to GO fulfill the great commission. Is that the heart of God? I don’t mean it in a blasphemous way but in the way we, as spiritual leaders are touting being missional, is that really how God intended us to hear that passage? And even more importantly, are we deceived into a missional experience only to check it off a list of spiritual to-dos and move on to the next task on our way to enlightenment?

Human beings are driven by the need to be in control. We value formulas that garner high potential for repeated success. We quantify our outcomes so they can be graphed and sold to the masses to prove our formula works. It is big business. No one wants to invest in a plan that is based on faith alone. Faith has uncertain outcomes and isn’t marketable until after the outcomes. Then the stories of faith become inspirational to us and profitable. I would have to say that the great women and men of faith did not feel “supported” going in and probably don’t care that their bandwagon is full on the other side. When we mass-produce missions we rob our missionaries of the experience Christ intended them to have as part of an on-going journey of faith. Instead it becomes purely experiential and a part of our personal history.

This past year I have taken a break from church and in large part from “missions.” After eight years of intense ministry my spirit was heavy and sad. What I heard from the pulpit saddened me, the urgency from administration, to get a mission trip going seemed all wrong. It all seemed so mechanical and scheduled and contrived. I longed for the authentic fellowship and goals of true missional living. On a side note, once you have tasted true missional life, however small the portion, it becomes your spiritual benchmark. Experience in and of itself is no longer enough.

I had a pretty outlandish plan I always wanted to try out when I was a mission director. It would serve as a kind of barometer to measure the true heart of a person who felt called to go on a mission trip.  I got the idea from the book of Acts when the new church converts were willing to sell all they had to give to one another to promote the cause of Christ.  The plan went something like this: pick a local location in genuine physical need but do not reveal the destination to anyone. Then create a team of qualified Christians that could meet that need, and allow anyone who felt called to be part of the team. Now lay out the cost, the dates. Begin a Bible study in Acts 2 and outline the basic principles of “the churches” philosophy on missions. Which by the way they were really successful at doing, …and hundreds were added to their numbers daily, Acts 2:45.

You can probably see where I am going with this…they get on a bus after months of planning, passports in order, shots done, highly anticipating their oversees journey, only to be dropped off in the inner-city of their very own city. Imagine the mixed reactions. How many of these missionaries would call a taxi and leave in anger, how many would do the task they were trained to do but with disappointed spirits, and how many would not blink an eye and get right to work?

Or change the scenario just a little and in the middle of your planning announce the team is going to (fill in a international location) but that only 6 of the 20 people will actually board a plane. All twenty people are asked to continue the fundraising efforts, the publicity, the spiritual preparations but the week before you are scheduled to leave you all meet together and pray for whom God chooses to send and the die is cast. What is the fallout of that decision? How many left behind would become prayer warriors and activists in support of those who leave?

The truth is that none of us are as altruistic as we would like to think we are. And who can blame us? There isn’t a lot of modeling of true missional living in our American culture or from our American pulpits. The ministry I was a part of for eight years, only one administrator or pastor has been on a mission trip local or otherwise, in the last 6 years besides myself, and only one of them gives a monthly message to the homeless as a form of local missions. The truth is I think we just want to check it off our list so we can say we are a mission-minded church so we hire someone to make us look good. As long as the congregation gets a taste, sees some pictures, hears some stories, sponsors a kid or two to go on a mission trip our epistemological Christian conscience is clear. Shame on us if that is even a little bit true.

Sometimes I actually get nauseous thinking about the times I have been a party to the same philosophy or have allowed it to happen so my job would be secure or so that my superiors would be happy. I can name the trips on one hand that have had legitimate reasons to happen, with pure motives, and genuine outcomes of missional experiences for its participants. The rest sit on an ever-increasing crap heap of good intentions; wood and hay.

I think that a mission is not marketable and if it is then it ceases to be missional in the truest sense of the word. Missions is personal, deeply, deeply, personal. It is likened unto your prayer closet, and the deeds your left hand does not know the right hand did. We are each responsible to reach those around us with the good news of the gospel. We are to help our neighbors, and sell our belongings to do so if necessary. It requires selfless living. It requires you to cease to care about yourself or your needs. It requires faith that God will provide if you will just go.

This is where we stand today. We are on the rooftop and we are the rich young rulers and we ask Christ what we must do to enter the kingdom of heaven but the majority of the Americanized world do not think the answer Christ gives applies to them. “Sell all you have and follow me.”