What is a Missionary?
**This is my personal blog. The views presented are my own.
At Missionary Training in 2017 - Our first public appearance as missionaries.
I AM A MISSIONARY
When I became a pastor, I found that all of a sudden I had a social problem. Any time I was at a gathering with new people and the subject of occupation came up, I always held my breath. I held my breath because it was never certain how people would react to hearing the word “pastor” come out of my mouth. Often you’d see them silently taking account of everything they had said to confirm nothing was embarrassing in light of the “holy person” they had just learned you to be. I know a pastor who had someone literally walk away when they revealed their profession to a new acquaintance.
I found that, without the disclaimer that “I’m not like a regular pastor, I’m a cool pastor”, peoples’ behavior would shift without fail. It takes a lot of work to make people feel at ease once they find out what you do.
Now that I’m a missionary…I find that dynamic to be increased tenfold. There is so much baggage to that word these days. So much so that some mission agencies have stopped using the word altogether. Rather they send “Mission Partners” or “Mission Personnel”. I’ve taken to saying that I work for the United Methodist Church. “Missionary” has too much to unpack at a dinner party.
The reason for that is that the term missionary is so closely connected with the West’s colonial past. It used to be that missionaries were almost exclusively White westerners. The paradigm was that White westerners had the truth. They had Jesus and their work was to carry Jesus with them to convert those who had never heard the word. That was the missionary’s burden. In its purest form, mission sought to give hope and salvation through Christ to people across the world. It also makes sense that it was mostly people of European descent because by the Middle Ages Chrisitanity had become primarily a European religion. Unfortunately it was most often coupled with European colonial conquest. Which is at best problematic. Read more about that in my most recent post.
CHANGED PARADIGM
My colleague Brandolyn, summarizing the book “The Open Secret”, recently pointed out that there was a shift in mission from evangelism toward social justice sometime in the twentieth century. Mission became about relieving people of their suffering, service of the poor, social empowerment, equality. This, to me, is a much better paradigm. It’s about partnering with people across the world to seek the Kingdom of God on Earth where the hungry are fed, the hurting are healed, and the oppressed find justice. It’s about seeking the flourishing of all people. In this paradigm, a missionary is someone who works toward these things.
I can get down with this idea. But the question comes up of why we have to send people to other places to do this. Why do we have vocational missionaries? What is the value of crossing a border to do the work of Kingdom Building when the Kingdom needs to be built in our own communities?
I’ve always felt called to crossing borders or boundaries. That’s why I became a missionary. I wanted to be community with people of other languages and cultures. I love the adventure and the richness of multi and inter-cultural community. To me, that feels like the Kingdom of God.
At the same time I have wrestled with this question of why a missionary is necessary and what a missionary is since I became one. I remember asking this question of what is a missionary and why are we doing this even at missionary training. I felt called to it. I believed it was God who was sending me. But why?
WHAT I THINK NOW
Now I’ve come to see missionary service as a natural part of being the Body of Christ. The Christian church is global by design. Christianity is nothing if not translated. It was Gambian scholar Dr. Lamin Sanneh who first pointed out that Christianity is the only religion in the world that does not have a primary language or country. Even the scriptures themselves were written in a language different than Jesus spoke. Christianity was spread through cultural and lingual translation from the start. All across the Roman empire. This is what much of the New Testament is about: how can we be community together when we are so culturally different?
It’s why youth group kids still have to endure the giggle-inducing lessons on circumcision. Why are we still talking about it? Because this was central to the question of how the early church could be community together across cultural, ethnic, and language borders. They set the example of how to handle the same challenge that becomes incarnate over and over again when cultures meet in a Christian context. How do we handle our differences? What is the heart of Christianity and what is simply cultural expression? Do they have to become like us to be Christian?
This church that Jesus started with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was an explosive expression of multi-cultural and multi-lingual inclusion. It brought about a new community. A new humanity, as Paul put it. From its inception it was global, with all the challenges that that entails. The church is a really big, impossible dream. The dream that people of all tribes and tongues could become one family together in Christ. It’s beautiful and it’s hard.
And it doesn’t work if we don’t know each other. It doesn’t work if we don’t do ministry together. It doesn’t work if we are siloed and insular and thinking only of ourselves. The church works when we do the hard and holy work of going beyond our differences to become family. We each bring our gifts to the table for the building up of the body. We who are many are one.
This is foundational to who the church is. It is a very big part of what God is doing in the world. A missionary is one part of bringing the whole together, ideally to try and fail and try again to model what it looks like to be the whole together.