We made it back safe and sound with no one injured, sick, or out of sorts with someone else. (People wonder why I like going with the young people.) I am processing my thoughts for future posts about Convoy of Hope and my friends who do their ministry there. For now, let me just give some facts about Convoy. Although they are known primarily for disaster relief, they are doing some really interesting things in El Salvador in the area of nutrition, water filtering, commuity development, and basic hygene education. I'm processing a post on the missiological aspects of this type of ministry for a future post; most likely on the On My Mind blog. But suffice to say, I think that this is the future of missions, particularly in the nations which are closed to the straightforward missionary evangelist/church planter model which worked for so well for so many years. I have seen in my own limited missionary experience that people who are resistant to the gospel message are more open to listen when they see that we have an interest in meeting a real need in their nation, community, tribe, etc. I can see down the road, if Christ delays His coming, that the methods and models which are being developed in El Salvador will be a large part of a new paradigm of reaching the most resistant countries. The easy countries have national churches in various stages of development. Those which remain will take a new level of creativity and openness on our part to penetrate the legal/social/religious barriers that do not allow a frontal assault with conventional missionary techniques.
Okay. Too long. More later.
1 comment:
Thanks for sharing about your trip Randy. I share your enthusiasm for a model of missions (for evangelism in general, for that matter) which is concerned with ministering to needs first rather than focusing primarily on making converts. I think you're right to believe that this is generally received better by those resistant to Christian ideology. Showing is always more persuasive than telling anyways, especially where God's love is concerned. Some of the language you've used to describe the other model betrays the spirit in which that type of approach is often received, e.g. as a "frontal assault." So long as our strategizing efforts owe something to militaristic metaphor (whether our intent is in this spirit or not), we will encounter a closed stance, slow to warm to our message of redemption through loving Christ and neighbor. Some of us tend to have historical amnesia about the more sinister currents within the history of Christian missions-- "missionaries" for whom the militaristic metaphor was more than mere metaphor--but much of the non-Christian world still suffers the pain of the deep wounds some of our predecessors have inflicted. As a result, they are more prone to fear and mistrust, and justifiably so from their perspective. I happen to think that the siege tactic approach still informs a lot of mainline missions, even if more implicit in attitude than explicit in approach. When people begin to question the apparent lack of Christian influence among secular people of First World nations, I often wonder if our effectiveness in ministering to our literal neighbors is not hampered by the same problem (although maybe we've bought into a slightly different metaphor at home than abroad; evangelism is a marketed sales pitch rather than a "frontal assault"). I think people in general respond more to love in action than they do to anything else, and it sounds like Convoy of Hope is endeavoring to meet needs in a way that shows this love concretely.
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