Early in our fact-finding trips to our mission field, we kept getting the sense that the nationals held a bit of a reservation about working with us. They were certainly friendly and accommodating, but their comments and facial expressions held a barely discernible air of skepticism. We knew that their interactions with a large majority of American missionaries had gone very poorly for a number of reasons, so we figured they were understandably hesitant to interact with us.
Fast-forward to about six months into living in the mission field, and the real reason for their hesitancy began to crystalise in my mind. We had been here long enough to watch several short-term mission teams funnel in and out of the church, plus there were several other long-term missionaries attached to help. Watching the interactions from the sidelines, I began to see what the nationals saw: most missionaries would only do ministry at arm’s distance.
This is going beyond the unfortunate handful of those with bad attitudes; actually, the majority were polite, respectful, and generally good people who were willing to help and work in many ways. Yet even in the group of good-natured, well-intentioned people, there still existed a trace element of distance from the nationals.
Many of the missionaries lived near each other, and, in the case of singles, roomed with other missionaries, usually from the same country or stateside church. Breaks and leisure time were spent using various social media to keep up with a very large amount of friends and family back home; in fact, this more-than-daily updating often overrode events or tasks during ministry time. Any external interactions or attendance at non-church events were with other missionaries, including dinners or “get togethers” that excluded nationals. While there is nothing wrong with comradery amongst those with a shared background experience, the lack of deviation from it gave the clear indication that the missionaries were not interested in engaging the nationals in the day-to-day experience of living.
From my sociology studies, I recognise that this is typical behaviour for most immigrants. Understandably, there is a common bond through nationality; even I’ve experienced a bit of comfort when talking with a fellow American about a situation only we could understand or remarking about how odd a custom in this mission field seems through our eyes. It also follows that immigrants would want to stay close to other immigrants when they share a language unlike where they now live. But I had expected missionaries to differ purposely from this behaviour for two reasons: 1) in this field, there is not a language barrier (well, there’s an accent and word definition barrier at times, but for the most part we are all speaking English), and 2) their reason for being here is to effectively spread the Gospel, unlike most immigrants who are here primarily to escape a dangerous situation in their homeland or to make money.
The message of Arm’s Distance Ministry is: I’m here to get a task done, and I’ll be friendly to you during this ministry time, but when it’s over I’d rather not interact with you. I’ve seen this happen quite a bit in the States as well in both paid and volunteer ministry, so I don’t believe it’s just a foreign missionary issue. It just becomes that much clearer in the mission field, perhaps because of two distinctly different cultures interacting.
Is it our phraseology? The term “outreach”, usually used for a special attractional church event, implies that we are reaching out to a place that we ourselves are not actually in. Is it our training? I am aware of one mission agency (note: this does not imply that they are all this way) that required a large amount of the “Way of Salvation” witnessing per month. Were this required in my situation, I’d have to confront strangers to “make the quota”, yet not only does relational (and slow-building) ministry work better here, street witnessing would get me ostracised from my small village.
Perhaps it’s the Western concept of compartmentalisation of our lives that shapes our definition of reaching out to others during “church events” or when ministry is scheduled to happen—but that stops when the prescribed time over. Maybe the few months or years the missionaries were scheduled to spend in the mission field made developing relationships with nationals seem moot if they planned to return permanently to the States. Western Europeans can be much slower to “warm up” than most Americans are used to. Whatever the reason was, it gave the impression to the nationals that the missionaries were primarily concerned with completing ministry tasks and nothing more.
While I had been pondering this concept for a while, it was an article linked from the How God Messed Up My Religion blog that pushed me to write this post. The article recounts several lessons from a recent short-term mission trip to Africa. Their team chose to stay at the orphanage they were helping, and a teacher from the orphanage told her, “people come to help, but they don’t really want to be with us and live our life with us.” While it’s understandable that Westernised Christians would find it hard to live a week in third-world conditions, the sad reality is that the same sentence could easily be said by our Western European nationals today.
The word “missional” gets bandied about a lot these days, and it’s definition seems to be still forming. As I understand it, the emphasis is on the body of believers acting like me, a foreign missionary, instead of a “Holy Huddle” in the church with the onus on the pastor as the “Hired Gun”. I think it’s a great idea, but from what I’ve witnessed in the mission field, we’re sometimes not very good about being missional ourselves. Whether it’s fear, or intimidation, or the fact that so few are encouraged to make missions, or a particular mission field, a lifelong (or at least open-ended) commitment, arm’s distance ministry can only go so far. The nationals appear to understand this better than we do.
Related posts:
Excellent article, it opened my eyes to ministry around me.
Thank you,
alan