Begin with Susan Lukey’s story:
My grade three teacher had been a missionary in Africa. I vividly remember the day she had us move our chairs into the shape of an airplane and imagine that we were flying to Africa. I don’t remember the stories she told of her mission work. I realize now that I don’t even know in what African country she served. But the word missionary captured me, and I wanted to be one. I soaked up stories told about missionaries at church. I imagined helping people. I imagined learning their culture and language. I imagined sharing stories of Jesus. The adventure of it called to me.
I went through phases of imagining myself as a teaching missionary or a medical missionary. Even after the Spirit hit me with a call to ordained ministry, the idea of missionary held fast. I trained as a teacher and gained a permanent teaching certificate, building my skills for serving overseas.
Next came seminary and internships for ministry. I jumped at the chance for an overseas internship. I was assigned to The United Church of Jamaica and Grand Cayman, and in May 1988, flew to Kingston, Jamaica. Over the course of four months, every romantic notion about being a missionary, held since grade three, was stripped away, and I am forever grateful.
As the internship progressed, I was thrilled to be invited to be part of two summer church camps. I love church camps! I enthusiastically went to the first planning meeting, feeling that finally I had something to offer. A discussion came up about how to involve the children in camp chores. I piped up, “At camps in Canada, we…” and I was abruptly cut off. The director spoke: “Frankly, we don’t care what you do in Canada. We’ve heard enough of what White people do.”
It was hard to hear those words. Yet, I am so glad that the director spoke them to me. From that point on, I learned to listen more than I spoke. I learned to pay attention to what I was seeing and not make assumptions. It is a lesson I continue to integrate into my life.
I came home with a different “mission” now firmly rooted in my spirit. I understood that I had nothing to offer to the church in Jamaica. My mission was to my own people in my own context. The Spirit was sending me home to challenge the assumptions and to broaden the perspectives of the people in churches I would serve in Canada. The challenge has come to The United Church of Canada from Indigenous peoples that we stop using the word mission. Consider how mission was a weapon used in residential schools. It is a word loaded with pain and trauma that grows with every Indigenous child’s grave newly found at residential school sites.
The word mission is woven into the fabric of the United Church. The Mission and Maintenance Fund, which became Mission and Service, is named every Sunday in most United Churches. Mission is from the Latin missio, meaning “to be sent forth.” The great commissioning at the end of the Gospel of Matthew has shaped our church culture. Yet, why would we continue to use the word mission when it is a word so twisted by colonizers that it no longer means sharing “good news” but instead pain, trauma, abuse, death, and the wiping out of culture, language, and traditions?
The challenge to stop using mission is a good one for us. It is so easy to keep using a word because we’ve always used it. Yet, to change our vocabulary, we must stop and consider. What does the word really mean—to settlers, to Indigenous peoples, to immigrants? Why do we want to use it when we are being told of the trauma associated with the word? What words can we use instead that bring clarity to what we want to be about in sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ? In 1 Corinthians 12:26, Paul tells us that “if one member suffers, all suffer together.” The word mission has caused and is causing suffering to others. It is time for us to find other words.
Susan Lukey, Editor
COPYRIGHT
Susan Lukey, 2022. Gathering A/C/E, Year A.
Describe going to UCCan website and looking under faith and seeing that 99.99 percent of what’s there is about social justice and environmental activitism. Where is the faith of Jesus and about Jesus?
There are many organizations that do this work already; we simply don’t have the resources to continue to do all of these things, and in general I don’t think we do them as well as the organizations that are devoted 100% to these causes. It’s important for Christians to stand up for these issues and to vote our values, but it’s my own opinion that our focus ought to be on the things that only the church can or will do – which means sharing the Good News of Jesus – which includes the transformation of society through his love and justice but is not limited to the justice work.
I’m not sure what I think about the new move away from the word mission – because I don’t’ know if we have an equivalent word with which we can replace it. Outreach? Ministry? Do we borrow the Jewish phrase “tikkum olam”, Mending the World? Love in Motion? I find myself bemused because at the same time we are trying to get rid of the word in the church it has become one of the primary words in business-speak. Every organization from Campbell’s Soup to Johnson and Johnson has a Mission Statement these days. I understand that mission means different things to different people, and that much of our mission has been wrong-headed and downright harmful, as it has been caught up with notions of white supremacy and Eurocentric view points – and in many places it still is. I just think it would be a shame to leave that word only to those whose mission has little or nothing to do with sharing the story of Jesus or living in the Way Jesus taught. Time will tell whether or not our language changes.
Nowadays in the UCCan we tend to use the word mission as a synonym for social justice work – yet the mission of the early church was clearly to tell the story of Jesus. That’s what all of these people – Paul, Barnabas, Silas, John Mark, Judas Barsabas, and all of these others we have learned about in the last months – that’s what they were all about. They understood that the stories themselves – Jesus’ teachings and actions told again and again – have the power to reshape lives and so reshape society. Look at the story of Paul and Silas in Jail! They went from being held prisoner by a man to celebrating the baptism of his whole household! Consider how the early believers shared their goods in common, so that no-one would go hungry!
It is not that we have to choose one or the other, Gospel in word or Gospel in action. But somehow the church seems to have a tendency to lean in one direction or the other. A colleague of mine wrote a book a few years ago about the United Church entitled “Who will tell the story?” That’s what I wonder, too. Do we really want to leave the story for others to tell?
What about you? Do you believe the mission – or ministry, or work, or love in action of the Gospel – is primarily to shape the world to reflect the values we have learned from Jesus, or to tell the story of Jesus and let those values shape the lives of others? I’m going to give you a moment to think about that. ….
… OK, so you’ve had a moment to think. Now let me help you out a bit with the “telling the story” part, that I’ve been talking about the last few weeks. These are from an article called “Three steps for starting conversations with new people”. I know, I’m not that great at it – though while I was in Whitehorse I had about an hour long conversation with a woman in a coffee shop about everything from the Catholic Church and the United Church, politics and social change, addiction and recovery, and more – all beginning with “Are you from here?” !
Here are the tips:
- Be approachable and positive – be open to conversations, don’t circle up with only the people you know, be aware that there are newcomers or people you don’t know in the same space. Smiling, making eye contact, open posture, all count.
- Ask open ended questions: “What brings you here? This is one of my favourite spots.”. “I notice you’re really enjoying the music – can you give me some recommendations of musicians to follow or places to hear them?”
- Find common ground. “I love your dog! I used to have a dog I took everywhere with me, even to church! Or “That book looks really interesting? “What’s it about?”
I’m not a big believer in jumping right into religious topics off the bat. The last time I was downtown there were two fellows on the corner approaching everyone with “The Word of God?” and offering them a free Bible. They weren’t getting any takers!
I was speaking with the mother of a friend of mine from Whitehorse who is a devout Roman Catholic. She was commenting on how the vast majority of priests in the North are from the Global South – Brazil, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, India. She said, “Our missionaries must have done a fantastic job! We used to send priests over there, and now they send priests to us!” As much as we might look back at the history of mission work and regret much of what came along with it, there is also something about the stories of Jesus that inspired the Away team in every denomination of the Christian church, to share those stories with others. Yes, as I said before, there were assumptions of white supremacy and Eurocentrism tangled up in there, but many missionaries went to serve and to share, not to dominate or abuse. Hospitals, schools, care homes, agricultural programs, advocacy for women and children, food programs, shelters – all came out of lives changed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
As we consider the work of the Christian church today, we remember Silas and Barnabas and the rest of the Away Team and hear the call ourselves – to continue to serve beyond these walls and beyond our comfort zones – to share the story of Jesus with others who are longing for meaning and belonging. That’s our commission. Amen.
