We just love heroes and love to pretend to be heroes. Most of the time, this is harmless enough, but hero narratives become a huge problem when it comes to global missions.

One of the great challenges missionaries from America face is the widespread misperception that Christianity is a western religion that only makes sense to people from western cultures.

“We don’t want just to throw money at some mission point, we want to be connected to something where we can actually get our members involved.”

I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve heard the above sentiment from church leaders. While I understand where they are coming from and can affirm much of what drives such a statement, I always feel conflicted when I hear this statement. Behind the good intentions reflected in this kind of thinking lurk some problems that need to be identified and screened out.

Like it or not, the church has often taken in things from local cultures, replaced the meanings, and brought them into the practice of the Christian faith as a way of focusing existing habits on Jesus. We could look at all these things as corruptions of the faith. But are they?

One of the biggest challenges we face when talking about race is that we don’t have a common vocabulary. For example, using the word “justice” associated with race evokes vastly different reactions. We have had different experiences, so we don’t see the same things or use the same language to describe what we see. Therefore, we misunderstand each other.

“I just wish I could put you all on an airplane so you could meet the people that have come to know the Lord because of your support.” – Ron Frietas

I can’t tell you how many times I heard Ron Frietas say this to the Alameda church in Norman, Oklahoma, back in the ‘90’s when he and his wife Georgia were our missionaries to Curitiba, Brazil.

If your congregation is going to have a healthy, impactful, and resilient missions ministry, the things you get involved with globally need to fit who you are locally. If you are out of alignment, you will likely end up in one or more of the ministry dysfunctions I wrote about earlier in this series.

In my last blog article, I wrote about common dysfunctions of missions’ ministries. I hoped it could help churches in the same way that Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team has helped business organizations avoid the habits that destroy their effectiveness.

However, the real challenge is not just spotting and deconstructing dysfunctions. We also need to construct healthy missions ministries proactively. That is more complicated.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Leo Tolstoy, AnnaKarenina

This is one of the most famous opening lines in world literature. It’s classic. Who can argue with it? Well, call me crazy, but I think Tolstoy is just plain wrong.

Every morning after tending to the dogs and getting my coffee, I sit down for some time alone with God and the Bible. I’ve done this more years than I can count. However, I’m finding the room increasingly crowded as the years go by. It seems not to matter what part of the Bible I’m in, I run into old friends waiting on me there. There are my old Bible professors and preachers I’ve heard through the years. My parents and grandparents are lurking about in most books, with their repeated admonitions in hand.

What is the role of the church vis-à-vis the world around us? What is our mission? What is God doing in the world and what is our role in it? Too often, we just haven’t done the work to get to a common understanding of these core issues in Christian circles. If we don’t get clarity around these questions from a biblically informed gospel perspective, we will end up importing ideas from other arenas of our culture as default values.

Our country and our churches are not in the same place as when I was born in the 1960s. However, the question, “Haven’t we made progress?” always makes me a little nervous. Here is why.

One of the side-effects of the Coronavirus pandemic has been the quashing of short-term mission (STM) trips. In a flash, a $5 billion-dollar-a-year industry came to a screeching halt. This has been devastating to organizations focusing on STMs and has interrupted a lot of important work. That said, STMs were in need of a thorough evaluation and re-visioning.

The past year has been hard, and no one is at their best. Grief, loss, and fear have been all around us. We are coming out of the storm shelter and surveying the damage even while the threat of the storm is still around us. We are sad, scared, and angry. The level of bad behavior from typically good and reasonable people has been at an all-time high. We aren’t sure what to do with all that now.

One of the most common expressions you will hear in global missions is: “It is time for Americans to pass the baton to national leaders.” This is a well-intended sentiment that recognizes that the leadership for kingdom expansion and development needs to be in the hands of national leaders as quickly as possible. That is good and true. But the “pass the baton” expression contains some serious problems that need to be examined and corrected.

Is missions a parasite or bone marrow for your church? Does it drain the life blood from your church or generate life blood for the church? I’ve seen it do both.

“I must be dreaming! I can’t believe I’m hearing this. I never thought I would live to see the day that I’d hear an American say such things!”

Those words, spoken with tears and great emotion, were spoken by a church leader from a French-speaking country in West Africa at a leadership conference I attended along with some of my MRN colleagues about 6 years ago.

Everyone loves the idea of peace. We all desire it. No one wakes up in the morning looking for a fight. We don’t like resistance and want smooth sailing and harmony. So why doesn’t that love of peace produce peace?

During the 22 years I was a preacher in a local church, the most difficult question I was asked routinely was, “How is the church doing?” I never knew what to say. How do you measure this? Should we count how many people show up for Sunday worship? How many baptisms we’ve had this year? Whether or not we’re meeting our budget? How many people are truly on a discipleship track? How well are we impacting our city with tangible expressions of hope, justice, and righteousness? How enjoyable or challenging it is to be part of the congregation?

Did you know there are no white people in the Bible? Does that surprise you? It’s true, I assure you. Not Adam, Abraham, Moses, Deborah, David, Elijah, Jezebel, Daniel, Jesus, Peter, Paul, or even Lydia or the church in Rome were white. Most of the people in the Bible were Jews of middle eastern origin. The few people in the Bible from the region we now call Europe may have had light-colored skin and would be considered white today, but they were not white in their day.

The last few years have been full of controversy among churches. There seems to be no end to the controversial subjects churches are being forced to address. Some come from within when our brothers and sisters challenge our traditional views and practices. Others are coming from the larger culture but spill over into the church. Regardless of their origin, the number of issues being reconsidered is huge. They include leadership models of church, worship practices, what is or is not part of “the gospel,” the mission of the church, how to interpret the Bible, the relationship between church and state, racial history and justice, gender roles in the church and family, LGBTQ matters, plus many others.

In my previous blog post I talked about how we cut ourselves off from much blessing when we cannot embrace wisdom both old and new because “we” trap ourselves in anxious echo chambers reacting to “them.” I believe we can and should create more non-anxious spaces for productive dialogue. By non-anxious spaces, I mean conversations among Christians where diverse points of view can be expressed without defensiveness, reactivity, labelling and dismissing each other. In order to accomplish this, we will need a clearer understanding of the gospel so that we can better differentiate the message of scripture from the cultural captivity in which we typically trap it.

By this point, it is cliché to say that the global church and the American church are in times of transition. That was true before COVID-19. The pandemic only accelerated the pace of change.

On both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the church is asking hard questions and sorting through the implications of the shift in the center of gravity of the Christian faith.

“So exactly what does a gift to MRN produce? What is the cost in dollars per soul?” asked the potential donor. I was stumped and wanted to check my ears. How would we calculate this? I wondered what he would consider an acceptable ratio. In his defense, he is a good man who was just trying to be a good steward, but the way he framed the question was stunning to me. It made us wonder, what is the value of a soul? How do you calculate the ROI (return on investment) for missions? We are fooling ourselves if we think people don’t ask such questions.

There is something alluring about “going back,” “starting over,” “returning to fundamentals,” “getting back to basics,” “re-rigging the wells,” “recovering what we lost,” “restoring past glory,” or any number of other figures of speech that call on us to look backward. People lose focus. Vision leaks. Corruption sets in. We drift off course. We can’t remember how we got here or why we started on this journey. Things rust, calcify, and oxidize. It’s all part of living in a broken world as fallible creatures with a predisposition to sin and folly. There is a force of gravity which not only pulls down on matter, but also on ideas, dreams, visions, and endeavors of all types. God’s people are not only attacked from the outside, we constantly struggle with controversy and corruption from the inside.

One of the more impactful books I’ve ever read was Tony Campolo’s Partly Right: Learning from the Critics of Christianity. It came out in 1987 to a big thud. I’ve never heard anyone else reference it. I doubt it sold well, but it sure impacted me. I loaned my copy to an old college buddy after I read it and never saw it again. But I still remember Compolo’s admonition to learn from people we view as enemies. It is a truth we need to hear in church, mission, culture, and politics. This is particularly important in a culture where we sequester ourselves in online identity ghettos with algorithm-tailored newsfeeds to reinforce our fear-driven biases. It is an essential element for any civil dialogue.

Prayer is mysterious. No way around it. No matter how much we read about it in scripture, read books or hear presentations about it, or practice the various forms developed through the ages by prayer sages, none of us really understands it. Not really. It doesn’t work like a Coke machine. Sometimes if feels like a slot machine, but we know that is not right either. It is a personal interaction with the Creator of the universe who is constantly monitoring over 7 billion humans on just this one planet, and who knows how many spiritual beings or other creatures on other planets in this vast universe flung over countless light years. We cannot understand it or master it.

I feel compelled to speak about racism, but I am hesitant to do so. I’m reticent not only because race is deeply controversial, but because tensions are high, and the issues are complex. More importantly, I’m still trying to understand the dynamics. However, I’ve been reading widely about racial history in the U.S. and the global context for years. I’ve been pursuing a multi-cultural vision for over 20 years and have learned much by making mistakes. I have had many conversations with church leaders of various races in the U.S. and around the world about these matters. Still, I feel in over my head all the time. Yet, at some point, it is time to move beyond learning and begin to say something. I need to do more than send out an occasional Tweet or Facebook post.

For over 30 years, I’ve been hearing that Churches of Christ have an identity crisis. I’ve heard endless self-critiques. I’ve added to them myself. We’ve explored our weaknesses and their origins obsessively. It is not hard to find defenders or critics of our heritage. But wise self-awareness - that is more elusive.

Defensive denial is childish. Self-loathing is adolescent. Both are harmful. Having a healthy sense of both your strengths and weaknesses is mature and helpful.