We're now entering our third month back from Home Assignment. I'm grateful the field has allowed us to settle in slowly. Our apartment is finally painted and mostly decorated. We're liking the 11th floor and getting used to the noise. Today the weather is cooling and hopefully our hot water will return sometime this week. We are now preparing for full ministry months ahead. I'm eager to get started with leaderhsip training and college student discipleship.
In preparation for resuming the challenging schedule of cross-cultural ministry (and in preparing the proposal for my Masters thesis at
UNISA), I am re-reading what I would consider to be two of the most important books I've read on the subject of spirituality and cross-cultural work. Duane Elmer's
Cross-Cultural Servanthood is one of the most convicting and challanging books, I've read on the issues of serving (I mean really serving ... like Jesus ... not just patronizing) another culture. The other book, I finished just this morning. It's a small volume by a South African missiology scholar named
David J. Bosch entitled
A Spirituality of the Road. It's also a challenging little book on maintaining a Biblical spirituality in the heat of cross cultural work. Yesterday, I read something from chapter 4 that brought me to a screeching squealing stop.
We so easily see our responsibility as disposed of when we have imparted the gospel to a people, established a younger church with it's own indigenous ministry, and taught them some Western administrative machinery. In all this, the emphasis is almost entirely on one-way communication ... We prescribe carefully prepared Gospel recipes. But - and this is the core of the problem - only rarely do we allow them to experience all this together with us.
The result, more often than not, is that we train parrots instead of building up people
Jesus commanded us to make disciples. Making disciples is not teaching parrots to speak or (to use a different metaphore) learning to be a puppeteer. This is true when it come to disciple-making and leadership training in any context and in any culture, but become especially vital when working cross-culturally. I still feel very much at the bottom end of the learning curve, when it comes to cross-cultural work. But this, I know ... my attitude must be that of a learner. A student. A neophyte in Monoglian culture and understanding. A question asker, rather than being "the answer". Bosch tells of an educated and respected worker who was leaving a particular African field for Home Assignment. One of the national church leaders made this statement about him:
What a pity. He's learned nothing while he's been with us. He always knew.
I don't want to always know. Particularly when it comes to leadership training, pastoral skills and the application of the Bible in Mongolia. If I "always know", my work becomes the mere impartation of knowledge, rather than the living out of Biblical grace and community with my Mongolian brothers and sisters in Christ. A fully trained disciple or leader must be able to do more than repeat words. The Gospel has no affect until it has been internalized, contextualized and lived. Together. Love and grace must be experienced along the road together, rather than through dispassionate classroom rhetoric that's copied and pasted into another life. Jesus is life and freedom and joy. Those are things are not understood in a classroom. It's on the road, together - and the proverbial "classroom" becomes daily life. Eating and drinking and laughing and crying. I suppose that's exactly what Jesus did with His "twelve". It's the pattern I'd also like to follow.
So, I am looking forward to working with Mongolian leaders and students this year. It will be a new year of challange and grace. However, my main objective is not to train parrots. I want to live and walk in grace and the Truth, and discover how to do that here with those God has called me to serve.
For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord; with ourselves as your servants, for Jesus sake
2 Corinthians 4:5