Methodist ministry in Chincha, Peru

I'm in Peru this week, working with the Iglesia Metodista here in the area of Chincha (about three hours south of Lima on the Pacific coast). I feel like Peru is a second home to me - this is my seventh trip since 2001, and every time I leave here I leave a little more of my heart behind.

My last visit here was in May 2008. If you want to read a little about that, check out my posts on "A Respite in Lima" and "Chincha, Peru." While a lot of the trip last year was focused around the effects of Peru's devastating 2007 earthquake, this year's trip is much more about helping the church here to move forward in its ministry of outreach, evangelism, and formation in the area of Tambo de Mora - a coastal community about 15 minutes from downtown Chincha Alta.

I'll share more about my trip when I return at the end of this week. Until then, if you'd like to know more about the ministry of the Methodist Church in this area, see the blog of my friend, Pastor Pedro Uchuya, at this website. Pedro is the district superintendent for the Distrito Costa Sur, and you can find his district's homepage here. You can find out more about the Iglesia Metodista del Peru at the national church's homepage.

What's in a mission statement?

In the Book of Discipline, the United Methodist Church's book of canon law and doctrine, the mission of the Church is described as follows:

"The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world" (par.120, p.87).

There are ways in which I think that statement is apt and helpful as local churches seek to focus their ministries to reflect the work of followers of Jesus charged with witnessing to his gospel through word and deed.

But in other ways I'm not such a big fan of the statement. For one, I'm not sure that an ecclesiastical communion like the United Methodist Church needs a mission statement. It seems simplistic and far too indebted to a marketing culture better at selling commodities than spreading the good news. I mean, why can't our mission statement simply be the Apostles' Creed?

Another way that I'm ambivalent about the Church's mission statement is the relatively recent prepositional phrase attached to the end of it: "... for the transformation of the world." This is difficult to explain fully in something the length of a blog post, so let me offer a Stanley Hauerwas aphorism instead: "The first task of the Church is not to make the world more just. It is to make the world, the world."

That is, God the Father has called a people together in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ. This people is known as the Church (1 Peter 2:4-10). And it is the community called Church that is serving as a light to the whole world, beckoning people to follow the way of salvation (Matthew 5:14-16). Through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Church is able to glorify God and mediate the saving grace of Jesus Christ to all those come within her bounds - namely, via the sacrament of baptism (Galatians 3:27-29). From within the covenant community, men and women are able to experience the transformation that brings them from sin to righteousness, from death to life!

The Church is charged with making the world see itself as the world, because only then can the world know a better form of life than the life that worships death. And through that very conviction, those who are lost in the wilderness of the world can be drawn to the salvation known in the Church.

So what does this have to do with the United Methodist statement? Simply put, I don't think we are charged with transforming the world. That's God's job, and God has promised to do it in God's own time (2 Peter 3:8-9).

We are charged with building the Church through the Holy Spirit's guidance, baptizing believers and forming them in holiness of heart and life.

Will those believers go out into the world and do works of justice and mercy, spreading the love of Jesus Christ in the world's institutions and structures? Absolutely! And thank God for it.

The teleological thrust of Christian discipleship, though, is not some kind of Pelagian transformation of the world into the kingdom of God. The belief that we can actually do such a thing is the tragedy of Protestant liberalism, which has led to a watering-down of both doctrine and the lived reality of the Church's life. It is an erroneous belief that still infects the Church, and I fear that our current mission statement doesn't help things in that area.

Colin Williams wrote John Wesley's Theology Today in 1960, at the height of the mid-20th century ecumenical movement. His presentation of Wesley's thought aims at providing Methodists with a theological basis from which to engage in dialogue with Christians of other traditions. The particular ecumenical moment in which people like Williams and Albert C. Outler were prominent Methodist actors has passed, but the heart of Williams' analysis holds up remarkably well.

At the end of a chapter on Wesley's nuanced understanding of justification by faith, Williams offers a passage that can serve as a corrective to our short-and-sweet mission statement:

"Our hope is in Jesus Christ, not in the transformation of the world or even of ourselves. Consequently our hope is not destroyed by the failure of the kingdom of God to become visible or even by our own failure to make visible progress to the goal of Christlikeness. Nevertheless, Wesley laid great stress on the fact that because our faith relation is in Christ, we live under the promise of present transformation and are able to move forward in creative, ethical endeavor because Christ continually offers his transforming presence to believers, and, through the Church, to the world" (p.73).

Williams' quote predates our current mission statement, of course, but it is superior to it in content and articulation.

The Church's first mission

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

That was H. Richard Niebuhr's comment in The Kingdom of God in America about the view of mainline Protestantism on the coming of the Kingdom of God. He was describing the belief that society's natural progress has pretty much done away with the need to understand sin, Jesus Christ, the atonement, and salvation in the ways they were understood in previous times.

Niebuhr wrote those words in the 1930s, but they pretty accurately describe wide swaths of the Protestant church in America today.

The belief in society's progress, held so firmly by Protestant liberals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was shattered by the devastation of World War I. But curiously enough, mainline Protestant denominations in the United States didn't seem to get the message (Niebuhr and others notwithstanding).

And whereas our Social Gospeling forebears still believed strongly in personal piety, the Protestant liberalism of the mainline church today has lost even the belief that something about salvation necessarily involves personal transformation. The optimism in human progress is still there, though, and our latter-day Protestant liberalism often sees the church itself as a hidebound organization that needs to 'catch up to the times.'

I've always been curious about how we could possibly look back over the last hundred years and see progress. Sure, there's been lots of technological progress - in science, medicine, engineering, etc. We've been to the moon, and we've stamped out smallpox.

But if you look at other measures, you can see how the very same technology that looks like progress in one place looks like regress in another. How about the 20th century's wars? Advances in technology allowed us to kill more people in war than had died in the wars of all other centuries combined. And what about the state of the environment - the plants, the animals, and even the atmosphere? At the rate we're going, we'll be lucky if there are any animals left in a few decades besides us and the ones we either eat or keep as pets. Our great technology is extinguishing animals, ecosystems, and glaciers in equal measure.

So are we really progressing?

The answer is 'no,' at least not in the way that really counts. Everyone is born a heathen, crippled by sin and in need of God's grace. And so God the Father calls all of us to walk the way of salvation shown to us through his Son, Jesus Christ. And the only real progress is the progress of the Holy Spirit in our lives, as we are healed by grace and made holy in heart and life. That is a progress that happens anew with every person, as he or she is gently healed by grace and restored through the ministry of the church and participation in the means of grace.

This is the Scripture Way of Salvation. I make the case in my recent UM Reporter column that proclaiming the reality of salvation through word and action is the very reason the Methodists were called into existence by God in the first place. And it remains our true calling still today.

The problem with us Methodists is not that some want to pursue social justice while others want to focus on spiritual formation. It is that all of us have an impoverished understanding of what salvation means. And we can begin to remedy that by searching deeply into our own tradition for the rich resources that await us there.

Should we go on mission?

A few weeks ago, I wrote this column in the United Methodist Reporter about my recent mission experience in Peru. I had wanted to put down in words my views on the importance of short-term missions for sometime, and the column gave me the chance to start to do that. There's a whole lot more than I couldn't fit in a 700 word article, but it was at least a start.

A couple of days ago over breakfast here at the Duke Youth Academy, I got into a conversation with fellow DYA staffer Lanecia Rouse over whether short-term missions to foreign countries can be justified. We had heard Dr. Amy Laura Hall give a plenary lecture to the DYA students earlier in the week, where she suggested that we would be better off focusing our efforts on being in ministry with our local communities. Lanecia is a youth minister at a large church in Nashville, TN, and she was reflecting on whether she should be taking her kids on foreign missions.

I admit it is a complex issue. There is a not-so-good history of mission work from Europe and the United States that saw peoples in the Developing World as inferior and pursued missions in a highly condescending manner. That missional legacy is a black mark on the church, and we should be ashamed for the attitudes of our ancestors. Some think that this negative legacy represents a conclusive case against foreign missions in the present (and that all missional activity between the Global North and the Global South will inevitably take on colonial overtones).

The other potential argument against foreign missions has to do with costs and the allocation of resources. This recent article in the Washington Post chronicles blunders commonly made by American missionary groups, from poor use of resources, to engaging in construction projects that are unnecessary or wrong-headed, to cultural ignorance of host communities. By this line of thinking, short-term groups do more harm than good when they go to engage in ministries that are best undertaken by churches already present in local cultures.

These are tough challenges that anyone who wants to go on a short-term mission trip needs to face. I think the key to understanding the importance of such missional ventures is in forming long-term, sustained relationships between sister churches that are constantly renewed through short-term trips. I have tried to go about my relationship with the Methodist Church of Peru in just this way.

I would be curious to hear your thoughts about the pros and cons of the short-term approach to missions. Should they be avoided? Or can they be justified? What are some of the important arguments on each side?

Theology of Mission

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I spent most of May in Chincha, Peru. When I talk to people about my ongoing work in Peru, I am often challenged about why I go at all. "What about needs closer to home?" I am often asked. "Isn't there plenty for the church to do here?"

The answer to that is "of course." There are more needs close to home than we will ever be able to meet. That's the nature of the world in which we live. But I also think there are very strong reasons for engaging in mission with the global church. Perhaps the main one is that, when you meet fellow Christians from other parts of the globe, wonderful relationships develop. I have one such relationship with the Rev. Pedro Uchuya in Peru, and I consider him a true spiritual mentor and brother in Christ.

But beyond that, there are some real reasons related to the nature of the church and the nature of salvation that call us to be in mission with our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. The church is a global body, after all, and it simply won't do to resort to some kind of localism (or nationalism) when it comes to the way we go about being in ministry. Just because there is a call to be in ministry in local communities does not mean that we can't also be in ministry with other parts of the world. For places like the United States that are particularly blessed with material resources, that is important to remember.

Another reason I think it's important to engage in mission is that doing so helps to move us outside of our cultural bubbles and into a mode where we are more open to being transformed by God's grace. Going far away from home, into a different cultural context where (oftentimes) a different langauge is spoken, can be a jarring experience. But it is in that very experience that we are opened up to the wonderful things God is doing in the church. Without our crutches of comfortability, we have to rely on God's grace - which, in reality, is all we've got anyway!

I write about moving "out of the bubble" through mission in my current column in the United Methodist Reporter. In the article, I reflect on why I think foreign mission is important with specific reference to my recent trip to Peru. I'd be curious to hear what you think about mission as well. And I would be interested to hear about your own mission trips (and larger missional relationships) and what you think is important about them. Peace ~ !

Read any good books, lately?

A parishioner at my former church e-mailed me the other day to ask what books I would recommend for a group preparing to go on mission.

That got me thinking. What books are really good for mission groups in preparation for service either at home or abroad? Do you have any recommendations?

I could think of three off the top of my head that I have used...

1) Gracias!, a journal from Henri Nouwen of his time as a missionary in Peru and Bolivia. This book is as readable and soul-searching as anything Nouwen wrote. I have used it specifically for groups going to Peru, but it would be very good for any mission in a Latin American context.

2) Yours Are The Hands Of Christ, by James C. Howell. This book, written by a United Methodist pastor, can be read either as a guide to discipleship or to mission (or both). It is written with a combination of erudition and anecdote, which is fitting from an author who has a Ph.D. (which Howell does) and is also a great preacher (which I have heard that he is). I would recommend this book for mission groups as well as small groups or Sunday school classes that are seeking to better understand Christ's call to discipleship in the world.

3) Ending Hunger Now: A Challenge to Persons of Faith, by George McGovern, Bob Dole, and Donald E. Messer. This is an interesting recent book that tackles the issue of global hunger from a non-partisan, faith perspective. It is good to use in a church with a wide range of political viewpoints because of the way McGovern and Dole approach their task. They assert that ending global hunger - a problem that disproportionately affects women and children - is an issue that all people of faith can agree on. They also claim that hunger can realistically be eliminated by the year 2030. The key is to figure out how to join (churches, governments, NGOs) together to get it done. The book has some deficiencies, and at times the contributions of Dole and Messer do not seem to match up to that of McGovern. (That's particularly disappointing in the case of Messer, who is a United Methodist ethicist and is supposed to be providing the theological heft to the book.) Still, it is a great book to use in preparation for a mission in the developing world. A mission team I led to Peru last summer read it beforehand, together with a lot of mutual prayer and joint physical preparation. The Holy Spirit really used this text to galvanize our attitude toward a children's feeding ministry in the location we were heading. It helped set the whole tone for our mission effort (as well as for continuing efforts after we returned).

I'd like to hear what books others are reading for mission and discipleship in the church.