Mission Pilot project gets results

Pastors and lay leaders from three continents meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina last week shared stories of how they interpret mission in their context today. The meeting in the Argentinean capital was part of a two-year study on

Results of the study are to be presented to a global mission conference “Edinburgh 2010: Witnessing to Christ Today” scheduled to be held in Edinburgh, Scotland in June 2010. But their impact is already being felt in Argentina, Cameroon and the Netherlands.

Pastor Luis Macchi from Chaco, Argentina, reported that the invitation to form a pilot group with participants from different denominations provided new momentum in a context where the word “ecumenical” can be controversial: understood by some as “anti-Catholic”, by others as “from the devil".

 

"The central question of how we, as an ecumenical group of local Christians, understand and practice our calling as followers of Jesus Christ today, helped us to look at each other and at mission with new eyes", Macchi said.

 

Local groups compared their witness today with that of their grandparents around 1910, whether that witness was acknowledged as “mission” in those days or not, said Jet den Hollander, executive secretary of the WARC Mission Project.

 

“We heard amazing stories of how our ancestors shared their faith", den Hollander reported, "and can only conclude that today as in 1910 the Spirit moves in her own inimitable way.”

 

Local discussions had included a Bible study on 2 Kings 5, which reports the salvation of an army general because of the intervention of a little girl.

 

“When we saw the suggested Bible passage we were suspicious”,  reported Julio López, president of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Argentina (FAIE) and coordinator of the four Argentine pilot groups.

 

“Why this passage about invading armies and slave-girls for a study on mission? But as we identified with the different characters, the story became a window into our own calling”, says López.

 

This experience was shared by Jonas Maïna, a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon. In his part of the country, Islam is the majority religion and most Christians belong to the poorer classes. “But God’s grace knows no boundaries", concluded Maïna’s group from the 2 Kings 5 passage. "The slave girl and prophet, wife and servants all in their own way became God's instruments of healing”.

 

As a result of their discussions the Ngaoundéré group, which represented eight different denominations, planned the joint construction of a chapel in the general hospital. The chapel is designed to serve the spiritual needs of Christians, Muslims and other faith traditions alike.

 

Dutch study groups rejoiced in the fact that a wide spectrum of churches and organisations participated in the study. Besides Protestants and Roman Catholics – who have extensive experience of cooperation in recent decades – all three pilots included Evangelicals, Pentecostals and migrant churches.

Grace Cabactulan, a Roman Catholic member of the Rotterdam group, says, “Migrant Christians can give a spiritual, social, and economical contribution to their new home country. I fled the Philippines in the 1980’s. Mission in Europe means giving a welcome to the many people who flee their countries but also recognising their contributions to church and society”.

Notwithstanding contextual differences, several common issues emerged in the Buenos Aires meeting. Unequal power relations and their detrimental effect on mission identity and prioritising, marginalization because of race and ethnicity, and the way migration shaped and shapes societies and mission were important items in all three countries. But as Wout van Laar, the Dutch coordinator noted, “In all our stories you can discern the Spirit’s movement. People share their faith in countless ways and often outside of formal mission structures and intentions.”

Den Hollander says, “These grassroots stories highlight mission as the privilege of every Christian in her or his own context. This represents a sea-change since that first world mission conference in Edinburgh 1910 when the word ‘missionary’ was mainly reserved for white men from Europe and North America working in contexts foreign to their own.”

Added Roger Schmidt of LWF’s Department for Mission and Development, “There are many ways in which this pilot project can now be developed for broader use. This was the first run. We hope many more groups will use this model to reflect anew on their calling.”

 

Stories, photos, processes and improved guidelines will soon be available on the LWF and WARC websites. A first sample is now available on You-tube. http://lwfyouth.org/2009/11/06/experiencing-mission/