A letter from Tim Wheeler in Honduras
April 2013
Dear Friends,
Sawdust rug at Easter time.
Easter time is a festive time in Central America. In many towns and villages there are reenactments of the last steps of Jesus on the way to Calvary. Good Friday is a day of reflection, of inactivity as people wait for it to pass and then feel that they can continue with their normal activities. Then people wait for the new hope of Easter Sunday, but most people really don’t have new tangible hope. What will be different? So many things are out of people’s reach.
A week before Easter I travelled to Guatemala and had the privilege of attending a “passing on ceremony.” Here there was real joy as project participants from the Heifer Guatemalan project passed on offspring to new participants in the program, thereby fulfilling their commitment for receiving the original animal. The people receiving new animals from their neighbors certainly showed joy on their faces, new hope for something better. Someone cared.
Passing on animals in ceremony in Guatemala
Now it is a week after Easter, and I am struck by the contrast of the two previous weeks. On one hand there was a tangible and real life hope being acted out in Guatemala through the gift of animals as people engage with each other. On the other hand, there is a solemn, solitary reflection process taking place with religious dedication and a desire to believe that things will be better but without tangible fulfillment. That is why it is important to be present in processes and as church partners around the world in tangible ways, to be active in this world. How can we make this blanket of love stretch more and fit better as a Church, as World Mission? One way is by all the things that you do in your churches, by praying and supporting mission efforts and helping to support mission co-workers. Thank you for this. Another part of this puzzle is carried out by co-workers in their mission sites, being there to listen, to accompany and to encourage people; helping mission partners be effective and helping them be true to their mission and to God’s mission in the world.
What I want to focus on is a third part of the mission puzzle, the short-term mission teams (SMT) that go to a site for a week to 10 days to be engaged in a mission program in another country or in a site within the U.S. Karla Anne Koll, a fellow PC(USA) co-worker, writes in her article “Taking Wolves Among Lambs: Some Thoughts on Training for Short Term Mission Facilitation” (International Bulletin of Missionary Research, April 2010):
“Surely we who dare to call ourselves by Christ’s name, who have been sent by God into the world through Christ, are called to work to transform the world. The call to mission is the invitation to participate in God’s liberating and redeeming action, together with all who are called by Christ.”
Organized community group that will work on their own housing project and mission teams will accompany and work with
Often mission is defined as going and doing something for someone who has been assessed as having a specific need or multiple needs. I think that depending on how we define mission will certainly determine to a large degree how we go about it. A more traditional view would be to assess from the outside the need of a person or people and go and do something for them. Karla talks about the need to listen to those we are going to “serve” as in the teachings of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher who wrote The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He makes a clear distinction between “false charity” and true generosity in which the hands of a person are less and less outstretched to receive and more and more active in transforming their reality. We have heard stories of painting the same wall of a church over and over again as an extreme example of what STM should not do. On the end of the spectrum there is the idea of focusing a mission trip principally on relationship, developing “relationships with the people." This seems to be the catch concept right now. While avoiding the dependency danger of the first example, is it fair to those we are going to be with in mission to limit our presence to that of relationship if it implies not going to another level of engagement together in transforming the reality of injustice or poverty that we have come into contact with?
Earlier this year a pastor who came with a mission team summed up STM focuses in a succinct but helpful way. There are STMs that go and do things for others and there are STMs that go and do with others. I found this distinction to be very helpful in explaining to those who come to our programs in short-term mission some of the very basic differences of each approach so that they can begin to grasp the focuses that we are sponsoring. Several years ago Gloria and I realized that many lessons learned from the community development world can be applied to mission work. When Paulo Freire talks about listening and about recognizing the context and reality that people are living in he is talking about a process and an approach that will eventually lead to beginning to transform that reality into a more just and wholesome living situation.
We are working with what I would depict as a third alternative approach to short-term mission. Definitely it is in the realm of people coming and doing with others and focuses on relationship, but it also focuses on doing to change and transform in a longer-term process. Relationships are built by common identity and side-by-side relationships of doing and collaborating on a community program that community participants themselves have determined. Often, in recent years, this community program is housing. The community is organized in small groups that come together as one large group. All members in the small group work together on each other’s house from start to finish. Mission teams come to work alongside of them, on the activity that they have determined in the small-group organization. Relationships of friendship and trust develop among those in the community and with those in the mission team. The housing transformation with better, more humane, living conditions is part of a larger human transformation taking place. Short-term mission participants can be part of this call to transform and redeem in community with those they are coming to serve and find that they too are recipients of the act of mission. In this way I think we find what it is that God would have us do, as we do it with our neighbors. Gloria tells me that is when short-term mission becomes long-term mission as a continuous effort tied in together for a longer-term process of transformation.
One part of this approach that I want to emphasize is the importance of the receiving partner that we go to do mission with. So much is up to them in determining the approach and type of mission experience that will be acquired. When we connect with organizational partners that focus on longer-term programs that are working toward the transformation of lives, then I think we are coming closer and closer to what God would have us doing.
Earlier this year we spent an evening with a mission team from Arizona that has come several times to Honduras to be with us. These are some of their comments during the evening.
“How do you build a relationship with people without working alongside them?”
“You see things in a different way and it shakes me out of what I am used to. We came and offered and became part of the community.”
“If we are going to say "God bless you" (to someone we are in relationship with), there has to be a (tangible) action in this. . . . If not, then I don’t have a responsibility and it is merely up to God (to bless and make things better)."
A mission traveler said, “How (can we) build hope in a mission focus?”
A village participant said, “Sometimes I feel so alone in my poverty . . .”
“What has been more important than building the houses has been building community and living in community.”
A mission traveler said: “Our coming does bring hope. I recognized the balance between Christian faith and a development focus, between spiritual and a humanitarian approach; I recognized the balance and it appealed to me. Not Church or mission; it is really both.”
This summer there will be a mission conference dealing with a lot of these issues called The Big Tent. This is the information:
The Power of “We”: The Call to Collective Impact
The World Mission Partner Conference at Big Tent 2013
August 1-3, 2013
Louisville, Kentucky
Register: pcusa.org/impact
800-728-7228, x2417
We give thanks to those who are called to short-term mission in the world. We ask for many blessings for those both going out and for those in a receiving role. We would like to thank you for your continued interest in us, in the people of Honduras, for supporting or participating in short-term mission trips, and for your financial support for us. Thank you especially for your prayers and for being open to hearing God’s call in new ways to transform and reconcile the world.
Yours faithfully,
Tim and Gloria
The 2013 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 20
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