I asked a Brazilian elder of our church to be the chief liaison for our Brazilian partnership. He was excited about the role and the possibilities. However, Brazil is a huge country and he was from a region very far from the one in which we were developing relationships. He visited the seminary and a few neighboring churches with me in southern Brazil, but felt that our chances of developing a church relationship were best with his former church in the north. I was not enthusiastic about this idea because, being so far away from our other activities, a relationship with his church represented a whole new partnership effort. Visiting there would require additional plane trips within Brazil or separate trips altogether from the US.

Another concern I had was that the relationship would be overly dependent on one person – him. We did not have a multi-person connection with that church as we did with the seminary. I built into all of my ministry efforts – including, or especially, our partnerships – a plan of succession. I did not want a ministry or partnership to falter because of one person moving away.

Another of my ministry principles, however, is to truly trust those in whom I have entrusted leadership. That means giving them the benefit of the doubt when they have strong and persistent notions about their area of ministry. I gave the approval for an exploratory visit to the church in northern Brazil. I did not go myself because I wanted to broaden the relationship to include another of our pastors and another lay leader.  Those two and the Brazilian lay leader returned with enthusiasm for the possibilities. But there was an important detail in their report that gave me pause.  A number of the Brazilian senior staff liked the idea of the relationship we were describing, but they couldn’t envision it happening. Their only experiences had been with an American mega-church pushing a brand of church on them, and with serving as a host for American church “mission trips.” In both cases, they felt used and their own contributions or perspectives under-appreciated. In contrast, we were describing a relationship in which we would exchange leaders for months at a time and seek to learn from each other.

We did have visits in both directions, but the longer term staff exchanges we had hoped for never materialized. Perhaps because their staff could not imagine the mutual learning relationship we were seeking; perhaps because the Brazilian church was itself a mega-church with a momentum that wasn’t in the direction of partnerships; our relationship never developed beyond polite and enjoyable visits.

Then, what I feared would happen, actually came to pass.  For a variety of reasons and over several years of time, all three of the people who initially visited the Brazilian church eventually left our church. Moreover, the people at the Brazilian church who most understood the nature of the relationship we were seeking left that church. We had lost our most promising connections on both ends. There is no vital relationship between us now and, perhaps most telling, no discernible sense of loss.

Lessons 

From these two experiences of relationships that did not take root, we have discerned a few lessons.  (1) A mutual learning relationship cannot be imposed by one partner: it must be a shared desire. (2) Some churches or church leaders cannot envision a mutual learning relationship. They may have been burned by one-sided relationships, or they may not be able to envision learning from another church. Both of these are failures of imagination that preempt a true partnership. (3) To survive changes in leadership, a relationship needs to involve several people on each side. And there needs to be a constant effort to bring more people into the relationship. One role of the liaisons is to create more liaisons. (4) Friendship between two leaders of two churches is not the same as a church partnership.  The latter is more institutional and involves more people in more relationships.

There is more to these stories, and this is not all that we learned. Still, from your experience with cross-cultural church partnerships, you may have insights into these stories that I haven’t mentioned here. Or you may have questions about the situations I’ve described. I welcome your insights and questions. And if you care to be transparent or “confessional,” I would also welcome hearing about your mistakes.