Short-term or long-term mission to Africa?

More and more of ’mission’ activities seem to work in favour of providing young (and older) people with short-term exposure. But short-termers can cheapen the mission task. We don’t have short-term pastors, we don’t have short-term Bible college lecturers, and we don’t have short term bishops and overseers. The above posts are filled by experienced professional people. (We don’t have even short-term evangelists, or short term church elders, or short term women’s leaders). In the secular world we don’t have short term pilots, or short-term businessmen or short term architects, school teachers or sailors. Then why do we these days have so many short-term missionaries?

I suggest there are four main reasons. 1. Perhaps the church’s missionary force has lost direction. 2. Short-term missionaries are tourists looking for an exotic experience with built in conscience relief. 3. People, including long-term missionaries, are afraid to speak out because the short-termers are extremely influential. They are financially powerful and have a loud voice in the sending churches on whom the long-termer is crucially dependent. 4. Access to money frequently being the main requirement for operating in mission means that short-termers with money can get quick and easy access to the field.

Many subsidiary reasons can be added. Mission agencies and departments hope that short-termers will become long-termers. They hope that the short term experience will cultivate long-term supportiveness to the missions’ task. It is important, they say, for young people these days to get a global perspective on life. The world is anyway becoming a ’global village’ in which English gets you almost anywhere – so why not? Surely it is better to spend 3 months on sabbatical or saving street children in Timbuktu than whiling away the months in UK suburbia …

It is a bold (or foolish) missionary who dares to speak out against short-term mission. Sometimes we are required to be bold and foolish for Christ. Should short-termers so dominate the missions’ scene? Should missions’ literature be full of accounts by people expounding on their initial experiences of foreignness? Should strategic decisions be made by those with no experience? I do not know of another field where this applies. If I pick up a journal on chemistry, I don’t read stories about ’when I first picked up a test tube …’. Educational journals contain articles by teachers, and not by ’one day I happened to visit a secondary school in action…’ by a total novice.

The uniqueness of the task of cross-cultural mission lies, I suggest, in its cross-cultural nature. Chemists, engineers, school teachers, vets, doctors, secretaries, professors, soldiers and even astronauts are all engaged in perfecting aspects of a familiar culture. The cross-cultural missionary is unique – in having to learn to appreciate, live with, and function in ways of life that are antithetical to, despised by or even abominable to the sending culture!

The cross-cultural missions’ task today faces a magnitude of challenge never before known. That is the challenge of meeting, comprehending and working with a foreign culture, while under a degree of scrutiny form ’home’ greater than could once have been even imagined. This is due to the communication-revolution of recent decades. To this can be added the ever more focused and narrow academia of the West brought about by numerous factors including the use of an international language for scholarly purposes, and (especially in Europe) a dogged determination to make rootless ideologies such as secularism ’work’, no matter what.

The missionary can be left high and dry! Few are prepared to listen to reports of ’exotic’ cultures when scores can say “I was there myself and spoke to the people face to face (in English) …”. Even those who do listen may struggle to take on board any aspects of cross-cultural encounter that counter or threaten the comfortable worldview that they have created for themselves.

The other part of my prescription for mission is that it should be vulnerable. People who are vulnerable are non-threatening. They do not work with those people who are at the same time dependent on them. They are ready to listen without condemning. They are ready to be misrepresented and abused without complaining. They have a listening ear but not a condemning tongue. They are not powerful in the worldly sense.

This is doubly (or triply or more) important for a Westerner wanting to engage in mission – because of the enormous power of the culture and the people from which he/she emerges. The Westerner carries this by default. He (she) is a marked man. A Westerner in Africa stands out as he/she would in a British crowd through growing horns like those of a bull, or having a nose like a football! Major efforts are needed for a Westerner even to get onto the starting-block in the race for vulnerability. At the moment very few are facing in the right direction – as policies of the West to Africa (of aid etc.) are such as to tend to set the white man apart more and more, and not less and less!

There are many reasons for vulnerability to have been thrown to the wind. One is plainly because technology and social know-how from the West have been widely considered to be the solution to African problems. Hence visitors to the Continent far from having the humility of recognising their own ignorance, often have the confidence of knowing that they hold solutions in their hands, if local people would only listen! Instead of putting themselves into humble positions where they can listen, visitors to Africa from the West concentrate on empowering themselves to enable their particular voice and message to be heard as widely as possible. When it comes to empowering African people – then the idea is to empower them to say what the white man is already saying, or to do what the white man has already been doing – not to think for themselves. The African who is praised is the one who behaves like a European!

I suggest that one cannot be effective as a missionary operating on this system. The African who behaves like a European is not behaving according to his heart orientation but through imitating foreigner(s). There being no indigenous foundation to such behaviour makes it liable to corruption and collapse at any time. Changing one person in a community accustomed to acting as a social whole makes him a misfit not a change-agent. (Unless he makes a lot of money, which of course he actually often does. But then are changes that follow money heartfelt and lasting?) People learn by building on existing knowledge, thus enabling gradual social change, but the individual who has been ’European-ised’ is airlifted out of his community, to be impaled onto a pedestal of dependency.

What helps an older person teach a younger is not only that he knows what the younger doesn’t, but also that he knows the state of not-knowing that the younger person is going through. In other words, someone who has climbed a mountain step by step is better equipped to direct someone else to do the same than he who was planted onto the mountain top by helicopter. He who has himself climbed out of a hole can best direct another to do the same. What is important is not only the desirable finished state (true faithful believing Christian) but also how to reach it! The process of reaching cannot be identical for people from different cultures (i.e. starting points). Hence assisting someone from another culture to achieve a said goal first requires the instructor to immerse him / her self into the culture concerned.

This principle is widely adhered to in the Western church and in Western life. That is why the leader of a woman’s fellowship is usually a woman, a youth leader typically young, the pastor of a Chinese church Chinese, and the elder of a church in town a respected leader of the town’s community. Such careful thinking goes to pot on the mission field in Africa – where European people using European languages try to control every cough and splutter of the African church. Saying this does not make me into a racist. The ’problem’ is not singularly that a Brit involves himself in an African church. The church has always been international and multicultural. The ’problem’ is that the Brit insists (and African people won’t argue because of their kindness, and their financial dependence) on running the church using his language in his way! (When I say ’insists’, I mean ’forces’ through circumstances. East African people can be desperately clinging to the use of English, because that is the language that gets them multiple financial and materially lucrative contacts. At fault are those who run projects on the African Continent while operating in English.) Many many mission contexts have almost zero built in learning curves in relation to African life, but are usually highly attuned to the pleasing of Western donors. This is ignorance being perpetuated.