This past weekend my home church had its missions conference. This is an annual event during which we emphasize world missions. My church devotes a substantial portion of its budget to support missionaries all over the world.
I have to confess that the missions conference, and missions in general, often leave me feeling ambivalent. I’ve supported missionaries in various ways, mostly financially, for many years, some good friends of mine are missionaries, and I even was chair of the church’s mission education committee for a few years. But I always come away from the missions conference wondering if it was a bit too much and a bit too lopsided. The conference is something of a rah-rah time, intended to motivate people to go on long or short term missions trips, to give to the missions fund, and to think and pray about missions. All of that is good, but I wrestle with broader questions about how to contextualize the gospel. How much of our missions efforts reflect an appreciation for the cultures to which we bring the gospel? The missions conference sometimes strikes me as triumphalist and colonialist, as if we have the gospel because we’re somehow inherently better than those to whom we want to bring it. And we never seem to hear about the families that limp back from the missions field, their idealism shattered and faith in rags, because of what they encountered once they hit the trenches. I want to hear those stories.
The odd thing is, I know that triumphalist impression is miles away from the hearts and minds of our church’s missions leaders and missionaries. Our missionaries include some of the most intelligent, dynamic, thoughtful people you’ll ever meet, and our Missions Director is a broad and careful thinker about these sorts of things. So maybe it’s just me and the residual feelings and attitudes I carry from growing up in a less discerning, more fundamentalist climate. Or maybe part of it is that institutionally we’re scared to really “let it all hang out” at the missions conference. I’m not sure, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has similar feelings about how missions are presented at their local church.