-Brian W. Aldiss
What do you think?
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Quote of the Week... on Childhood
-Brian W. Aldiss
What do you think?
Friday, February 26, 2010
Short Term Pros and Cons: An Epistle
My cousin, Drew, who is also in what he calls a “do-gooder” profession ;-) sent me this link to an article called The End of Service Trips? by Tim Ogden:
http://www.philanthropyaction.com/articles/the_end_of_service_trips/
The author challenges the value of overseas service trips (such as missions trips) in terms of value for dollar. He says, “My epiphany on the pointlessness of such trips came while spending a month volunteering at an international NGO’s famine-relief operation in Ethiopia. Despite my good intentions it was abundantly clear that I had no useful skills for the situation.”
He also sites an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, The 'Great Commission' or Glorified Sightseeing? by Evan Sparks. Sparks, who has himself taken numerous short-term missions trips, is even more critical: “The billion-dollar question, however, is whether they're worth the cost. Are short-term missions the best way to achieve the goals of Christians? Critics argue that sightseeing often takes up too much of the itinerary, leading some to call short-termers ‘vacationaries.’”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122359398873721053.html?mod=djemITP
My husband maintains that the value of such trips is the exposure of Americans to how “the other half” lives. He feels that every American church member should make such a trip to the Third World. Andy Crouch, executive producer of Round Trip, a documentary film-based curriculum designed to improve church service trips, echoes this sentiment: “To experience the absolute poverty in parts of the developing world, to see people who couldn’t possibly be doing anything more to escape poverty, can be a transformative experience. It begins raising systemic questions that don’t necessarily get raised when you see the relative poverty in the United States. It’s very important for people in the rich world to be exposed to absolute poverty and I don’t know how you do it without an encounter with a real person.“
But Ogden responds, “Evidence suggests that these trips have no lasting impact on the participants, however.” Sparks cites Calvin College sociologist Kurt Ver Beek, who surveyed U.S. [short-term] missionaries who built homes in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch in 1998. “After coming down from a post-trip ‘high,’ the short-termers did not evince much change in their lives. Only 16% reported ‘significant positive impact,’ including in prayer, friendships and financial giving.”
Sparks says further, “Indeed, if you were to ask an economist about short-term missions, many of which involve such manual-labor projects, he would have a simple answer: Ditch the traveling team members and send a check. A career missionary knows better what manual labor needs to be done on-site, and he can hire local laborers for much less money than what flying in unskilled Americans requires. Using local labor contributes to the local economy and avoids perpetuating a culture of dependency and powerlessness. A career missionary is also fluent in the local language and culturally aware, so he can be more effective at evangelism, discipleship and social-justice ministries.”
So where do I stand on this issue? Firmly straddling the fence! The above statement is correct about providing employment to and empowering locals. Yet we want short-term teams to come here, to see what our lives are like, and to meet the people in whom we have invested ourselves. We believe that long-term missionaries are often called through such an experience (though I have no empirical statistics to back my claim).
As for the advice above for people to stay at home and send a check, things just don’t work that way. I remember a time when we were building a church, and a builder’s team came from the States. The local pastor commented, “With all the money these people are spending on travel, we would have more than enough to finish the building.”
What we told him was that if those people had not come, they would not have sent us their money instead. If they paid for the trip themselves, they would have simply spent it on another trip. If the members of their church contributed to help them, it was because of the participation of people they knew. Contributors get more excited about the involvement of a person they know than about a building project. If they can’t go themselves, they feel good about enabling someone else to do so. There’s not as much vicarious satisfaction in buying a brick.
Crouch suggests, “The trips only make sense if they are part of a comprehensive program of changing peoples attitudes and behaviors. Evidence is shockingly clear that a single trip has no impact. No matter how well you do a trip, especially when you’re talking about teenagers, they are at such a high-velocity developmental stage that I don’t think any single experience is going to have an ‘impact.‘...If you want to see any lasting change you can’t have the trip end when people get back, or even after that one meeting where everyone shares their pictures. The organizations that have thought about this the most and are doing the best job are making these trips part of a much longer engagement with the issues. For instance, there’s one organization that requires a year-long commitment and the trip occurs in the middle—they meet just as often after the trip as they do preparing for it. What we need to do is go out and have our world rocked and then come back and in a sustained way make some real commitments to change and be held accountable for enough time for those changes to sink in. The grooves in our culture are too deep for us to escape from without that level of commitment.“
We have been impressed by a program of the Cooperative Missions Network of the African Dispersion (COMINAD), called Adopt-A-Village. http://cominad.com/
Adopt-A-People has been a popular concept in missions circles for the past decade or longer. This means “that a church, congregation or fellowship group makes a serious commitment to do all they can to reach their adopted people group by working in partnership with the mission agency of their choice.” http://www.adopt-a-people.org/ One criticism of this approach, however, is that it is too big. It’s hard for people to feel intimately involved with a whole tribe of people.
So COMINAD (and others) came up with the idea of allying a single church with a single village. In the COMINAD model, members of the American church visit the village annually, or more often, so they are returning to the same place over and over again. Pictures are taken of each villager, and each member of the US church commits to pray for one of the villagers. The villagers also receive pictures of their prayer partners. The American church also agrees to support a church-planter to live in the village. He will build relationships with the local people, and work or farm alongside them. There may be development projects eventually, but the focus is not on financial benefits, but rather on relationship.
As an African-American organization, the focus of COMINAD is on reconciliation: reconciliation with the descendants of their African brethren who sold them into slavery centuries ago, and reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ. They say to the Africans, “We all know that our ancestors could not have been captured as slaves without the participation of the local people. [Here the villagers nod their heads and/or avert their eyes.] But what they intended for evil, God intended for good (Gen. 50.20). When our ancestors went to the United States, they learned about the Gospel of Jesus Christ so we can bring that back to you.”
This more focused approach on a smaller group of people, with repeated contact, has proven fruitful for COMINAD and other organizations.
Finally, our daughter, Ruthanne, and son, Benjamin, both went on overseas summer trips with Teen Missions International. We are very impressed with this organization as well. For the same amount of money that a young woman in our church was paying to go help missionaries in Costa Rica for two weeks, our kids had two weeks of “Boot Camp” training in Florida, then a month or more of work in their country, followed by a week of follow-up debriefing. We would recommend TMI highly and would love to get one of their groups to come here as well! www.teenmissions.org
If after all this, I have not discouraged you about short-term missions, here are a few helpful links!
Reconciliation Ministries International:
http://www.RMNI.org
Christ for Humanity:
http://www.christforhumanity.org/
Teen Missions International:
www.teenmissions.org
The Alliance for Excellence in Short Term Mission:
http://www.aestm.org/
Christianity Today’s ST mission site:
http://www.roundtripmissions.com/
Short Term missions database/search engine:
http://www.shorttermmissions.com/?STM=0a041825abfa34c137309bced555bb09
United World Mission’s short term opportunities (note: these are for one-to-two year terms, as recommended in the Ogden article):
http://uwm.org/ex237/
And oh, yeah, don't forget about us:
malibowers@gmail.com
Further reading on this issue:
Churches Retool Mission Trips: Work Abroad Criticized for High Cost and Lack of Value By Jacqueline L. Salmon
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070402233_pf.html
http://www.philanthropyaction.com/articles/the_end_of_service_trips/
The author challenges the value of overseas service trips (such as missions trips) in terms of value for dollar. He says, “My epiphany on the pointlessness of such trips came while spending a month volunteering at an international NGO’s famine-relief operation in Ethiopia. Despite my good intentions it was abundantly clear that I had no useful skills for the situation.”
He also sites an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, The 'Great Commission' or Glorified Sightseeing? by Evan Sparks. Sparks, who has himself taken numerous short-term missions trips, is even more critical: “The billion-dollar question, however, is whether they're worth the cost. Are short-term missions the best way to achieve the goals of Christians? Critics argue that sightseeing often takes up too much of the itinerary, leading some to call short-termers ‘vacationaries.’”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122359398873721053.html?mod=djemITP
My husband maintains that the value of such trips is the exposure of Americans to how “the other half” lives. He feels that every American church member should make such a trip to the Third World. Andy Crouch, executive producer of Round Trip, a documentary film-based curriculum designed to improve church service trips, echoes this sentiment: “To experience the absolute poverty in parts of the developing world, to see people who couldn’t possibly be doing anything more to escape poverty, can be a transformative experience. It begins raising systemic questions that don’t necessarily get raised when you see the relative poverty in the United States. It’s very important for people in the rich world to be exposed to absolute poverty and I don’t know how you do it without an encounter with a real person.“
But Ogden responds, “Evidence suggests that these trips have no lasting impact on the participants, however.” Sparks cites Calvin College sociologist Kurt Ver Beek, who surveyed U.S. [short-term] missionaries who built homes in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch in 1998. “After coming down from a post-trip ‘high,’ the short-termers did not evince much change in their lives. Only 16% reported ‘significant positive impact,’ including in prayer, friendships and financial giving.”
Sparks says further, “Indeed, if you were to ask an economist about short-term missions, many of which involve such manual-labor projects, he would have a simple answer: Ditch the traveling team members and send a check. A career missionary knows better what manual labor needs to be done on-site, and he can hire local laborers for much less money than what flying in unskilled Americans requires. Using local labor contributes to the local economy and avoids perpetuating a culture of dependency and powerlessness. A career missionary is also fluent in the local language and culturally aware, so he can be more effective at evangelism, discipleship and social-justice ministries.”
So where do I stand on this issue? Firmly straddling the fence! The above statement is correct about providing employment to and empowering locals. Yet we want short-term teams to come here, to see what our lives are like, and to meet the people in whom we have invested ourselves. We believe that long-term missionaries are often called through such an experience (though I have no empirical statistics to back my claim).
As for the advice above for people to stay at home and send a check, things just don’t work that way. I remember a time when we were building a church, and a builder’s team came from the States. The local pastor commented, “With all the money these people are spending on travel, we would have more than enough to finish the building.”
What we told him was that if those people had not come, they would not have sent us their money instead. If they paid for the trip themselves, they would have simply spent it on another trip. If the members of their church contributed to help them, it was because of the participation of people they knew. Contributors get more excited about the involvement of a person they know than about a building project. If they can’t go themselves, they feel good about enabling someone else to do so. There’s not as much vicarious satisfaction in buying a brick.
Crouch suggests, “The trips only make sense if they are part of a comprehensive program of changing peoples attitudes and behaviors. Evidence is shockingly clear that a single trip has no impact. No matter how well you do a trip, especially when you’re talking about teenagers, they are at such a high-velocity developmental stage that I don’t think any single experience is going to have an ‘impact.‘...If you want to see any lasting change you can’t have the trip end when people get back, or even after that one meeting where everyone shares their pictures. The organizations that have thought about this the most and are doing the best job are making these trips part of a much longer engagement with the issues. For instance, there’s one organization that requires a year-long commitment and the trip occurs in the middle—they meet just as often after the trip as they do preparing for it. What we need to do is go out and have our world rocked and then come back and in a sustained way make some real commitments to change and be held accountable for enough time for those changes to sink in. The grooves in our culture are too deep for us to escape from without that level of commitment.“
We have been impressed by a program of the Cooperative Missions Network of the African Dispersion (COMINAD), called Adopt-A-Village. http://cominad.com/
Adopt-A-People has been a popular concept in missions circles for the past decade or longer. This means “that a church, congregation or fellowship group makes a serious commitment to do all they can to reach their adopted people group by working in partnership with the mission agency of their choice.” http://www.adopt-a-people.org/ One criticism of this approach, however, is that it is too big. It’s hard for people to feel intimately involved with a whole tribe of people.
So COMINAD (and others) came up with the idea of allying a single church with a single village. In the COMINAD model, members of the American church visit the village annually, or more often, so they are returning to the same place over and over again. Pictures are taken of each villager, and each member of the US church commits to pray for one of the villagers. The villagers also receive pictures of their prayer partners. The American church also agrees to support a church-planter to live in the village. He will build relationships with the local people, and work or farm alongside them. There may be development projects eventually, but the focus is not on financial benefits, but rather on relationship.
As an African-American organization, the focus of COMINAD is on reconciliation: reconciliation with the descendants of their African brethren who sold them into slavery centuries ago, and reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ. They say to the Africans, “We all know that our ancestors could not have been captured as slaves without the participation of the local people. [Here the villagers nod their heads and/or avert their eyes.] But what they intended for evil, God intended for good (Gen. 50.20). When our ancestors went to the United States, they learned about the Gospel of Jesus Christ so we can bring that back to you.”
This more focused approach on a smaller group of people, with repeated contact, has proven fruitful for COMINAD and other organizations.
Finally, our daughter, Ruthanne, and son, Benjamin, both went on overseas summer trips with Teen Missions International. We are very impressed with this organization as well. For the same amount of money that a young woman in our church was paying to go help missionaries in Costa Rica for two weeks, our kids had two weeks of “Boot Camp” training in Florida, then a month or more of work in their country, followed by a week of follow-up debriefing. We would recommend TMI highly and would love to get one of their groups to come here as well! www.teenmissions.org
If after all this, I have not discouraged you about short-term missions, here are a few helpful links!
Reconciliation Ministries International:
http://www.RMNI.org
Christ for Humanity:
http://www.christforhumanity.org/
Teen Missions International:
www.teenmissions.org
The Alliance for Excellence in Short Term Mission:
http://www.aestm.org/
Christianity Today’s ST mission site:
http://www.roundtripmissions.com/
Short Term missions database/search engine:
http://www.shorttermmissions.com/?STM=0a041825abfa34c137309bced555bb09
United World Mission’s short term opportunities (note: these are for one-to-two year terms, as recommended in the Ogden article):
http://uwm.org/ex237/
And oh, yeah, don't forget about us:
malibowers@gmail.com
Further reading on this issue:
Churches Retool Mission Trips: Work Abroad Criticized for High Cost and Lack of Value By Jacqueline L. Salmon
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070402233_pf.html
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Quote of the Week
"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." Logan Pearsall Smith
What do you think?
What do you think?
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Wednesday without Words
I couldn't figure out how to attach these photos to my previous post, so here are some samples of Malian "uniforms."
Cloth Heaven
Tomorrow I’m going to a wedding, and with any luck, I’ll be wearing the same dress as most of the other women there (and it’s not because I’m a bridesmaid)!
One thing that is very different here from back home: In the U.S. if a woman walked into church or the office wearing the same dress as another, the reaction would be great chagrin. Not here! Fabrics come and go in popularity, and everyone will buy the same print to have an outfit made, so you often meet people wearing the same thing. Additionally, for events like weddings or holidays, groups go out of their way to buy the same material and wear it together. It’s called a “uniform.” In fact, every year the Malian Association of Evangelicals puts out a Christmas design so that we all go to church on Dec. 25 wearing the same thing.
The textiles are one of the most fun and interesting aspects of Malian life. Brilliant colors and designs guarantee that life in this often-brown (due to the dust) country is never dull. Interestingly, many of the best-quality fabrics are manufactured in the U.K. and Holland, where they have textile industries entirely for export to Africa consisting of loud cotton prints which no European woman would be caught dead in.
Ready-made clothing is rare here. You buy the fabric you like and take it to a tailor. Unlike in North America and Europe, a trip to the tailor is not an expensive luxury. It’s an everyday necessity and quite affordable, and a common profession among men.
Some of the patterns I’ve seen over the years in church, in shops, or on the street:
- Lots of florals and geometric designs.
- Numbers and letters.
- Soccer balls.
- Disembodied fingers.
- Chickens (one of the first uniforms I ever had had chickens, roosters, and chicks on it, with lines of eggs all around. UG-LEE).
- A hand holding a spray can, with a triangle of spray being squirted.
- Eyes.
- Insects.
- Leaves.
- Matches.
- Badminton raquets & birdies.
- Neckties.
- The backs of ladies’ heads showing hairstyles.
- One Sunday in church, I saw a shirt covered in laptop computers.
- I also saw a lady with a large safety pin design on her dress, where the tailor had rather unfortunately located a pin across her buttocks so that it looked like she needed it to keep the seam together!
- Images of people, such as the president of Mali, the First Lady, or perhaps a popular imam (Muslim preacher) and of course, Barack Hussein Obama! One of my Peace Corps friends boasts two different BHO outfits.
If you want to see a sample of African Obama fabric, check out #6 in this gallery:
Monday, February 8, 2010
Quote(s) of the Week... on Friendship
Next Sunday is Friendship Day in Honduras, so we missionary ladies celebrated yesterday. In case you think that's strange, we only meet for prayer once a month, so since it was within a week, one of our Honduran colleagues suggested we honor our friendships this time.
We all brought a little gift to exchange and some of us brought quotations or thoughts related to friendship. Here's a sampling:
"A friend is someone who dares to ask the hard questions." (Marian H., SIL)
"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: 'What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.'" (C. S. Lewis, author)
"Only God can be a perfect friend, for he has promised, 'Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.'" (Rose L., ReachAcross)
"I've discovered a way to stay friends forever --
There's really nothing to it.
I simply tell you what to do
And you do it!" (Shel Silverstein, author of The Giving Tree)
Friday, February 5, 2010
Humbled by Respect
Marcie Harris & I are doing a women's leadership seminar this weekend in Bambara. We have invited all the pastors' wives from our town, plus at least one women's leader from each church. Last night was the opening meeting and there were 9 women; we will continue all day today and are hoping to get a few more.
I was thinking what a humbling experience this is. If I were invited to a seminar by a foreigner speaking heavily accented, broken English, purporting to be an expert on some subject, would I attend? I'm not sure I would. Yet these women come willingly. Why?
1. Because I'm a missionary. Most of them, or their parents, came to faith through missionaries, so there is an inherent respect for us.
2. Because there is a dearth of good Bible teachers in this land. In America we don't need foreigners to preach to us because there are so many fine 'native' Bible scholars. Here one takes whatever one can get, and with gratitude!
3. Because I'm white. Yeah, not very PC, huh? But the fact is that despite Malian resentment of colonialism, they accord to us a lot more respect than they do each other.
So may I not take this for granted, nor waste this opportunity. May I respect and honor them as they do me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)