Follow-up on yesterday’s post about global awareness in the church, here’s a little self assessment of your geography skills. Give this puzzle a try and see how much you really know about the world (full disclosure, this took me a little while).
Hint: Countries grow or shrink to scale when you’re getting close to the right location.
Heads in the Sand: The difference between TIME’s cover stories on its U.S. and international editions says a lot about Americans’ interest level in the rest of the world. Image courtesy www.dailykos.com.
Samuel George is a pretty humble guy. You’d have to be, to come from India, a place with four times the population of the United States, and take it with a smile when some American kid asks if India is part of Australia.
He’s used to it by now.
George is director of TEAM India, a ministry that, through the years and different seasons, has cultivated hundreds of churches, schools and medical programs in the northern part of that country.
Over sandwiches and gallon-sized sweet teas last week with a group of coworkers, I asked George if he was surprised by anything during his recent visits to American churches. With almost no pause, he told me he was shocked at how little Christians in America seem to know about the rest of the world. Specifically, he was shocked at how little they know about global missions.
“In India, when Obama sneezes, it’s in the newspaper,” George said. When he was still in elementary school in India, “I memorized all the states of America.”
It’s nothing new that we Americans have a reputation for being a little in the dark about what’s happening around the world (compared with so many other countries where U.S. news is followed as closely as local headlines). In an interview with PBS last year, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski called America “probably the least-informed public about the world among the developed countries in the world.” Case in point, a lot has been made of the startling contrast between recent TIME magazine covers for international and U.S. editions.
But George wasn’t picking on American Christians. Americans, he said, are almost always eager to help in missions, to do something. They just don’t know what to do. “And they feel genuinely bad when the feel they could do more for missions.”
He added that missions organizations have a “vital ministry” of informing the church about what’s happening.
With a few exceptions, most American missions organizations and NGOs have fallen short in this area. Rather than making the church more globally aware, they have tended to reduce communications to targeted marketing approaches or micro-level storytelling. Like most media, after all, they have limited budgets and pressure to keep their focus to what sells.
For example, many American Christians know there is a huge problem with human trafficking in Thailand and perhaps have even read a book about it. But how many could point to Thailand on a map? And while millions of Americans probably receive newsletters about how their donations are helping to drill wells in Haiti or bring earthquake relief, most probably do not know that Haiti is the only country in world birthed by a slave revolt — something that shapes nearly every part of Haitian society, religion and progress.
In part, we have more tools than ever to distill our information intake to only what we “want,” which often means we are consuming more, but consuming less broadly. As traditional media outlets cut back, missions organizations and NGOs have a great opportunity to step into a huge void and educate our audiences. Maybe not just an opportunity, but an obligation.
Missions sending is decentralizing, both in the United States and other countries. I believe that ultimately can be a good thing, but it will work best when there are rich sources of valuable, reliable information to help guide decision-making. And because the best stories are emotional — and because emotional associations help information to stick around longer in our brains — stories are great tools for comprehension.
For NGOs and missions groups that tell stories, the burden is not just to get out content, but to produce well researched, vetted, and challenging content. That means more than just a travelogue accompanied by a few photos from a four-day trip. Simply being there does not make us subject-matter experts, any more than just visiting makes a tourist into a “local.”
And this is non-negotiable: That content must be creative and new, not just the same old stuff that agencies have churned out for decades.
Communications that motivate someone to give a dollar or go on a trip are vital and good. On their own, however, those will tend to produce only globetrotting givers — not a bad thing, especially if you work for Lonely Planet or AFAR magazine, but it’s not the full extent of the type of disciples Christ is looking for.
I hope we produce a generation of thoughtful, informed, all-in missionaries and missions supporters who are innovating and carving out the missions models of the future, investing their lives in transforming communities around the world.
TEAM worker Linda Wagner is a pioneer of Christian counseling in Ireland, but still makes time for informal conversations as she walks her dog against a seascape backdrop. Photo by Robert Johnson / TEAM
Painting with broad strokes, Ireland is not a place where talk easily about their personal problems. Which is why it’s even more impressive how open people were as we put together this story about a TEAM worker who has been a leader in Christian counseling in Ireland. Transparency makes this type of stories a whole lot easier to write.
Props to the creative team members who went to Ireland for the reporting and showed sensitivity and care in the process. God uses people from all walks of life as he’s putting the world back to rights.
Check out the story here at TEAM.org.
Erika and Thad take a quiet moment during our recent retreat in Texas.
Sunday was Easter. When God turned the world’s darkest hour into history’s greatest moment. Or as Tom Tanner put it that morning at Riverstone church, what for the disciples was the weekend from hell became the most joyous celebration of their lives.
I didn’t practice any special Lenten disciplines this year to prepare for Easter, but last week I found myself suddenly overcome with anticipation for the day. I guess it was just excitement at being reminded that God’s business is redeeming bad things and making them incredibly good.
It’s fitting that my first day of work at TEAM came right after Easter. I’ve been in Chicago this week for training, and it feels at times like the opening theme of this new chapter for us is all about redemption. Consider:
REDEEMED YEARS
There can be lots of inefficiencies in the missionary life, or at least it can feel that way. Lots of waiting, transitions, more transitions. Then you get to do some “ministry,” which rarely happens as quickly or as smoothly as you want. God uses this to shape us more into his image, of course, but in the moment it can still all feel very dumb.
But God is faithful to “restore the years the locusts have eaten” (Joel 2:25). He turns wasted time into an asset. Somehow this first week at TEAM overshadows all the weeks we felt we were losing. It makes that all worth it.
REDEEMED GOODBYES
We gave up a lot to leave all our friends and family and move to Miami (though I don’t want to overstate this, because most missionaries sacrifice so much more). It was not easy, but we did it. And it was good.
God, in return, brought us through a short season of pain and inconvenience, then turned everything on its head by unexpectedly placing us so much closer to the friends and family we thought we’d never live near again.
REDEEMED TIMING
We waited a while before having children. Then we waited some more, beyond what we’d originally planned. Transitions took their toll, and like most first-time parents we began to feel there would never be a “right time” to start a family. Then we said to heck with it and Erika was pregnant.
As if to reward our final relinquishing of control, God brought Thad into the world at the “worst” possible time as we lost our jobs — but surprised us even more by proving that He would provide for us anyway, even better than we could care provide for ourselves if we had tried.
REDEEMED LOCATION
Not many people know that Chicago has always been sort of a city of defeat for me. It’s where, in high school, I auditioned twice for one of the nation’s most competitive drum and bugle corps and twice was rejected (if you were a band nerd you appreciate this). Chicago is where I had late-stage interviews to join the Foreign Service and was rejected.
If it weren’t for the good pizza, family and friends here, we might have shaken this midwestern dust from our feet for good. But God, in his humor, chose to make this city the staging ground for our chapter of redemption. Even thought we won’t be living here (and our wallets are grateful for that), the TEAM world very much revolves around its Chicago presence.
Thanks to the many wise friends who have helped us see these glimpses of redemption. We’re seeing more almost every day.
One last thought on redemption: In the Bible, people almost always celebrated in some way when they experienced reception, and God of course likes this very much. Which is also why I think God allows for so much chocolate at Easter.
Photo: Angela Maria Posada and one of her daughters, Veronica. Angela lived on the streets for years. Her family now lives in a poor community near downtown Medellín, Colombia.
By Andy Olsen
I was riding in a taxi in Colombia last week, and the driver, once he learned I was American, immediately wanted to know if I thought the United States would stay at the top of the Olympic medal count or would be overtaken by China.
Who doesn’t love the Olympics? In a great global irony, every two years, a billion of us come together to live vicariously through a handful of athletes pushing every physical limit, while we push the limits of our couches.
The excitement of high-stakes competition and displays of raw skill are hard to resist. But there are other things that draw us to the games. Beautiful bodies. Televised construction of celebrity, and the sense of significance that follows. The sheer logistics of it all, thousands of people from every corner of the Earth descending on a single city, cheering in stadiums that are each-one-more-impressive monuments to success.
Centuries after God foiled man’s attempt to unite around an ill-fated tower and scattered us across the planet, humans now reunite around sport.
The key to the Olympic mystique, I have a hunch, is the ordinariness of the athletes. We can relate to them. Unlike professional athletes, the olympians seem so approachable, and (most) are not yet millionaires. They seem, well, a lot like us. Which is why we have all at some point imagined ourselves in their shoes.
The Olympics embodies everything that the world values. Self-made success. Rewards for the fittest. Physical beauty and sex appeal. Perfection and winning. Advertisers know this very well. In the United States, television commercials during these games whispered to us: “You’re not an Olympian, but you can be like one. Buy this luxury car, use this credit card, wear these clothes or this makeup, and you’ll be (almost) one of them.”
There are few other events where mankind puts so much importance, where governments and corporations put their massive resources behind a select few individuals to bolster their image before a watching world.
As Christians, it should make us pause and ask: What are the things that thrill God as much as the Olympics thrill us?
The truth is, what the Olympics say about our values is quite opposite of what we know that God values. The gospel is about downward mobility. Christ taught and modeled a life of meekness, of fleeing from self-glorification, of sacrificial service. He minced no words in Mark 9:35 when he said that the least of these would be those most honored in his Kingdom (and you can be sure that will be a much grander stage than the Olympic podium). He made it very clear that he did not come to build his reign on the backs of self-made winners, but through the humility of self-confessed losers.
Don’t get me wrong. World-class athletic competition surely puts a smile on God’s face. After all, it is a spectacle of his most prized creation in perfect physical form. It must fill him with joy when his children go on camera and publicly thank God for the gifts he has given them. Great sport grips us with unexplainable interest, and it’s a safe bet that God made it that way on purpose. At its best, it is worship of our Creator.
But alas, the world loves sports-spectacle in different ways than God probably does. It so easily wins our hearts because it lures us with the possibility of greatness that we all crave. If we can’t personally win at sport, we certainly hope we’re flying the flag of the nation (or city or school) that does. Which is why we invest so much of our collective resources in professional athletics.
“His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, nor his delight in the legs of the warrior, but the Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.” – Psalm 147:10-11
The news media is a great indicator of just how much we project on the Olympics. NBC alone spent over a billion dollars only for the rights to broadcast the 2012 Olympics in the United States. That sum dwarfs the GDP of some of the very countries participating in the games. And it doesn’t include the actual cost of producing the coverage, estimated at easily more than $100 million dollars. Add to that the money that hundreds of other news outlets around the world spent to send photographers, writers, video crews and producers to London.
As Christians, we are not necessarily called to remove ourselves from all the spectacle, but we are called to balance it. We must remember that where the world invests its hopes is generally not where God calls us to invest ours. Wide and obvious is the road of the world. Our privilege is to point people to the road that is narrow and easy-to-miss.
Last week, around the same time that millions were cheering for (or against) Usain Bolt, I was sitting in a tiny room in a drug-filled building in Medellín, Colombia, listening to Angela weep. Now a believer, Angela had once been addicted to drugs and lived on the streets on-and-off for 18 years. She shared with how she had just learned that her 15-year-old daughter was pregnant. The young girl had begun using drugs herself and was shacked up with a professional thief.
Her story is predictably common in her neighborhood, a place where the cycle of drug abuse, prostitution and poverty is particularly vicious. But the miracle is that Angela and her other children have come to love Jesus and are, slowly, escaping from the hell that they once lived. Their story is the fruit of the hard work of Fundación Viento Fresco, a ministry we at LAM serve with in that barrio. They are a small team of people who have been feeding children and providing after-school programs for over eight years. They work every day with no recognition, no big funding, and no quick-and-easy results.
Why do I bring up Viento Fresco and Angela? Because one of the things I love about my job is that I get to tell the stories of unsung heroes like these. We tend to overlook the narratives of the poor and struggling unless they are part of the past of someone who has now achieved greatness. But I have to think that God leans over the ledge of heaven, hanging eagerly on every twist and turn of their stories and rooting for them like we would never believe.
If we can invest billions of dollars in the distribution of a few gold medals, then surely we have a responsibility to also broadcast the good news of a few lives transformed by the love of God. Because a family pulled from the grip of the most unthinkable circumstances is a greater event in the Kingdom then shaving a few milliseconds from a world record.
As I reflect on my past week, I’m super glad that our church schedule allowed us to watch the USA basketball gold-medal game on Sunday morning. But I am eternally more grateful for the chance I got to listen to Angela’s story, to pray for her and her daughter, and to share her story later this year (when it publishes).
The narrow road is full of easy-to-miss champions walking along it. May we notice them and have the courage to follow along, especially in the times when the wide road is calling us so loudly.
In ministries around the world, there is an army of diligent servants laboring long hours behind closed doors. Without them, there would be no ministries.
Most of these people will never be publicly recognized for their work — lifetimes of licking envelopes and filing forms and fixing leaky pipes — save for perhaps a humble retirement lunch and a gift-wrapped plaque. But they persist with joy nonetheless, and you can be sure that though few notice when they do their jobs well, everyone notices when they do it poorly. So they work hard.
Their collective efforts are nothing less than the foundation upon which every nonprofit organization is built. They provide the structure that allows ministries to change lives, fight poverty, and heal brokenness. To borrow from author Andy Crouch (more on him later), those workers are the administrative cosmos that allows ministries to create culture — that is, we in ministry absolutely need such people to be able to go out and build beautiful things that point toward God.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this type of unseen work lately because Erika and I have been in the middle of it for most of the last couple of months. Erika has joined with a team to review years and years worth of information about our organization’s “mobilization” efforts — evaluating every inch of how we go about recruiting missionaries and equipping them to serve, asking what has worked and what has not. It is not a response to a crisis, just an essential exercise that every business or nonprofit should go through every few years (or more frequently).
For my part, I’ve been clocking long hours at my desk and on the phone, coordinating the movements of a fairly large group of players, all working together to launch (in my opinion) a new and exciting web project. The project is not just about communicating ideas or raising funds, though those certainly would be welcome side effects. Really, the goal is more ambitious: creating a way to come alongside missionaries around the world and enable them to be better workers for the Kingdom.
But Erika’s project and mine have been exercises in introspection, and sometimes we feel we don’t have much to show for all the labor except for stacks of paperwork and documents tucked away on hard drives. It can easily be daunting, especially with bosses and boards of directors and stakeholders in multiple countries eagerly looking on to see results.
But it is absolutely worth it. And though we should never take anything we do too seriously (and I try not to), I nevertheless wake up each day with a desire to keep doing it. Laying foundations takes patience, precision, and it is not the most prestigious profession. But try building a house without one.
Missions agencies across North America are at a critical moment in history. Cultural and technological shifts (and for sure, economic factors) have made missions today look dramatically different than they did even 20 years ago. What’s more, changes within the global Church are demanding that missions agencies (and missionaries) dramatically adapt their approaches — though not, of course, their core commitment to Christ and the gospel.
This season of evolving missions is exciting for me, and I’m thrilled that Erika and I have been given seats at the table to be part of the discussion. We hardly have all the answers — just some humble ideas, I’m afraid. But I think the dialog is yielding insights that will shape missions for the next hundred years.
There will be plenty of time in coming months to document the story of those changes though photos, video and words, as I love doing and have been called to do. At the moment, though, there is more behind-the-scenes work to be done. And in some ways it can really be the sweetest type of service, seen by few and enjoyed like a little secret just between you and God, the true impact of which no one will know until someday when all things are revealed.
So if you pray for or financially support or are otherwise investing in anyone laboring in a thankless ministry task behind the scenes, keep it up. Chances are, you’re going to someday meet a man, woman or child who’s life was radically changed because of it. You probably already have.
Above: My friends Jason and Scott grabbing footage in Haiti last year. Andy Olsen photo
Jason and Scott are awesome.
I spent one of the best weeks last year in Haiti with these guys, the Americans pictured in the photo above. They were there shooting a project with us for Showtime about NFL receiver Pierre Garcon, and I think we laughed our way though most of the long and exhausting week. I was reminded of the experience this past weekend, as Jason grilled hot dogs for us and his super family at his home in Seattle. He and I talked shop a bit while he prepared to fly a couple thousand miles away for another video shoot.
I got to thinking, this guy has clients with high standards and expectations that he will meet those standards. No excuses, not in his business.
I got to thinking more that it’s a good thing when people who support missions also have high standards.
We must be excellent stewards of our God-given resources. And in the missions world, that means it can be good to ask missionaries to articulate goals for themselves and then expect them to make real progress toward those goals, just as we would with an employee.
I have noticed how rarely people ask Erika and me about our goals, and I suspect it is because most folks are simply reluctant to ask. I understand that. Which is why we want to be very intentional about communicating our goals with you over the coming months. What’s more, we really hope you’ll check in with us every so often to see how we’re progressing.
I’ll get more specific once we officially start with LAM, but let’s start with the big picture. And I will admit these are big goals:
1) I want to do more than take pretty pictures. I aim to tell compelling, powerful stories that inspire change and make us all want to be better followers of Christ. I aim to use the most appropriate tool for the job — whether photos, video or the written word — to help the Church around the world to reach out to more of the world.
2) I want the central theme of our stories to be about redemption through partnership. In the 21st Century, missions will (actually, it must) dramatically shift toward listening to Christian leaders in Latin America and beyond and allowing them to take ownership of missions in their own countries. It will be about carefully listening to their ideas more than ever. I aim to shape LAM’s communications strategy in a way that gives voice to those leaders and allows us to hear them in ways we have not been able to in the past.
3) I want our work to be sustainable. The kind of work outlined above takes time, so Erika and I want to be invested as long as we are able. That means we cannot try to do it alone. I plan to immediately begin creatively recruiting and building a communications team to work with me — a team ideally packed with talented Latin Americans who desire to serve as storytellers.
4) I want to set healthy boundaries. Arguably the biggest mistake we see made over and over again in ministry, the failure to say “no” when we should is guaranteed to hijack our entire endeavor. I plan to — and ask you to pray specifically that we would — prioritize what is best.
There you have it, the big goals. These are specifically mine, and Erika has her own that she’ll communicate in due time. But since much of our travel and work will overlap, our goals are very much shared.
Now two goals for you: Would you pray for us? Would you be brave enough to hold us accountable, of course exercising grace when necessary, just as we benefit from the daily grace given to us through God’s mercy?
Abelardo Morell – Brooklyn Bridge. Courtesy abelardomorell.net
Abelardo Morell is a brilliant photographer who’s known for single images that can take days of prep work and more than eight hours just to expose.
At a recent lecture at the University of Kentucky, he shared about how he passes the time during such long exposures — talking a walk, meeting his agent, catching a movie. During shorter exposures that may only last 20 or 30 minutes, he confessed that he sometimes just sits and watches the wall.
This is a man who understands patience, speaking to a generation that does not.
In the era of Twitter, tech-startup phenoms and instant results, patience does not come easily to my generation — present company included. Morell said that nowadays “a minute is like a year” for young artists, who hit small setbacks and struggle with profound discouragement.
Someone in the audience asked him what his parents thought when he told them he was becoming an artist. It took them years to accept his decision, and not until he was exhibiting work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art did they finally concede that the whole “artist thing” seemed to be working out for him.
Morell left us all with one encouragement: To commit to what you’re doing and just keep pushing, even when it’s not easy.
That might sound trite, but it has encouraged me lately. We’ve been visiting Maine this week — where Morell when to school, incidentally — and spending evenings with many of Erika’s super relatives. One of her uncles was talking about discerning between an opportunity and a calling. He said an “opportunity” is a chance to make a decision that will work out in your favor. A “calling” is a chance to make a decision that may or may not make sense, but you commit to it anyway because it’s the right thing to do. And often the two look the same at first.
For most missionaries, support-raising is one of those seasons when you have to consciously decide if you’re merely pursuing an opportunity, or if it is a calling. It’s probably just the first of many such seasons. I think my generation has an especially tough time with the uncertainty of setbacks and of times in life when we have to hurry-up and wait. I sometimes feel that in the technology age we have been empowered so much externally — through tools, knowledge, connections, resources — that we do not have the internal strength to stand in the moments when all those external things fail us.
This is really what Paul was getting at when he said, “suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” (Rom 5:4). If all we have seen is success, it can be heartbreakingly difficult to stand when the inevitable setbacks come.
Really, it’s all about building faith. And Erika and I are certainly building faith these days, though we have a long way to go. But we are more excited than ever about starting with LAM, and our grand plan for success boils down to this: Do all that we can, and then stand and wait for God to show up.
A little cliche, but hey, if the shoe fits…
Rev. Billy Graham visits Jim Vaus’ youth group in Hell’s Kitchen during the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s Spanish-America Crusade in New York in October 1960.
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
And though it’s cliche and a little old-fashioned to say so, we must never forget that — lest we start believing that success should come easily and instantly, lest we take too much credit that’s not really ours.
The problem is, when you recognize those giant shoulders, you become acutely self-conscious of how tiny your own are.
I’ve been humbled — daunted, even — as I’ve peered into the history of Latin America Mission. For the last month, I’ve been reading through (nerd alert) a doctoral dissertation on the organizational growth and evolution of LAM.
It’s a fascinating collection of anecdotes: Brushes with death, civil rights-esque church rallies with thousands marching through the streets of Latin capitals, enormous triumphs and, yes, some failures.
The dissertation by Randal Smith, now a pastor at an Indiana church, is a well researched snapshot of LAM’s enormous legacy. Thanks in large part to the records left behind by the donor magazine LAM has published since its beginning — and which I will be editing when we get to Miami — Smith serves up a detailed look at the tireless men and women were who made LAM what it is today.
Since its birth in 1921 by founders Harry and Susan Strachan, LAM has grown from a small, old-time-revival style evangelism campaign to a complex and sprawling network of ministries ranging from pastoral training, to youth outreach, to medical and social justice work, to sending Latino missionaries around the world.
The Strachans were traditional old-school European missionaries who stepped onto South American soil in 1901 after a steam-ship journey of more than a week across the Atlantic. The eventually settled in Costa Rica and launched a continent-wide evangelization endeavor.
Latin America was a very different place in the early 20th century — far less urbanized, few good roads and almost exclusively Catholic. The Latin Catholic Church was also very different institution at the time. Latino laypeople were often discouraged from reading from the Bible and, as such, the presence of Protestants teaching openly from the Bible was very threatening both to priests and the authority of the Pope.
Early LAM documents detailed mobs stoning LAM missionaries, dynamiting LAM facilities, and even burning Bibles that were, presumably, distributed without the approval of local Catholic leaders.
(Note: The Catholic Church in Latin America has undergone dramatic change since that era, brought on by Vatican II, liberation theology, and many other forces. Today, LAM partners with and ministers alongside many reputable and Christ-centered Catholic ministries in Latin America.)
As LAM grew over the decades to include educational, medical, and “rescue” ministries such as work with street children, its legacy also grew. Entire denominations of hundreds of churches developed because of LAM efforts. Today, some of the most enduring landmarks of social responsibility in Costa Rica, including what is arguably Central America’s best hospital, are a direct result of ministries LAM launched.
Over nine decades, LAM endured and prospered despite two World Wars, the Great Depression, revolutionary movements that ravaged Latin America, and the recent economic crisis. Across the region, LAM’s work is well regarded and LAM’s people are highly respected.
LAM’s journey is well-stocked with great experiments in progressive missional thought, which paid huge dividends and also came, at times, at a high price (being ahead of your time is not always a rewarding experience). Organizationally, LAM has made great choices and also mistakes. But through it all, LAM’s leaders seemed to have humbly sought God and shown a willingness to reinvent themselves when necessary.
Most encouraging for me, LAM took risks early on in its history by prioritizing the leadership of nationals — that is, they recognized from nearly the beginning that the only way to transform Latin America in lasting ways was for the Latin American church to do it itself.
That is a big deal, and God seems to have blessed LAM’s work because of it.
But best of all, LAM’s history is still being written. I’m humbled that we get to be a part of it. And a little daunted.
Sometimes, I need images that remind me God is in control and that His kingdom is still breaking through, even in quiet, still and anonymous ways. This woman praying with her baby in the small village of Mare Rouge, Haiti, was that for me yesterday. I’d take the small, subtle victories of the divine any day over the grand schemes of man — or at least I hope I would.
Back in Haiti for another week, then home to spend a long weekend with the greatest in-laws in the world.
More later.