Mission Impact

Introduction

When Elbert asked me to speak about the impact that mission service has had on my life I was happy to accept. It’s something I’ve been passionate about, from the first mission trip I went on (to Mexico) when I was 15 to the trip to St. Croix that we just returned from yesterday.

I’ve served as a volunteer with AVS twice. The first time I was a chaplain and high school teacher on Majuro in the Marshall Islands. The second time I taught English and Bible in South Korea. For the majority of my time in Korea I was also a supervisor of the other foreign missionary teachers at my branch, so I gained an additional perspective in helping other missionaries to adapt to mission service in another country.

I’d like to share several lessons I learned from mission service that I think are relevant to service to God wherever we may be.

Lessons

Nothing happens as planned

1. Mexico trip as a teenager: My group crossed the border three times before we found the right place to cross. We were unable to contact the other group we were supposed to meet up with when they didn’t arrive at the meeting point in time. It turns out that they had car trouble and bypassed the meeting point thinking we’d gone on ahead. This was in the days when few people had cell phones, and none of our group had a phone, so we couldn’t effectively contact each other. We had to ask at a church in McAllen, TX for directions to Montemorelos. We eventually arrived, but we were rather late.
2. As an AVS volunteer in the Guam-Micronesia Mission, I expected to serve as a chaplain and Bible teacher at our school in Delap, Majuro, Marshall Islands. I was pleasantly surprised to have choir and computer classes added to my schedule. I was dismayed to be assigned to teach the life skills class. I never figured out what the class was about, despite teaching it for a year.
3. My experiences are far from unique. Acts 16:6-10: Paul’s mission trip plans were thwarted by none other than the Holy Spirit Himself.
4. I’ve been reminded of this lesson once again during the Treasury mission trip that I just returned from. As on any other mission venture, things didn’t always go as planned, and I found myself often repeating the advice I’d received from a former pastor: Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken.
   1. This advice applies to a lot of areas of ministry. We know that when we work for the church things sometimes come at us that we weren’t expecting. Sometimes we find ourselves faced with demands that aren’t really related to our jobs but which we find ourselves needing to attend to anyway. Sometimes, the line between work and volunteerism gets blurred. Of course, we can easily become stressed out by all these things, but:
   2. Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken.

5. A missionary who began service in Korea in the same term as me was rather set in her ways. She constantly complained that things in Korea weren’t the way that they were in New Jersey. Her branch supervisor reported that she routinely missed mission duties such as Friday night vespers. After a series of incidents where she didn’t think things were happening the right way and her supervisors thought she wasn’t fulfilling her responsibilities, she was sent home early. Very early. As she was preparing to leave, she remarked that God had played a cruel joke on her by sending her to Korea.

   While this is the most extreme example I experienced during my mission service, it is by no means the only one. This missionary’s expectations clearly differed from her experiences, and it’s entirely possible that her expectations were at least in part informed by what she had been told by someone prior to coming. Nevertheless, by not being flexible she was broken.

God teaches life lessons that you didn’t expect to learn

1. During my first term as an AVS volunteer (in the Marshall Islands), there was a lot that I still needed to learn. I observed the differences between the facilities that we teachers had access to and what the students had. Here’s one example: Majuro Atoll is little more than a ring of barely-exposed coral reef in the middle of a vast ocean. There are no rivers, and drilling a well would only yield saltwater. There were really only two main ways to obtain fresh, drinkable water. One was to open a coconut, and the other was to catch rainwater. As you might correctly assume, rainwater that is caught on roofs, roads, and the airport runway isn’t the cleanest. So at our school we had a filtration system for drinking and cooking water available for teachers to use. It was off-limits to the students. For the students, there were drinking fountains that used unfiltered water.

   I’m not here to criticize this system. I don’t know why it was set up this way, and I wouldn’t want to make any assumptions. I will tell you, however, how it interacted with my thinking. You see, it led me to an assumption that I was unaware of at the time that what the Marshallese people needed was somehow different from what the missionaries needed. Maybe clean water wasn’t so important to the Marshallese people. I never directly thought this and would have denied it if it had been brought up. But my actions belied my unconscious assumptions. I started making unwarranted distinctions. Of course, this thinking wasn’t caused by my mission service. It was merely exposed by it. But God didn’t deal with that thinking at that time, beyond making me aware of it.

2. Some time later I was again in the mission field, this time in Korea. My work put me in much more regular contact with the locals and in a culture that was completely unfamiliar to me. As I learned the Korean ways of thinking, I started to understand why things were the way they were, and I became aware of just how much of the way I thought the world was supposed to be was merely a reflection of my own culture and background. Through my time in Korea, God taught me to see people as equals and to not harshly criticize differences between people that I don’t understand. Without my experience in Korea I never could have married my wife, who also comes from a different culture, and I couldn’t have had all of the multicultural experiences I’ve enjoyed since, at work and at church.

3. I never even knew that this was something that I needed to learn, yet it’s a lesson that God taught me through mission service.

   So, when God calls you to service, expect to learn unexpected lessons.

Missionaries are people, too

While I was in Korea, leadership made changes that many missionaries, myself included, strongly disagreed with. If this had been a secular job, many people would have either kept quiet or found other jobs. But in the mission field people are more passionate. A number of missionaries used constructive but ultimately unsuccessful means to try to bring about change. But others began complaining about all sorts of things that had been longstanding issues but never major problems. Interpersonal drama increased and teamwork suffered. Eventually, most of the longest-serving missionaries left.

Why do I tell this story? Because we sometimes think that when we serve with other missionaries, other church leaders, etc. that our colleagues must be very nearly angels. It can be discouraging when we discover that our colleagues are, in fact, human, and sometimes do things that we think they shouldn’t do. Of course, the same could be said of us.

We don’t always fit into the mission the way we want, but God isn’t surprised

As I mentioned earlier, I just returned from a mission trip to St. Croix. I won’t go into very much detail since I understand that a full report is coming. I will say, however, that when I signed up for the trip I expected to be preaching evangelistic meetings. Later, plans for the trip were modified and I was told that I would instead be doing Bible work. When I arrived on the island, I learned that plans had changed again and I would instead be doing construction. Remember what I said about nothing happening as planned?

So, on the first day of the trip, instead of directly mingling with the people I was pulling a wagon around the perimeter of the construction site picking up trash. And for all I knew at the time, that was the kind of work I could look forward to for the rest of the trip. I was quite unhappy with the way things had worked out. I was thinking that we could have hired contractors to do this work, and when you factor in the travel costs it probably would have been cheaper and more efficient.

But then I started praying. I first remembered “Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken.” Then I learned more about the big picture and realized that I was a small part of something much bigger that God was doing on the island. At that point, it was exciting to be able to join God in His work.

I didn’t spend the rest of the trip picking up trash. I ended up in other, equally unexpected roles. But I learned once again to be OK with where God places me, even if it’s not what I want.